Cryptocurrency exchanges are the backbone of the digital asset economy. They enable users to buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies securely while supporting liquidity, price discovery, and market growth.
As the crypto market continues to mature, businesses entering this space or scaling existing platforms must make one critical decision early on:
Choosing the right cryptocurrency exchange development company.
Image is created by ChatGPT
The wrong partner can lead to security gaps, scalability issues, regulatory trouble, and delayed launches. The right one accelerates time-to-market, ensures compliance, and builds long-term competitive advantage.
This guide explores what to look for in a crypto exchange development company and why ITIO Innovex is a preferred choice for businesses worldwide.
Understanding Cryptocurrency Exchange Development Services
Cryptocurrency exchange development services involve building, customizing, and deploying secure platforms that allow users to trade digital assets efficiently.
These services typically include:
Core Features of Cryptocurrency Exchange Development
1. Scalable Platform Architecture
A well-designed exchange must handle high transaction volumes while maintaining performance, uptime, and data integrity. Scalability is critical for future growth.
2. User Interface (UI) & User Experience (UX)
An intuitive, trader-friendly interface improves adoption, reduces friction, and enhances retention especially for first-time users.
3. High-Performance Trading Engine
The trading engine is the heart of the exchange. It must support:
Fast order matching
Multiple order types
Real-time price updates
High concurrency
Security & Compliance: Non-Negotiables in Crypto Exchange Development
1. Advanced Security Measures
A reliable exchange integrates:
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
End-to-end encryption
Cold and hot wallet architecture
DDoS protection and monitoring
2. Regulatory Compliance
Adherence to global standards such as:
AML (Anti-Money Laundering)
KYC (Know Your Customer)
is essential for legal operation and long-term trust.
🔔 Thinking of Launching a Crypto Exchange? Pause Here
Before investing heavily, a short technical review can save months of rework and costly mistakes.
👉 DM us directly or book a free consultation with ITIO Innovex 🌐 https://itio.in/ 📩 Message us on LinkedIn or request a callback
Let’s build a secure, scalable, and future-ready crypto trading platform together.
Conclusion
Choosing the best cryptocurrency exchange development company is a strategic decision that directly impacts security, scalability, and long-term success.
By evaluating experience, customization capabilities, compliance readiness, and technical support, businesses can avoid costly missteps. ITIO Innovex delivers all of this making it a reliable partner for cryptocurrency exchange development in today’s fast-evolving digital asset landscape.
In an era where digital payments dominate everyday transactions — from online shopping and mobile wallets to contactless in-store purchases — the security of cardholder data has never been more critical. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) stands as the global benchmark for protecting sensitive payment information. Developed by the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), it applies to any organization that processes, stores, or transmits credit or debit card data.
Generative AI
1. Exploding Cyber Threats and Data Breaches
Cyberattacks targeting payment systems have surged. Ransomware, phishing, supply-chain exploits, and advanced persistent threats (APTs) are common. Non-compliant businesses face higher breach risks — studies show compliant organizations experience up to 50% fewer incidents. A single breach can expose thousands of card records, leading to massive fraud and identity theft. PCI DSS enforces controls like encryption, access restrictions, and vulnerability management to minimize these risks.
2. Building and Maintaining Customer Trust
Consumers now prioritize security when choosing where to shop. A visible commitment to PCI DSS signals reliability — think “Your card details are safe with us.” In contrast, a breach erodes trust overnight, resulting in lost customers, negative reviews, and long-term reputational damage. Compliant businesses often see higher conversion rates and loyalty because customers feel protected.
3. Avoiding Severe Financial and Legal Penalties
Non-compliance carries heavy costs:
Fines from card brands (up to $100,000+ per month in severe cases)
Increased transaction fees
Liability for fraud losses and breach-related expenses (legal fees, notifications, credit monitoring)
Potential loss of payment processing privileges
With stricter enforcement under v4.0.1 — including mandatory MFA for admin access, enhanced password policies, anti-phishing measures, and continuous monitoring — regulators and acquirers are less tolerant of lapses.
4. Enabling Secure Digital Innovation
Modern businesses rely on cloud services, APIs, e-commerce platforms, and third-party processors. PCI DSS v4.0.1 introduces flexibility (e.g., customized approaches and targeted risk analysis) while raising the bar on emerging risks like payment page skimming and insecure authentication. Compliance helps organizations innovate safely — adopting new tech without exposing card data.
5. A Foundation for Broader Cybersecurity Maturity
PCI DSS isn’t just about cards — its 12 core requirements (build and maintain secure networks, protect cardholder data, maintain vulnerability management, etc.) strengthen overall security posture. Many organizations use it as a baseline for GDPR, HIPAA, or ISO 27001 alignment.
Bottom Line in 2026
In a world of nonstop digital transactions and sophisticated cybercriminals, PCI DSS compliance protects customers, safeguards revenue, and demonstrates responsibility. It’s no longer a “checkbox” — it’s a strategic imperative for any business handling payments.
If your organization processes card data, assess your current status against v4.0.1 requirements today. Non-compliance risks far outweigh the effort of achieving it.
What challenges have you faced with PCI DSS? Share in the comments — I’d love to discuss real-world tips!
A new report from CoinGate shows Bitcoin took back the crown in cryptocurrency payments during 2025. Here’s how the rest of the rankings looked.
Bitcoin Was The Most Used Cryptocurrency On CoinGate In 2025
In a new thread on X, digital asset payments processor CoinGate has shared insights from its latest report about transactions that occurred on the platform in 2025. In total, CoinGate processed 1.42 million cryptocurrency payments during the year, bringing its total lifetime payments beyond 7 million.
As the below pie chart shows, Bitcoin accounted for the largest share of these payments.
Back in 2024, Tether’s USDT ranked the highest in payments on the platform, beating Bitcoin. With a share of 22.10% in 2025, however, the original cryptocurrency managed to reclaim the top spot over the stablecoin, which ended the year with a payments dominance of 16.60%.
The third position was occupied by Litecoin, which was involved in 14.40% of CoinGate payments. In Summer 2025, LTC even briefly became the second-best coin in the metric. Litecoin being preferred over some other popular assets could be due to the fact that its blockchain offers cheap and fast transactions as core features.
Ethereum and Tron, the fifth and sixth most used coins, both observed growth in payments dominance during 2025. “TRX payment share grew from 9.1% to 11.5% and ETH from 8.9% to 10.6%,” noted CoinGate.
In terms of networks, the Bitcoin blockchain, including the Lightning Network, was the most widely used on the platform in 2025, symmetrical with the token’s payments share itself.
As displayed above, the second and third largest networks on CoinGate were Tron and Ethereum, occupying shares of 19.6% and 15.1%, respectively. These blockchains being above Litecoin despite their native tokens accounting for lower payment shares is because they also facilitate stablecoin transactions.
The United States led in country rankings on the platform, with 24.37% of payments on the platform taking place in the nation. Germany and Netherlands rounded out the top three with shares of 6.83% and 5.16%, respectively.
Cryptocurrencies saw significant usage on the platform in terms of being a payment mode, but that’s not all they were used for. According to the report, merchants also increasingly chose to settle in digital assets.
More specifically, cryptocurrency settlements rose from 27% in 2024 to 37.5% in 2025. Stablecoins were the preferred option for merchants, being involved in 25.2% of all settlements, while Bitcoin occupied a smaller, but still notable, 9.7% share.
Merchants also used cryptocurrencies to pay vendors, affiliates, partners, and contractors. “The most popular payouts were in USDC, Bitcoin, and Ethereum,” said CoinGate. Stablecoins once again dominated here, occupying a payouts share of 87.8%.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $88,300, down more than 9% over the last week.
I still remember the call from a founder last year. They had just hit a $2M monthly transaction run rate, and suddenly their dashboard lit up with failed payments.
Customers were complaining. Engineers were scrambling to patch code they hadn’t touched in months. And worst of all? Half of the failures were preventable.
ChatGPT Generates Image
It’s a story I hear too often. Payments look simple at first: APIs work, sandbox tests pass, money flows. But scaling unveils a harsh truth. Failed webhooks, chargebacks, reconciliation errors, compliance audits, they don’t show up during the initial dev cycle. They appear under pressure, when your revenue, reputation, and team sanity are at stake.
Let’s break down the mistakes that make this story so common.
1. Choosing a gateway based on features, not trade-offs
Founders often assume that the more features a gateway has, the more future proof it is. “It has subscriptions, multi-currency, fraud tools; let’s go!” sounds reasonable.
Reality hits when your first refund fails, or when a rare edge case in cross-border settlement causes a week-long reconciliation headache. Suddenly, the fancy features don’t matter. Your engineers are rewriting integrations mid-growth. Months of effort vanish, and your launch roadmap slips.
2. Assuming compliance is “someone else’s job”
It’s tempting to think: “PCI, KYC, AML; they handle it all.” After all, the gateway promises compliance.
Here’s what happens in production: small oversights, like storing card data incorrectly or missing a subtle webhook log, trigger audits. The team spends days compiling reports and justifying processes instead of building new features. And yes, fines can follow.
I use a simple payment gateway evaluation scorecard with founders to avoid these mistakes. Comment SCORECARD if you want it.
3. Waiting for failures to appear
Many founders think transaction failures are rare: “We’ll fix them when they happen.”
But failures spike when you least expect them: Black Friday, payroll days, or cross-border spikes. Without retry logic and monitoring, failed payments mean lost revenue and frustrated customers. In one case, a startup lost tens of thousands of dollars before realizing a webhook timeout was silently dropping transactions.
4. Overlooking hidden integration complexity
“APIs are simple, our engineers can handle it,” is another common assumption.
Reality: multi-currency settlements, partial reversals, and chargeback disputes accumulate invisible technical debt. Each small edge case adds up. When scaling, these “minor” issues snowball into weeks of firefighting, delaying product releases, and exhausting teams.
5. Treating costs as static
Early-stage founders often calculate fees based on current volume. But as volume grows, hidden costs appear per-transaction fees, currency conversion spreads, settlement delays, and dispute management fees. Suddenly, profitability looks very different than expected.
How seasoned teams think differently
Experienced fintech teams don’t chase features, they map trade-offs. Before selecting a gateway, they ask:
How does this gateway behave under load?
What’s the retry and reconciliation plan?
How much compliance work falls on us versus them?
Can it scale cross-border or multi-currency?
What happens when transactions fail or are disputed?
They monitor payments in real-time, automate error handling, and stress-test every critical flow. Integration quality compounds over time. A good decision now prevents months of pain later.
Practical Checklist for Early-Stage Founders
Test failure scenarios, not just happy paths
Clarify compliance responsibilities upfront
Track per-transaction and hidden fees at scale
Audit webhook reliability and retry logic
Automate reconciliation end-to-end
Stress-test cross-border and peak-hour flows
Document trade-offs, not just feature lists
I’ve seen founders lose months or even millions, because they underestimated these issues. Gateway decisions aren’t just tech choices; they’re long-term operational bets. The right choice now saves time, money, and headaches later.
I’d love to hear your experiences: what unexpected payment failures did you encounter, and how did you fix them? Share your story in the comments, we can all learn from each other.
Dogecoin is moving closer to real-world payments, with House of Doge confirming plans for a dedicated DOGE payment app. House of Doge, the official corporate arm of the Dogecoin Foundation, plans to launch a new mobile payments app designed to…
Circle and Coinbase have partnered with the Government of Bermuda to help the island nation go “fully onchain” by providing the digital infrastructure needed to support a nationwide transition to blockchain-based finance. The initiative was announced during the World Economic…
Why global instant payments fail not because of technology, but because settlement, governance and programmability remain structurally misaligned
Layered global payment architecture: Fast execution and orchestration layers sit above a stable settlement foundation, highlighting why global instant payments depend less on new technology and more on aligning settlement, governance and programmability.
Abstract
Despite significant advances in instant payment systems, tokenisation and digital asset infrastructures, global payments remain structurally fragmented. While execution speeds have increased markedly, settlement finality, governance and programmability continue to be addressed in isolation rather than as integrated components of a coherent financial architecture. This fragmentation becomes particularly visible as payment processes move towards real-time, event-driven and increasingly automated models in global trade and treasury operations.
This article examines four prominent approaches to modern payment infrastructure: Brazil’s Pix, Europe’s SEPA, emerging BRICS cross-border initiatives and the Bank for International Settlements’ experimental projects, not as competing systems, but as partial solutions optimising different layers of the payment stack. Each addresses specific challenges, ranging from domestic execution efficiency to regional standardisation and wholesale settlement in central bank money. None, however, provides an end-to-end framework that aligns execution, settlement finality, governance and programmability across jurisdictions.
By analysing these initiatives through a layered architectural lens, the article argues that the central challenge of global instant payments is no longer technological capability, but institutional coordination and settlement design. It proposes that sustainable innovation in global payments requires the integration of programmable processes with interoperable settlement layers anchored in central bank money, supported by open governance and legally robust finality. In this context, the debate shifts from the optimisation of individual rails to the design of shared infrastructure capable of supporting real-time global trade.
Introduction
Over the past decade, the global payments landscape has undergone a remarkable acceleration. Instant payment systems, real-time treasury operations, tokenised assets and digital settlement experiments have moved from conceptual pilots to operational reality in multiple regions. Yet this apparent progress masks a deeper structural tension. While payments are increasingly executed in real time, the underlying settlement, governance and legal finality mechanisms remain fragmented, jurisdiction-bound and inconsistently integrated. The result is a global payments environment that is faster, but not fundamentally more coherent.
This tension is becoming increasingly visible as global trade and corporate finance adopt event-driven and programmable operating models. Execution speed alone is no longer sufficient. As payment processes automate and scale across borders, the question shifts from how quickly money moves to when, where and under which authority value is finally settled. It is at this architectural level, rather than at the level of individual products or political narratives, that today’s debates around instant payments, central bank digital currencies and alternative settlement networks must be examined.
This article approaches that examination by comparing four influential payment infrastructures, Pix, SEPA, emerging BRICS initiatives and BIS-led experiments, not as rivals, but as complementary attempts to address different layers of a shared problem.
Speed Is No Longer the Binding Constraint
For much of the past three decades, the evolution of payment systems has been framed primarily as a problem of speed and efficiency. Batch-based processing, limited operating hours and fragmented correspondent banking arrangements were widely identified as the principal bottlenecks in cross-border and domestic payments. Considerable institutional and technological effort was therefore directed towards accelerating execution, reducing cut-off times and improving straight-through processing.
These efforts have largely succeeded. A growing number of jurisdictions now operate domestic instant payment systems that provide near-real-time execution and immediate availability of funds to end users. Brazil’s Pix, Europe’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst), India’s UPI and similar systems demonstrate that real-time execution at scale is technically feasible, economically viable and socially impactful. From a purely operational perspective, the question of “how fast payments can move” has largely been answered.
However, the increasing prevalence of real-time execution has exposed a more fundamental limitation. Speed optimises only one layer of the payment process: execution. It does not, by itself, resolve questions of settlement finality, legal certainty, balance sheet exposure or cross-system interoperability. In fact, as execution accelerates, the weaknesses of underlying settlement arrangements become more pronounced rather than less relevant.
This distinction is particularly important in cross-border and multi-currency contexts. While instant payment systems can deliver rapid crediting of accounts, the ultimate settlement of obligations often continues to rely on deferred processes, commercial bank money and jurisdiction-specific legal frameworks. As a result, faster execution may coexist with persistent settlement risk, intraday liquidity pressures and fragmented governance structures.
From an architectural perspective, this implies that further gains in payment system performance cannot be achieved by execution-layer optimisation alone. Once speed ceases to be the binding constraint, attention must shift to the design and coordination of settlement mechanisms, governance models and the legal foundations of finality. It is at this level that contemporary initiatives increasingly diverge, and where meaningful comparison between systems such as Pix, SEPA, BRICS-linked proposals and BIS-led experiments becomes analytically productive.
Execution, Clearing and Settlement as Distinct Architectural Layers
A persistent source of confusion in contemporary payment debates arises from the tendency to treat execution, clearing and settlement as a single, homogeneous process. While closely related in operational terms, these functions represent analytically distinct layers within the payment architecture, each governed by different technical, legal and institutional logics.
Execution refers to the initiation and routing of a payment instruction and the conditional crediting of accounts. Modern instant payment systems have significantly optimised this layer, enabling near-immediate user-facing outcomes. Clearing, by contrast, concerns the calculation and netting of obligations between participating institutions. Settlement represents the final discharge of those obligations through the transfer of a settlement asset, thereby extinguishing counterparty claims and producing legal finality.
In traditional banking infrastructures, these layers are tightly coupled but not temporally aligned. Execution may occur within seconds, while clearing and settlement may follow hours or even days later, often across different systems and balance sheets. This decoupling has historically been managed through credit risk, liquidity buffers and legal constructs designed for batch-based environments.
As payment systems move towards real-time and continuous operation, this architectural separation becomes increasingly consequential. Accelerated execution compresses the time available to manage settlement risk, while automated processes reduce the scope for discretionary intervention. Under such conditions, the nature of the settlement asset and the legal framework governing finality assume heightened importance.
Commercial bank money, which dominates settlement in most existing systems, represents a private liability and therefore embeds counterparty risk by design. Central bank money, by contrast, constitutes a public settlement asset with unique properties of legal certainty, risk insulation and systemic trust. The distinction between these assets is not merely technical but foundational, as it determines how risk is distributed across participants and how resilient a system remains under stress.
An architectural analysis must therefore distinguish clearly between improvements at the execution layer and transformations at the settlement layer. While the former can deliver efficiency gains and enhanced user experience, only the latter can fundamentally alter the risk, governance and interoperability characteristics of a payment system. This distinction provides the analytical basis for assessing whether current initiatives represent incremental optimisation or structural innovation.
It is against this layered framework that domestic instant payment systems, regional standards and emerging cross-border settlement proposals must be evaluated. Their differences lie less in technological sophistication than in how, and whether, they address the settlement layer explicitly.
Domestic Instant Payment Systems as Execution-Layer Optimisations
Over the past decade, a growing number of jurisdictions have introduced domestic instant payment systems designed to modernise retail and business payments. These systems typically prioritise speed, availability and user experience, offering continuous operation, immediate confirmation and increasingly rich data exchange. From an execution perspective, they represent a significant departure from batch-oriented legacy infrastructures.
Architecturally, however, these systems are best understood as execution-layer optimisations rather than as comprehensive transformations of the payment stack. They focus on the rapid transmission and processing of payment instructions between participant institutions, often supported by enhanced messaging standards and real-time liquidity management. The user-facing outcome is near-immediate crediting, which materially improves cash-flow visibility and operational efficiency for end users.
Crucially, these improvements do not, in themselves, alter the underlying settlement logic. In most implementations, final settlement continues to rely on commercial bank money, with positions ultimately reconciled through deferred or periodic settlement processes. Even where prefunding or intraday liquidity mechanisms are employed, the settlement asset remains a private liability rather than a public one.
This distinction matters because execution speed and settlement finality are not interchangeable. Instant execution reduces operational friction but does not eliminate counterparty exposure. As long as settlement occurs outside central bank balance sheets, the system’s resilience depends on the creditworthiness and liquidity management of participating institutions, as well as on legal arrangements designed to manage failure scenarios.
From a systemic perspective, domestic instant payment systems therefore deliver substantial efficiency gains without fundamentally reconfiguring risk allocation. They improve how quickly value appears to move, but not how or where value is ultimately settled. This makes them highly effective within stable domestic environments, yet structurally limited when extended across borders, currencies or regulatory regimes.
The growing success of these systems can paradoxically obscure this limitation. High adoption rates and positive user experience create the impression of infrastructural completeness, even though the settlement layer remains unchanged. As long as payments remain predominantly domestic and low-risk, this architectural gap may appear tolerable. However, as real-time execution becomes the norm and payment flows increasingly span jurisdictions, the absence of an equally real-time, risk-free settlement layer becomes more pronounced.
Understanding domestic instant payment systems as optimisation layers rather than as full-stack solutions is therefore essential. It clarifies why further gains in speed and availability, while valuable, cannot by themselves address challenges of cross-border interoperability, systemic risk reduction and global scalability. These challenges reside not at the execution layer, but at the level of settlement architecture.
Why Cross-Border Extension Exposes the Limits of Execution-Only Models
The extension of real-time payment capabilities across borders introduces a set of structural challenges that execution-layer optimisation alone cannot resolve. While domestic instant payment systems benefit from legal harmonisation, shared currency frameworks and aligned supervisory regimes, these conditions rarely persist beyond national or regional boundaries.
Cross-border payments operate at the intersection of multiple currencies, legal systems, regulatory frameworks and liquidity regimes. Execution speed in such environments does not simply amplify efficiency; it amplifies coordination problems. Each additional jurisdiction introduces new settlement calendars, risk thresholds, compliance requirements and failure modes, which cannot be neutralised by faster messaging or improved user interfaces alone.
In execution-only architectures, cross-border connectivity is typically achieved through bilateral or hub-based linkages between domestic systems. These arrangements focus on routing payment instructions and managing prefunding or liquidity bridges between participants. While such approaches can reduce friction at the margins, they leave the fundamental settlement logic unchanged. Obligations continue to be settled in commercial bank money, often across multiple balance sheets and time zones.
This creates a structural asymmetry: execution becomes real-time, while settlement remains fragmented, deferred and risk-bearing. As a result, credit and liquidity risk are not eliminated but redistributed, often in opaque ways. The faster the execution layer operates, the more sensitive the system becomes to settlement disruptions, liquidity bottlenecks and legal uncertainty.
Furthermore, execution-only cross-border models tend to rely on conditional guarantees, bilateral credit lines or collateralisation schemes to manage risk. These mechanisms introduce complexity and cost, and they scale poorly as the number of participants and corridors increases. What appears manageable in limited pilot corridors becomes increasingly brittle when extended to global networks.
From an institutional perspective, this exposes a deeper limitation. Cross-border payments are not merely technical exchanges between systems; they are legal and economic events that require universally recognised finality. Without a shared settlement asset that is trusted across jurisdictions, execution-layer connectivity cannot produce true interoperability. It can only simulate immediacy while deferring risk resolution.
The consequence is a proliferation of partially connected networks rather than a coherent global infrastructure. Each linkage optimises locally, but the system as a whole remains fragmented. This fragmentation is not accidental; it reflects the absence of a settlement layer capable of operating across borders with uniform legal certainty and risk neutrality.
Cross-border extension thus acts as a stress test for execution-only models. It reveals that speed, availability and user experience, while necessary, are insufficient conditions for global scalability. The binding constraint is not how fast instructions move, but how and where value is ultimately settled.
The Settlement Asset as the Missing Variable in Global Scalability
The structural limitations identified in cross-border execution-only models ultimately converge on a single, often underexplored variable: the nature of the settlement asset itself. While execution systems determine how payment instructions are transmitted and processed, it is the settlement asset that determines whether obligations are discharged with legal certainty, risk neutrality and systemic trust.
In most existing payment architectures, settlement relies on commercial bank money. This asset represents a private liability, issued by individual institutions and embedded within their balance sheets. While commercial bank money functions efficiently within established domestic frameworks, its suitability diminishes as payment processes become continuous, automated and cross-border by design. The resulting exposure to credit, liquidity and legal risk does not disappear with faster execution; it becomes more immediate and more tightly coupled to system stability.
Global scalability requires a settlement asset that is universally recognised, legally final and institutionally neutral. Central bank money uniquely fulfils these criteria. It constitutes the ultimate settlement asset within a currency area, free from private credit risk and anchored in public law. Historically, access to central bank settlement has been restricted to regulated financial institutions, reflecting the batch-oriented nature of legacy infrastructures and the need to manage systemic risk through controlled participation.
As payment processes evolve towards real-time operation, this historical separation between execution innovation and settlement architecture becomes increasingly untenable. Automated, condition-based transactions require deterministic settlement outcomes. Without a settlement asset that can support continuous finality, programmability at the execution layer merely accelerates the accumulation of contingent claims.
This observation reframes the debate around payment modernisation. The central challenge is not how to connect execution systems more efficiently, but how to anchor those systems to a settlement layer capable of operating at the same temporal and legal resolution. Without such anchoring, global interoperability remains fragile, dependent on bilateral arrangements and risk mitigation techniques that do not scale.
The settlement asset therefore functions as the gravitational centre of the payment architecture. It determines not only risk distribution, but also governance, access and trust. Any attempt to construct globally interoperable payment infrastructures without addressing this layer will inevitably reproduce fragmentation at higher speeds.
Recognising the settlement asset as a design variable rather than a given marks a conceptual shift. It opens the analytical space for institutional innovation at the infrastructure level, rather than continued optimisation within inherited constraints. This shift provides the foundation for understanding why recent initiatives increasingly focus on settlement itself, rather than solely on execution efficiency.
Institutional Responses to the Settlement Constraint
Once the settlement asset is recognised as the limiting factor in global payment scalability, recent institutional initiatives can be reinterpreted not as isolated experiments, but as convergent responses to a shared architectural problem. Across jurisdictions and governance models, a growing number of actors are exploring ways to reintroduce central bank money as an active settlement layer capable of supporting real-time, cross-border processes.
At the multilateral level, initiatives coordinated by international institutions have focused explicitly on settlement interoperability rather than on execution efficiency. Experimental platforms exploring multi-currency settlement, shared ledgers and synchronised settlement mechanisms reflect a recognition that global payments cannot be stabilised through bilateral optimisation alone. These projects treat settlement finality as a public good, requiring coordination across central banks rather than competition between private intermediaries.
Parallel to these efforts, several emerging market economies and regional blocs have begun to articulate settlement infrastructures aimed at reducing dependency on correspondent banking chains and dominant reserve currencies. While often framed in geopolitical terms, these initiatives are more coherently understood as attempts to regain control over settlement finality and liquidity management in cross-border trade. Their common feature is not political alignment, but the explicit use of central bank money as the settlement anchor.
Within advanced economies, central bank digital currency initiatives represent a complementary response. While many early discussions have focused on retail use cases, the underlying architectural implication is broader. By making central bank money natively compatible with digital infrastructures, CBDCs reopen the question of how settlement access, programmability and interoperability can be designed for continuous operation. Importantly, this does not imply a displacement of private sector innovation, but a reconfiguration of its foundation.
These institutional responses share a critical characteristic: they shift the locus of innovation from the execution layer to the settlement layer. Rather than attempting to optimise existing commercial bank-based arrangements indefinitely, they seek to redesign the conditions under which settlement occurs. This marks a departure from incrementalism towards structural intervention at the infrastructure level.
At the same time, these approaches remain incomplete. Most initiatives address either wholesale or retail settlement in isolation, and few are yet integrated into corporate payment and treasury workflows. Nevertheless, they signal an emerging consensus: global payment systems cannot achieve real-time, programmable and interoperable operation without revisiting the role of central bank money in settlement.
Understanding these developments as architectural responses rather than ideological positions allows for a more constructive evaluation. It highlights convergence where public discourse often emphasises divergence, and it clarifies that the underlying objective is not control over execution, but stability, finality and trust at the settlement layer.
Synthesising Pix, SEPA, BRICS and BIS Within a Layered Framework
When examined through a layered architectural lens, the apparent diversity of contemporary payment initiatives becomes analytically coherent. Systems such as Pix, SEPA Instant, emerging BRICS-linked settlement efforts and BIS-coordinated projects do not represent competing visions of the future, but rather address different layers of the same structural problem.
Domestic instant payment systems, exemplified by Pix and SEPA Instant, operate primarily at the execution layer. They demonstrate that real-time payment initiation, continuous availability and high-volume processing can be achieved reliably within harmonised legal and currency environments. Their success lies in operational efficiency, user adoption and economic inclusion. However, their settlement logic remains anchored in commercial bank money, rendering them optimised yet incomplete from a global scalability perspective.
Cross-border initiatives associated with BRICS economies focus on a different constraint. Their primary objective is not execution speed for end users, but sovereignty over settlement and liquidity management in international trade. By emphasising settlement in central bank money and reducing reliance on correspondent banking chains and dominant reserve currencies, these efforts explicitly target the settlement layer. While often interpreted through geopolitical narratives, architecturally they address the same deficiency identified in execution-only models: the absence of a universally trusted settlement anchor.
BIS-led initiatives occupy a distinct but complementary position. They do not aim to create production payment systems, but to explore interoperable settlement architectures across currencies and jurisdictions. By experimenting with shared settlement platforms, synchronised settlement mechanisms and multi-currency coordination, these projects explicitly treat settlement as a design problem rather than an inherited constraint. Their value lies less in immediate deployment and more in defining architectural primitives for future systems.
Viewed together, these initiatives illustrate a fragmented but converging trajectory. Execution-layer optimisation, regional standardisation and settlement-layer innovation are progressing in parallel, but largely without integration. Each addresses a necessary condition for global instant payments, yet none alone provides a sufficient solution. The absence of a unifying architectural framework explains why debates often oscillate between domestic efficiency, monetary sovereignty and technological experimentation without resolving their interdependence.
This synthesis suggests that the current landscape should not be interpreted as a competition between models, but as an incomplete assembly of layers. The challenge lies not in selecting a single approach, but in designing interfaces between them that preserve their respective strengths while addressing their limitations.
Toward a Coherent Architecture for Global Instant Payments
A coherent global instant payment architecture cannot be achieved through further optimisation at individual layers alone. Nor can it emerge from isolated institutional initiatives, however sophisticated. What is required is an explicit architectural alignment between execution, clearing and settlement, supported by governance structures capable of operating across jurisdictions.
At the execution layer, systems must support real-time, programmable and data-rich payment initiation. This capability is already largely in place. At the settlement layer, value transfer must occur in assets that provide legal finality, systemic trust and neutrality across borders. Central bank money, whether accessed through existing infrastructures or digitally native representations, remains uniquely positioned to fulfil this role.
Crucially, programmability should be understood as a property of processes, not of money itself. Payment logic, compliance rules and conditional execution belong in systems and applications. Finality belongs in the settlement asset. Conflating these functions risks either undermining trust or constraining innovation. A coherent architecture must therefore separate concerns while ensuring deterministic interaction between layers.
From an institutional perspective, this implies a redefinition of roles. Central banks act as infrastructure providers and guarantors of settlement integrity, not as competitors in product markets. Private institutions innovate at the execution and service layers, building differentiated offerings on top of shared settlement foundations. International coordination bodies provide the standards and interfaces necessary for interoperability.
The transition to such an architecture will be incremental rather than revolutionary. It will require bridging domestic instant payment systems to interoperable settlement layers, integrating wholesale and retail perspectives, and aligning regulatory frameworks with architectural realities. Yet the direction is clear. As payment processes become real-time and programmable, settlement finality can no longer remain deferred, fragmented or opaque.
The future of global instant payments will not be defined by the fastest execution rail, the most sophisticated token or the loudest political narrative. It will be defined by the ability to align speed with finality, innovation with trust, and domestic efficiency with global interoperability. Designing that alignment is no longer a theoretical exercise. It is the next structural challenge for the global financial system.
Conclusion
Viewed through the lens of Global Instant Payments, the developments discussed in this article point to a common architectural requirement rather than divergent institutional agendas. The RELEVANT framework, Regulatory, Economic and Legal Enablement through Value Alignment and Networked Trust, provides a way to integrate execution efficiency, settlement finality and governance coherence into a single analytical construct. It emphasises that sustainable innovation in payments does not arise from isolated optimisation, but from aligning technological capability with legal certainty and institutional trust at scale. In this sense, GIP is not a call for faster payments alone, but for an infrastructure in which real-time execution and central bank settlement operate as complementary layers, enabling programmable, resilient and globally interoperable financial processes.
I work in payment infrastructure, and I keep seeing the same pattern across startups, marketplaces, and PSP-style builds.
Teams spend weeks perfecting checkout.
Then they get blindsided by payouts, disputes, mismatched balances, and “why didn’t I get paid?” emails.
Not because the payment gateway failed. But because KYB → risk → routing → settlement → reconciliation was treated like a straight line.
It isn’t.
It’s a system one that has to stay consistent when real money, real merchants, refunds, chargebacks, delayed webhooks, and regulatory scrutiny enter the picture.
If you’re building any of the following, this applies directly to you:
A marketplace (split payouts, vendor settlements)
A SaaS product (subscriptions, prorations, refunds)
BTC Inc, the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine and the organizer of major global Bitcoin conferences, has spent the past several years restructuring its internal operations around Bitcoin-native infrastructure, relying heavily on the open-source BTCPay Server to manage its payments, payroll, and treasury functions.
The effort reflects a broader push by the company to operate on what it describes as a “Bitcoin standard,” using bitcoin not only as a reserve asset but as a primary medium for internal and external transactions.
Executives and engineers involved in the project say the goal was to eliminate dependence on custodial payment processors, reduce cross-border settlement friction, and create a unified system capable of handling live commerce at speed and scale.
BTCPay Server, a self-hosted and non-custodial Bitcoin payments platform, emerged as the core infrastructure after BTC Inc evaluated multiple third-party payment solutions.
According to the company, custodial processors introduced counterparty risk and regulatory constraints, while off-the-shelf systems lacked the flexibility needed for global events and payroll coordination.
Conference payments as the first test case
BTC Inc first deployed BTCPay Server at its flagship conferences, where the need for high-throughput, real-time payments was most acute. Events regularly host tens of thousands of attendees and dozens of vendors, often in environments with constrained connectivity and strict operational timelines.
Using BTCPay’s web-based point-of-sale system, vendors were able to accept on-chain and Lightning payments directly to their own wallets. BTC Inc also used BTCPay’s “mark as paid” functionality to record cash and card transactions alongside bitcoin payments, allowing vendors to reconcile all sales through a single interface.
The system was rolled out across four major events between 2024 and 2025, beginning with Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong and expanding through conferences in Nashville, Abu Dhabi, and Las Vegas.
Each event served as an iteration point, with the operations team refining vendor onboarding, payment flows, and reporting tools.
Record-setting deployment in Las Vegas
The largest deployment took place at The Bitcoin Conference 2025 in Las Vegas, where BTC Inc integrated BTCPay Server with Lightning-enabled NFC Bolt Cards and optimized point-of-sale infrastructure across the venue.
On May 28, 2025, the event set a Guinness World Record for the most cryptocurrency point-of-sale transactions completed in eight hours, recording 4,187 transactions.
BTCPay-powered terminals operated alongside traditional Square point-of-sale systems, which had recently added Bitcoin payment support. BTC Inc said the side-by-side deployment demonstrated that Bitcoin-native payment systems could function at the same scale and speed as established fiat infrastructure in high-traffic commercial environments.
Across all conferences, BTC Inc reports more than 5,600 in-person Bitcoin transactions, totaling approximately 2.09 BTC in volume.
Expanding into BTC Inc payroll and vendor payments
Following the conference deployments, BTC Inc extended BTCPay Server into internal finance operations. The company adopted BTCPay’s VendorPay plugin to manage outbound payments to contractors, partners, and employees, many of whom are distributed across multiple jurisdictions.
VendorPay allows payments to be batched, scheduled, and tracked, reducing transaction fees and eliminating delays associated with international bank transfers.
BTC Inc says it has processed more than $1 million in Bitcoin payouts using the system, without relying on intermediaries or custodial services.
As payment volume increased, the company implemented BTCPay’s native multisignature wallet support to add shared approval controls to treasury management. Transactions now require multiple signatures, with hardware wallets integrated through BTCPay Vault, allowing the company to maintain self-custody while distributing authorization across team members.
Automating Bitcoin accumulation
BTC Inc developed a BTCPay Server plugin known internally as “Bitcoin Stacker” to automatically convert a portion of fiat revenue into bitcoin. The system routes a percentage of Stripe credit card receipts into bitcoin purchases, creating a rules-based dollar-cost averaging process.
Since launching the program in January 2025, BTC Inc says it has accumulated more than 6.5 BTC through automated conversions. The company describes the approach as a conservative treasury policy rather than a speculative strategy, designed to build bitcoin-denominated working capital that can be reused for vendor payments and payroll through BTCPay.
BTC Inc says BTCPay Server has become a core operational tool across events, finance, and treasury functions, citing reduced payment friction, faster settlement, and consistent self-custodial workflows.
The company also contributed operational feedback that informed improvements to VendorPay and multisignature support.
While aligned with BTC Inc’s long-term view on Bitcoin adoption, the company says the shift has been driven primarily by operational efficiency.
Login
