alt-rails
The Lightning Network is a payment protocol built on top of Bitcoin that enables instant, low-fee transactions by routing payments through a network of bidirectional payment channels. Poon and Dryja described it in their 2016 whitepaper as a system that could scale Bitcoin to "billions of transactio
alt-rails
We have spent the previous articles in this series examining the individual components: stablecoins, Lightning, neobanks, cross-border rails, the unbanked thesis, and privacy-preserving methods. Each serves a function. None is sufficient alone. The question that remains is the practical one — how do
alt-rails
If you want to understand why alternative payment rails matter, look at what happens when a construction worker in Houston tries to send five hundred dollars to his mother in Guatemala City. He walks into a Western Union office, pays somewhere between thirty and forty-five dollars in explicit fees,
alt-rails
A neobank is an app-first financial services company that either holds a banking charter or partners with a chartered bank to offer accounts, transfers, and payment services. The distinction matters more than it appears to. Wise, Revolut, Cash App, Mercury — these companies occupy an enormous amount
alt-rails
Financial privacy is not about concealment. It is about the basic principle that your economic life — what you buy, who you pay, how much you earn — should not be automatically legible to every intermediary, advertiser, data broker, and government agency that sits between you and the person on the o
alt-rails
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to the value of a fiat currency — most commonly the U.S. dollar — and issued on a public blockchain. That sentence sounds like jargon, but what it describes is remarkably simple: dollar-denominated value that moves over the internet without touching the bankin
alt-rails
The cryptocurrency industry has spent a decade telling itself a story about banking the unbanked. The pitch is simple: 1.4 billion adults worldwide lack access to basic financial services, and a smartphone with a crypto wallet can do what a bank branch never could. It is a compelling narrative. It i
alt-rails
We spend considerable effort in the sovereignty conversation talking about money — what it should be, who should control it, how to store it safely. We spend far less time talking about movement. But money that cannot move is not money. It is a number on a screen, an asset frozen in place, a balance