#payments

The design detail that surprises people: Stripe caches the result of the first request under a key even when that result was a 500, and replays the failure to every retry. That is correct, and once you see why, the rest of the design follows, including where most homegrown implementations go wrong.

Crypto maximalists sold you a revolution and skeptics sold you a scam. Both missed the actual product: dollar-denominated B2B settlement rails that moved about $9 trillion last year and now hold more US Treasuries than most countries.