UPI: Anatomy of a Payment Transaction

pzmarzly

22B transactions a year mean an average of ~700 QPS for the NPCI switch. Of course the traffic is not uniform, it probably peaks at many times that number, but that still doesn't sound that bad - for comparison, a quick Google tells me Nasdaq TotalView ITCH feed peaks at 100k+ QPS at market open.

jesuswasjew

Centralized, kyced, private money transaction network. Is this something good?

elendilm

I have the utmost respect to people who makes UPI work. Made even the old people in the nation completely go digital for payments - a feat unparalleled in the world.

GZGavinZhao

How is this different from Alipay/WeChat Pay in China? Handling transactions of this volume is an amazing technological feat, kudos to the team! However, I don't think this mobile QR code paying system is anything novel. Alipay rose to popularity much earlier (I can't recall exact when, but it was already super popular in ~2010, and definitely ubiquitous by 2015).

colesantiago

UPI is fantastic software and the pride of great software engineering from India. Excellent engineering. I only wish more countries would implement something like UPI in other countries and get rid of inferior and broken solutions like crypto.

codethief

Great article. I would love to see a similar article about how POS credit card / debit card payments work in the US/Europe, depending on whether you use the card's magnet stripe, chip or your phone (Apple Pau/Google Pay/…) to pay.

adithyassekhar

I like the article but “ Bricolage Grotesque” and the claude background colour just puts me off.

sometimes_all

The content is good, but the crore/billion toggle is fantastic. A great addition, I hope it catches on in India-specific websites. I just wish it had a tooltip because its purpose was not immediately clear (CR/BN is a bit cryptic).