Cross-border payments were built for a world that no longer exists.
The rails that move trillions were designed for paper ledgers and telex machines. We built the settlement layer for the digital age.
Every year, trillions of dollars crawl through a network of correspondent banks that was architected in the 1970s. A payment from Sao Paulo to Lagos touches four intermediaries, two compliance queues, and a currency desk that operates on yesterday's FX rate. Each hop adds cost, latency, and opacity.
The result is a global financial system where capital is routinely trapped in transit. Exporters wait days for settlement confirmation. Treasurers over-fund foreign accounts as a hedge against unpredictability. Small discrepancies compound into millions in reconciliation overhead. The infrastructure doesn't fail catastrophically -- it degrades quietly, extracting value at every seam.
What if money moved like a database transaction -- instantly, atomically, or not at all?
Vect started with a simple architectural premise: treat every payment rail -- SEPA, PIX, USDC, Ethereum -- as an interchangeable endpoint behind a single API. The orchestration layer selects the optimal route based on cost, speed, and compliance constraints in real time. If any leg of the transaction fails, the entire operation reverts. No partial state. No stuck funds.
The semantics are borrowed from distributed systems, not banking. Atomic commits. Idempotent retries. Deterministic finality. We applied the rigor of database transaction design to financial infrastructure, because capital deserves the same guarantees as data.
Capital should move like data -- instantly, conditionally, and atomically.
We are building toward a world where settlement is invisible. Where a payment between any two points on Earth resolves in milliseconds, with full compliance, at near-zero cost. Not because the regulations changed or the banks agreed -- but because a better abstraction layer made the old constraints irrelevant. That layer is Vect.