True, but you can't have complete tests without 100% coverage. It's a necessary, but not a sufficient condition; as long as it doesn't become the sole goal, it's still a useful metric.
CashApp was launched in 2013, long before Zelle and other instant payment rails arrived, which closed wallet providers solved for (Venmo too, owned by...Paypal). There is little growth to be had when these customers can get free deposit accounts with access to Zelle or FedNow to move value for free instantly. It's success to be sure to accumulate the cashflow from the customer base built, but it isn't lasting.
Absolutely, most of this is private corporate duct tape over a lack of Pix (Brazil), UPI (India), Instant SEPA (Europe), etc [1]. “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” [2] In a US financial services market, Venmo and CashApp are unnecessary assuming you procure a deposit account from a bank or credit union with instant payment rails access [3] [4]. Even Schwab has access to Zelle, for example. You need not extend credit and have credit risk exposure for paper checks anymore as well as an issuer of a deposit account.
Transfer limits are selected by each network participant [1], based on their risk tolerance. Four years ago Zelle was moving half a trillion dollars (~$490B) a year, 1/4th of total credit card volume [2]. I’ll come back with 2025 numbers when time permits. Zelle is baked into each financial institution’s app, there is no stand alone app anymore (as of March 2025) [3]. If you don’t like the UX, switch banks or credit unions, they’re mostly interchangeable. There are thousands to pick from.
I move thousands of dollars a month with Zelle, so I know it’s possible. My credit union allows me $3k/day, $8k/month. Chase Bank had similar limits before I left them.
Nitpick: Credit Card volume is on the order of 4-5 trillion (depending on source) in the US. Add in debit and prepaid cards on card payment rails and it is around 10 trillion.
Appreciate recent numbers. FedNow (us instant payments) has not been around long, growth will take time. My point was you don’t need Venmo or CashApp, almost any bank or credit union will do today and the volume is substantial.
I expect it to take at least 5-10 years for instant payments to replace Zelle, credit, and debit cards in the US.
> Brazil’s card industry seems to have already come to terms with the loss of market share to Pix. For 2024, Abecs sees the debit card “moving sideways,” growing only between 0.4% and 0.7% compared to the previous year. This trend is consistent globally: Visa earnings reports reveal that its debit volume has been in monthly decline since February 2024.
> The numbers around Brazil’s RTP [Pix] are indeed superlative. Central Bank data shows that over 40% of all payments in the country are currently made through Pix. The system is used by more than 90 percent of the adult population, has over 15 million businesses and moves 20% of the country’s total transactional volume.
> As it gains new features, Pix will continue to cut into banks’ interchange revenues and compete with the card industry, not only in terms of ‘stealing’ transactions from these legacy players but by allowing a new stack of solutions to be built on top of its scheme. What the Brazilian Central Bank created is a new payment rail that allows for fewer intermediaries and, therefore, for cheaper solutions.
Everywhere else has instant settlement payment rails available for yonks.
And FedNow removes the need for Zelle or CashApp, assuming the banks offer it.
Of course, a regulator working for the consumers might mandate as part of a banking deposit taking license, that the bank must offer FedNow as part of the account at zero transaction cost to the account holder, perhaps with transaction limits.
Updated to two tricks. And you could argue three if you call banking its own trick. Afterpay was an acquisition (and much smaller) so IDK if that counts.
Still, all the bitcoin stuff, music, other side ventures, most of the international expansion, attempts to appeal to bigger businesses, the recent "focus local" vision, all hardly made a dent in the respective markets and I wouldn't be surprised if they lost money or are still losing money on most of those things.
Afterpay (and the other Buy Now Pay Later competitors like Klarna) are potential financial arrangement facilitators for their customers.
Sure the BNPL model uses effectively invoice factoring with high interest penalties but they do have a financial relationship with both vendors and buyers.
There's a lot to leverage there. It's Paypal with lending attached.
Genuine question, why does Flock get so much bad press in the US compared to other, much more infringing surveillance tech?
Your mobile provider knows your exact location at any point in time, and the NSA probably has access to most big tech data. Those tell you much more than a license plate reader.
In much of Europe, it is quite normal to see cameras everywhere both for traffic enforcement and for crime prevention. They are generally popular with the public, eg. in the UK with a >80% approval rate. In many cities, essentially every corner has CCTV.
Is it because Flock Safety also markets to private businesses, whereas in Europe CCTV and ANPR are state-run? Or is it a cultural thing, eg. because Americans value freedom or prefer driving over the speed limit, and Flock may end that?
> Your mobile provider knows your exact location at any point in time, and the NSA probably has access to most big tech data.
I can choose whether to carry a cell phone. I can control what data I share with big tech (very little here since I use free software and self-host everything).
I cannot do anything (that isn't illegal) if some bureaucrat decides to place a camera down my street to identify me or my car anytime I pass nearby.
Likely it's just a coincidence — there were other Sybil attacks that are not in February too, so the chance that you'd get 3 in Feb isn't all that low.
He was likely referring to the claim that 70% of the internet flows through Loudon County, Virginia, where AWS us-east-1 is located, although the more accurate number is probably somewhere around 22%.
Every cloud provider worth talking about is there too. Both public and sovereign/gov data centers.
And of course all the privately owned ones too. It is bananas. Not just because of government either - low ping times to the biggest population center of North America.
> why do you think that this is worth sharing with the world yet?
It's worth sharing because it's cool, even if it's not perfect yet!
You'll never make every single person on HN happy. But if you share your stuff early and make one person happy at the very least that means you should keep working on it!
Don't let perfectionism get in the way of good enough :]
Show HNs never pleased everyone, and it'd be silly to try, but until recently there was a bit of a "it's not perfect... but the person has spent more time working on this than I have even spent thinking on the problem" kind of expectation whereas now many of them feel like the comments section ends up doing more thought about the submission than was put into refining it.
It'll be really interesting to see where this settles. In the meantime, erring on the side of kindness tends to work best!
SVB was considered the "standard" bank for all startups for decades so it's not surprising that YC would give the same advice. If you run a startup out of a normal bank sometimes you get weird glitches: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-startup-banking-story
Of course today startups are probably using Mercury/Ramp/whatever.
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