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The most common payment rails in the United States are Fedwire (formerly known as the Federal Reserve Wire Network), CHIPS (Clearing House Interbank Payment System), ACH (Automated Clearing House), credit cards, PayPal, and peer-to-peer payment services like Venmo.
there is no such thing as a “wire request.” As such, wires cannot be used to automatically pay recurring bills or other invoices.
1970s, the major US banks also established a competitor to (and customer of) Fedwire, named CHIPS, in part to reduce their transfer costs. In particular, this meant departing from Fedwire’s “real-time settlement,”
each bank holds outgoing CHIPS wires until the end of the day, at which point they are grouped together based on the recipient bank,
With this system, neither the sender of a wire nor its recipient has access to the wire’s funds (and for up to 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds).
Naturally, banks typically default to CHIPS for their wires.
In 2021, $992 trillion in value was sent via US Fedwire across 205 million transactions (an average of roughly $5 million),
while CHIPS cleared over $700 trillion across an estimated 250 million transactions (an average of $3 million).
70 trillion was processed by the US ACH in 2021, spanning more than 20 billion transactions (an average of roughly $2,500 per transaction).1
which point a bank aggregates everything it must send to another bank (that is, all ACHs) and sends it in one sum via Fedwire, CHIPS, or similar solution.
estimated $6 trillion was spent via credit card
in the US in 2021, with an average of $90 across more than 50 billion transactions.
In 2021, an estimated $2 trillion was processed globally by PayPal, Venmo, and Square’s Cash App, with an average of roughly $65 per transaction across more than 30 billion transactions.
$50 billion on digital-only video games (in contrast to physical discs), and nearly $100 billion more on in-game goods, outfits, and extra lives. As a point of comparison, $40 billion was spent at the theatrical film box office in 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and $30 billion on recorded music.
But in the “Metaverse,” everything costs 30%.
But in the digital economy, there are only two “countries” and both are happy with their “GDP.”
Mark Zuckerberg has said that “the hardest technology challenge of our time may be fitting a supercomputer into the frame of normal-looking glasses”—
Ethereum, which they described as a “decentralised mining network and software development platform rolled into one.”
language (Solidity) that enabled developers to build their own permissionless and trustless applications (called “dapps,” for decentralized apps), which could also issue their own cryptocurrency-like tokens to contributors.
Ethereum’s trustless and permissionless programming actually encourages developers to “compete” with its core functionality.
“Layer 2” blockchains on top of Ethereum (the Layer 1).
In 2021, total transaction value exceeded $16 trillion—over five times as much than digital payment giants
user’s in-game account. The fact that “decentralized” assets have “centralized” dependencies leads to two major conclusions.
Blockchains can be thought of as a virtual vending machine.
Some envision smart contracts as the Metaverse-era version of the LLC (limited liability corporation) or 501(c)(3) (nonprofit organization).
“trustlessly” manages much of the administrative work for the organization on an ongoing basis, including the assignment of ownership rights, calculation of votes on bylaws, distribution of payments, and so on. These organizations are typically called “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations,” or “DAOs.”
the Ethereum blockchain cannot “waive” fees for reversing or refunding a transaction. As a result, these fees were effectively doubled as a result of the auction,
dominant ethos of Web 2.0 was “Don’t be evil,” the phrase that (in)famously served as Google’s unofficial motto, then a (blockchain-based) Web3 is “Can’t be evil.”
technologists say that blockchains are “fat protocols” that support “thin applications,” in contrast to the “thin protocol” and “fat application” model of today’s internet. While the Internet Protocol Suite is enormously valuable—and thankfully, not a for-profit product—it does not operate a user’s identity, store their data, or manage their social connections. Instead, all of this information is captured by those building on TCP/IP.
Metaverse may be a “a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds,”
