> FedNow is live (offered by the federal reserve) and can move up to $1M with a 20 second SLA for ~5 cents. Walmart is implementing it for “pay by bank” to avoid ~$1B/year in interchange fees.
Does FedNow operate outside of the US?
No, good callout, cross border fiat token transfers. Central banks are working on native cross border transactions through faster/instant payment system interoperability (Bank for International Settlements working group). Think plugging FedNow into Pix (Brazil), UPI (India), and SEPA (Europe) (just a few examples, there are ~80 instant payment systems in the world as of this comment [1]). You're just pushing XML messages over a bus (ISO 20022 [2]).
Isn't Volt trying to build the cross-border version of this? I was actually not familiar with "pay by bank" before, but it sounds like it makes stablecoins even less attractive for the low-margin business use case a16z (and I am sure there are others) is advocating for.
Not familiar with Volt, their content marketing instant payment map was simply convenient when I searched for one (as I haven’t had time to pay someone to make a Wikipedia page yet with the same content).