I work in Payments, and it's convinced me the future is on-chain

As an engineer at a big bank, I've heard the "a blockchain is just a slow database" enough times, including from very technical people. I normally just roll my eyes, as it's painfully obvious that anyone saying this hasn't worked in payments, which fundamentally, are what Crypto is about.

For most people the reality of payments are heavily abstracted away from the UX. I can send a friend a penny and it arrives instantly. Except, it actually doesn't - it takes days to settle, and the speed is entirely smoke and mirrors.

The sheer complexity is difficult to grasp, with dozens of partners, different payment flows, conflicting regulatory requirements...it makes using blockchains look user friendly.

It's a challenge to even get to 2.5kTPS, supporting payment flows across the world, as an organisation with more people than most countries. Visa actually gets about 2kTPS, despite some inflated Buttcoiner claims out there.

Big banks are investing heavily in interbank blockchains because the technology works, and because it solves trust issues. The technology inherently solves some of the major issues with payments today that we spend huge amounts trying to fix - audit trails and consensus for instance. You could never just resolve payments on a big central database.

You could argue that banks investigating private blockchains for interbank payments doesn't necessarily translate to public chains seeing success, but considering the sheer variety in payments platforms today, from startups to megacorps, I can see public chains being the underlying infrastructure of some payments solutions in the future. The technique is validated.

And payments are just one aspect of the potential for public chains. Tokenisation, decentralised identity management, cool experiments like community points and meme coins.

There's a lot of UX work to be done for sure, but I don't see a future where we don't replace the archaic mess of a stack that is payments today, with public blockchains.