Why Low Cardinality Accounts Are A Ledger's Bottleneck

You can build a ledger that’s blazingly fast with a slow programming language.

Jan 28 • Alvaro Duran

TigerBeetle's Stablecoin Mistake

Is there such a thing as "the ultimate fintech database"?

Jan 21 • Alvaro Duran

Why Don't You Use Generics in Ledgers?

It's not you; it's that DRY and KISS are misguided.

Jan 14 • Alvaro Duran

Money as Metadata

What happens when we ignore the belief that all money is interchangeable?

Jan 7 • Alvaro Duran

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December 2025

The Playbook's 2025 Year In Review

The most popular and most important articles on The Payments Engineer Playbook in 2025.

Dec 17, 2025 • Alvaro Duran

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From Stock Markets To Ledgers, Part VI: Mechanical Sympathy

3 books to satiate your curiosity and ambition

Dec 10, 2025 • Alvaro Duran

From Stock Markets To Ledgers, Part V: Continuous Deployment

I'm the Andrew Hiller of software releases

Dec 3, 2025 • Alvaro Duran

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November 2025

From Stock Markets To Ledgers, Part IV: Queues

AMQP failed, but companies building ledgers pretend that it didn't

Nov 26, 2025 • Alvaro Duran

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From Stock Markets To Ledgers, Part III: Time

I find Feynman’s quote that “nobody understands quantum mechanics” a bit silly.

Nov 19, 2025 • Alvaro Duran

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Raft Consensus in 2,000 words

Understanding the Understandable Consensus Protocol

Nov 12, 2025 • Alvaro Duran

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From Stock Markets to Ledgers, Part II: Fault-tolerance

Paxos is Not-Invented-Here consensus. That's why Raft is succeeding.

Nov 5, 2025 • Alvaro Duran

October 2025

From Stock Markets To Ledgers, Part I: Fairness

Why fairness, not speed, is the ultimate validation of stock markets

Oct 29, 2025 • Alvaro Duran

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