Modern Treasury's Stablecoin Sandwich

After acquiring Beam, Modern Treasury wants to become the developer-first API for moving money in any form.

Feb 19 • Alvaro Duran

Stablecoins for Skeptics

The last crazy idea from cryptoland may be crazy enough to work

Feb 11 • Alvaro Duran

Ledgers of Catan

The future of accounting is commodity accounting.

Feb 4 • Alvaro Duran

2

January 2026

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

1

TigerBeetle's Stablecoin Mistake

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

Jan 21 • Alvaro Duran

1

Why Don't You Use Generics in Ledgers?

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

Jan 14 • Alvaro Duran

2

Money as Metadata

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

Jan 7 • Alvaro Duran

4

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

2

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

1

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

3

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

1