Open Source Visa / Mastercard Competitor: Zenobia Pay

Since February, Teddy and I have worked tirelessly to build a Visa+Mastercard competitor. We quit our jobs and built an instant clearing, mobile first, pay-by-bank network. However, we failed to get any adoption besides thieves and mobsters.

A couple weeks ago, we decided to pivot away from Zenobia Pay. Today, we are open sourcing all the code we wrote: the core payments service, the merchant dashboard, the ecommerce integrations, the transfer status websocket service, and the iOS app. It is all free and MIT licensed.

To go live, you will need a fintech banking partner, so this isn't a one-click-deploy. That said, I hope it will save a lot of time for somebody who wants to try where we failed. I've seen a few HackerNews commenters talk about this recently, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676559.

In the blog post, I go through the different customer iterations we tried and the problems we faced with each. If you just want to see the code, here are the links: - https://github.com/zenobia-pay/ios - https://github.com/zenobia-pay/zenobia-pay - https://github.com/zenobia-pay/core