But they're no longer active as mentioned on site
Super interesting read! I work in payments for context and see tons of different payment methods every day. People tend to find a payment method they like, and really only ever use that one method. It’s very hard to get someone to switch - even if an alternative is better. It’s just so ingrained to swipe that same card, click the same autofill button, etc.
Digital wallets did somehow over come this, and those would be a super challenging but potentially valid approach #4. If Zenobia is in Apple Pay, google pay, link, etc it’s natural and easy for customers, saves money for merchants, and disrupts visa/etc without disrupting anything else (ie making people us QR codes).
Tough problem. You need a Jony Ive on your team to help solve it.
Or do like pix and give everyone $1500, but only if they use Zenobia :)
Let me say first of all that the card networks do great work enabling commerce by being lightning-fast and generally secure.
I can securely complete transactions and subscriptions with ~anyone on the planet in mere seconds.
But holy cow do they have large margins. 40-50%!
The profit growth charts on these two are a sight to behold.
The situation is simply begging for disruption.
US consumers are too conservative in the way they expect payments to work—checks are still in circulation and “swipe & sign” has barely been put to rest (has it?). Any system like this would require adoption by a few diverse and large-scale retail institutions to make it worthwhile for consumers to use. Or else it would be a mere alternative to “PayPal me”…
Seems misleading or at the very least incomplete not to mention that basically only the US has these high credit card interchange fees of 2-3%.
EU & UK cap it at 0.3% (0.2% for debit cards), and the rest of the world are closer to EU than US fees, if I understand correctly.
The power of the free market.
What I need is not lower fee cards, but anonymous pre-paid debit cards that do not allow linking purchases to a person and profiling people. Until that appears, I will use cash only.
The post is really interesting. Sorry it didn't work out for you guys. Thanks for open sourcing the code. The world REALLY needs better/faster alternatives to the big payment processors
Istanbul has a card that you can use to pay for some things like public transit and have to use to pay for public bathrooms (because that's so cheap that if you paid with credit card, the fee would more expensive than the payment).
Maybe this is a way to break the credit card duopoly: offer something (like public bathrooms) that requires your card, and then try to expand it from there.
The modified scrolling on the website is the worst!
Two of the linked GitHub repositories don't have licenses.
What many people are missing is what is in the fees. Consumer protection and risk mitigation. If you are dealing with "cash" payments, like A2A or crypto, there are no consumer protection. Not even auth and capture flows. These are basic needs in a transactional commerce system, which the card companies provide.
Cofounder of Lopay here - we have the same mission: offer free payments to businesses, but we're working with existing networks to do this.
QR code payments are particularly hard in countries like US and UK as you're trying to change consumer behaviour. I tried doing this in 2014 and again in 2019 - both failed to gain traction (aside from during COVID).
In the UK it's possible to accept card payments for 0% via Lopay, but only if you spend your earnings on our card (essentially, passing the fees onto the merchant/supplier you're paying). We're launching the same proposition in the US soon too.
If you don't use our card, our headline rate is 0.79%.
We're a lean team of just 36, supporting over 40k weekly transacting businesses with £1B+ in card processing. If anyone reading this is interested in this space, we're hiring and on the look out for driven people to join us!
In Norway there is already a low fee processor called BankAxept. It has made it practical for shops to sell even the cheapest item and accept payment by card without losing money.
This sounds like a post mortem disguised as marketing material.
Something weird happens whenever someone tries to disrupt the Visa/Mastercard mob. Even in this post, the founders alluded to being "not well connected enough". Also look at how Plaid's acquisition by Visa was cancelled by the DOJ on antitrust claims but then Plaid dropped its plans to build a pay-by-bank network. Makes no sense when compared to the lawsuits filed and dismissed in 2024 and recently July 2025 claiming that Apple tried to build a payment network but were stopped by Visa/Mastercard.
What the fuck is with the comments here? Guys, it is a postmortem. So you all are complaining about the scrolling and accusing it of being advertising or an announcement?
Frankly, I find this admirable and want to encourage these kinds of things. Guys gave it a shot, failed, and are putting their work out there. They are communicating why they think they failed and what they think would help someone pick up the mantel. What did you all want? Them to just die in quiet and all that code disappear? Hell, their READMEs have more documentation than most of the open source projects out there.
What happened to that hacker mentality? That belief in an open source world, even if as just a pipe dream. To me it looks like they still care about their dream but realized they can't make it happen. They aren't asking for investment and their website says they are inactive, so what makes this advertising? FFS do we have to assume everything is done in bad faith? You don't advertise by giving your competition a leg up. If this gets them investment, who cares, the result is the same. Code and information is out there, you can't take that back. Honestly, I don't care even if the code was garbage (I don't know if it is or isn't), I'll respect anyone that releases their code instead of letting it die with the business. It's just a better outcome, so why are you all complaining?
Wild how far down I had to scroll to even see "cryptocurrency" mentioned.
Normally, I'm not a fan of always relying on incentives, but you can't begin to tackle this problem without understanding, and being grossly open about the fact that it's almost certainly not a "tech capability/efficiency" problem, but a (naturally) greedy financial sector company problem.
When you start at the wrong premise, you typically end up in the wrong place.
The premise is that credit cards (visa / Mastercard) is broken. When actually it works really well.
For starters it works everywhere. Online. IRL. In my home country, in foreign lands.
Secondly it costs the consumer nothing. The cost goes to the merchant. If anything the customer gets rewards.
Merchants might pay 3%, (and ultimately yes, that's in the price of goods) but checkout "just works". They're in the "get paid" business, not the "teach customer new system" business. They'll accept new payment options (which the POS) just provides. But they don't drive the market.
Fixing Visa doesn't work because the people that matter don't think it's broken.
Interesting read, I searched if another startup got this market right, it seems truelayer did using open banking for online payment ($700m valuation) https://truelayer.com/
The fees are for fraud prevention and sanctions compliance. That stuff costs real money.
the home page says "ZENOBIA PAY IS NO LONGER ACTIVE"
so this is a farewell post disguised as open source announcement?
ngl i read it as zenophobia pay
The failure of the Zenobia Pay encodes much of the REAL value of Mastercard and Visa:
1. A global, enforceable rulebook + dispute court. They standardize how authorization, clearing, settlement, chargebacks, retrievals, representments, reason codes, and evidence work—and they arbitrate when parties fight. That governance is why a corner bodega and a transnational airline can both accept the same credential. (Read the rulebooks; they’re huge, living specs.) 2. Credible liability commitments that change customer behavior. Zero-liability and liability-shift regimes make consumers fearless and pressure merchants to adopt secure tech (EMV, 3-DS). Fearless buyers = higher conversion. That demand-side boost is the engine of card commerce. 3. Tokenized, portable identity for payments. Network tokens (EMVCo) and wallet provisioning (Apple Pay/Google Pay via DPANs) are the reason card data can live safely in phones, browsers, and vaults. This reduces breach externalities and keeps the credential working when plastic changes. That’s not ACH. 4. Compliance offload and ecosystem discipline. PCI exists so the brands don’t directly police every merchant’s infosec day-to-day—yet they still set the bar and yank privileges when needed. It’s governance as a service. 5. Programmable payout rails on the same credential. They’re not just purchase networks anymore. Push-to-card (Visa Direct/Mastercard Send) rides the acceptance footprint for disbursements, wage advances, gig payouts, and remittances—instantly, to billions of cards. That makes the card a universal endpoint for money-in and money-out. 6. Regulatory navigation and durability. Interchange caps and business-rule constraints (EU IFR; U.S. Durbin/Reg II) didn’t kill them; they adapted by shifting economics across scheme fees, value-added services, and routing. Survivability under hostile policy is part of the value. 7. They own the “choice architecture.” Historically, anti-steering rules protected fee levels; those were curtailed, but the lesson stands: control over how credentials are presented and preferred at checkout is leverage. (See the AmEx case for the legal theory on two-sided markets and steering.)
What they don’t do (important) • They don’t issue credit or carry most fraud losses—that’s issuers. Networks set rules and move bits; issuers/acquirers take primary financial exposure and then sling chargebacks through the network’s process. (Still: the rules are the value.) • They aren’t the only rails that can scale: account-to-account can win when the state or banks coordinate (Pix, UPI, iDEAL). Those systems prove rails alone can beat cards on price and UX—if you also deliver governance and adoption.
Where they’re vulnerable next (and already hedging) • A2A/instant schemes (Pix, UPI, iDEAL) are re-wiring consumer habits. If U.S. open banking + FedNow/RTP ever gets real UX and liability parity, cards will feel it. Meanwhile, Visa/MC are buying into open banking to stay the orchestration layer (Visa–Tink; Mastercard–Finicity). • Checkout is being intermediated by wallets and platforms. Apple/Google own the front door; card brands keep the credential alive via network tokens, but UX power is shifting up-stack. Tokenization keeps them relevant; control of the UI does not necessarily stay with them. • Policy pressure keeps grinding down interchange/steering constraints. They can adapt, but the rent skim is under scrutiny—again.
The blunt summary
Visa and Mastercard don’t win because they’re the fastest rail or the cheapest. They win because they govern trust at scale: a portable identity (token), a standardized contract (rules), and a credible promise about who pays when things go wrong (liability). That cocktail reliably boosts conversion for merchants and confidence for consumers. Until an alternative can match all four—rail + rules + identity + liability—cards remain the default operating system for commerce.
Interesting read. I'd suggest next time choosing a name that does not sound close to Xenophobia :) anyway, good luck on your further journey
That scrolling. No way.
> cheaper payments ... Zenobia Pay charges 1%.
5x higher than they would be allowed to charge in the EU.
> accept pay-by-bank
I am reminded of tech bros inventing the bus in 2025
While almost every other major economy in the world has developed their own government-mandated low-fee payment network, the United States is a corporate oligarchy. Hurrah for the free market.
Zenophobia
I totally disagree with “We proposed merchants "split the difference" in fee savings with their customer, giving customers ~1% in at-checkout "cashback". But this is just a worse version of credit card rewards.”
As a shopper, if I know that a SMB is saving 1% or even 2% on merchant fees, I would gladly choose that option, even if I miss out on rewards for that purchase.
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This is what product market fit looks like; everyone is trashing various pieces of Zenobia, but it's still getting upvoted because we all want the solution.
I'm calling it-- 5 years and this will be vaporware. We live in a world where you have to 1) compete with VISA, Mastercard and 2) compete with Bitcoin Lightning Network.
Are these live private keys?
https://github.com/zenobia-pay/core/blob/6b79cc494d3f14e4ddf...