it worked because india never had credit card payments( at scale ) . they went straight from cash to digital payments.

The right comparison for Nasdaq's order processing volume or messaging volume would be India's National Stock Exchange (NSE). It does more executed orders per day than nasdaq.

I worked on scaling UPI a few years ago. Real-time Payments is vastly more complex as it is much more distributed - each transaction involves the two banks holding funds, two end-user apps (and their banks), and the network (npci) – for the payment to complete end to end, multiple message exchanges need to happen between these parties while the user at both ends are waiting. So, if you measure the scale in messages/sec it would 10-25x higher.

Real-time payment rails that works 24/7 365 days a year from any bank to any bank (domestic, no exceptions) for free is truly a game-changer. Compare that to US payment rails which is slow and expensive. Apart from UPI, India has 3 more payment rails – NEFT (similar to ACH – batch settlement), IMPS (similar to UPI, instantaneous - but different user experience), RTGS (real-time, intermediated by the central bank RBI, but only for high-value transactions) – all are 24/7/365 and free. Then, there's credit card rails – apart from Visa and Mastercard, India also has RuPay which has much lower interchange rate.

22B in the month of June 2026, so 264B extrapolated annually.

A great lesson for system design job interviews - if this is a popular payment system in a country with 1.5 billion people, your theoretical system you're designing for a small company cargo culting Google interviews will not likely support millions or even tens of thousands of average TPS.

way better than privately owned banks doing the same while extracting profits from users. better than todays crypto with terrible ux where its easy to lose all your money. more practical than cash (but that should still be an option).

worse than a system thats convenient and decentralized and anonymous at the same time, but we dont have one yet. maybe in 5 years when ethereum figures out native account abstraction, seamless scaling and monero level privacy.

It’s extremely good, at least in terms of user experience and how practical it is. Adoption is massive and at small chai shops it makes transactions a breeze, allowing businesses to serve more volume. The downside is making it incredibly frustrating for foreigners to pay using this as it’s tied to your government ID that your bank has authorized.

Yes it is. It's not trying to be new money, it's your money that already works.

That's how government money works. This is the best possible system for handling government money. If you want an alternative you could buy some bitcoin with it.

It's the CBDC that govts lust for.

I have heard nothing but good about it, from my Indian friends. They rave about it.

> Is this something good?

All good for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) and for creating the digital rupee.

Horrible for your bank account.

Yes, it is peak developed world financial infrastructure, ran as a utility under government direction.

How is it KYCd yet also private?

It’s a completely different backend model; as far as I know alipay works just like PayPal where transactions are fully “internal” - the buyer pays Ant Group and the seller cashes out at a later date.

UPI is a real inter-organization payment system more akin to credit card processing, where fund requests flow from the payer, through a payer processor, through a merchant processor, and finally to their end destination, and the actual reconciliation happens through a bank transfer system. It’s a much less centralized system.

UPI is more like a routing/reconciliation layer like VISA that can work across any bank/wallet, and that core is run by a non-profit government org. It doesn't take custody of the funds and doesn't centralize the information into a private corporation. The fee is also minimal and flat-rate with no profit incentive, instead of paying a percentage of the entire countries transaction volume to some private company. I would guess that adds up to a huge amount of money saved overall.

The main difference is that the core API is public infrastructure (run by a government authority). The apps are run by different companies but the backbone is interoperable by design

Much of the world doesn’t like having a single entity own and control the process end to end, it’s more efficient but there’s only one point of trust. Multiple institutions that have to check each other means you don’t have to trust a single entity with everything.