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Zenobia Pay founders open-sourced their payment platform after failing to gain adoption as a Visa/Mastercard alternative using bank transfers and QR codes. Despite building a functional system leveraging FedNow instant transfers, they struggled with customer acquisition across three iterations: targeting SMBs, high-ticket merchants with fraud insurance, and luxury goods with resale verification. The project was ultimately derailed by fraud from criminals exploiting their platform, leading the founders to pivot away from payments entirely while sharing their code and lessons learned.

Open source Visa/Mastercard competitor: Zenobia Pay

Why we're open sourcing our payments platform

<p>Did this never get out of US, then?</p>
<p>We desparately need to break up the Visa/Mastercard monopoly.</p>
