The four-axis ranking
We rank humanity’s most important problems on four quantifiable dimensions — quantity of humans affected, severity per capita, current solution quality, and addressable market size — and package each as a proposal in the spirit of Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha. This document is the proposal for financial infrastructure. Every number below is sourced and tagged with confidence. Every ranking is a conjecture, open to refutation.
Quantity · humans affected
1.3B
highSeverity · WTP / wealth
300%
lowCurrent solutions
70.0 / 10
medMarket size · TAM
$2.5T
highWhat we are trying to solve
Global payments generate roughly $2.5 trillion in annual revenue on about $2.0 quadrillion of value flows, and two companies founded in 1958 and 1966 hold roughly $1.2 trillion of the card rail between them. This is the rare category whose incumbent ceiling does not cap out: Visa sits at its all-time high after 68 years, and JPMorgan is close to becoming the first trillion-dollar bank. Added to this index in August 2026 as the fifth problem clearing the $1T bar, and the only new one to survive a nineteen-candidate screen (see TRILLION_DOLLAR_SCREEN.md). Two honest caveats travel with it. The humanitarian case is the weakest of the five: 1.3 billion adults remain unbanked, but account ownership already reached 79 percent of adults, and Nubank, the most successful bank-the-unbanked company ever built, is worth $70 billion, which settles where the trillion is not. And the category is heavily defended: US merchant processing fees hit a record $198.25 billion in 2025, the year after stablecoin legislation passed, so no disruption is yet visible in the fee data.
The gap between the world and the world that is physically possible
Current solution quality is rated 70.0 / 10 (med confidence) — meaning there is substantial unclaimed ground between what exists and what is possible. card rails work well for the banked; the gap is cost, settlement latency, and the unbanked tail.
Who is already working on this
No companies have yet been tagged to this problem in the dataset. If you know one, open a PR.
If we solve this, here is the world we get
Section in progress
The success vision and technical proposal for this problem are still being drafted. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
What the market can pay
The world is already paying $2.5T per year against this problem (McKinsey Global Payments Report 2025: $2.5T revenue on ~$2.0 quadrillion of value flows, forecast above $3T by 2029; high confidence).
A successful solution does not need to capture more — it needs to redirect a meaningful slice of existing spend, plus the latent willingness-to-pay implied by the severity score above. The cost ceiling for a real solution is bounded by this number; everything cheaper is dominated, everything more expensive is a non-starter.
What could go wrong, and how we know we are not wrong
Section in progress
Failure modes, ethical considerations, and the conditions under which this whitepaper would be falsified are being authored as the weekly cadence ships. The Deutschian commitment: every claim above is a conjecture; we publish the conditions under which we would update. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
Who would back this
Section in progress
No capital allocators have yet been tagged to this problem in the dataset. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
Where this is wrong, tell us
Every number on this page carries a source and a confidence tag. Every section open to refutation. If a citation is wrong, a number is stale, or a conjecture is unfounded — file a correction.
- [1] McKinsey Global Payments Report 2025
- [2] World Bank Global Findex
- [3] GENIUS Act, S.1582, 119th Congress
- [4] Nilson Report, US merchant processing fees 2025
corrections → use the feedback widget in the nav · open issue at github.com/adamtpang/optimism.fun