ZERO-SUM BY DESIGN: 10 YEARS OF UBER'S PAYMENTS PLATFORM

Summary from the TLDR Data newsletter

Uber's Gulfstream payments platform now supports $217B in annualized gross bookings, nearly twice that in money movement, and ledger balances for 1.2B+ entities. The design relies on immutable zero-sum money orders, double-entry accounting, DynamoDB-backed balances, Kafka pipelines, Cadence for synchronous flows, and generic payment-instrument interfaces that let new business lines plug in with minimal core changes.