Implementation Roadmap

Implementation Roadmap

Guiding Principles

1. Value delivery over completeness — ship an end-to-end payment through one corridor before expanding
2. Dependencies dictate order — services that others depend on are built first
3. One of everything first — one PSP, one chain, one off-ramp partner, one corridor. Then multiply
4. Compliance before money — no value moves without regulatory gates in place
5. Observability from day one — logging, tracing, and alerting deployed alongside the first service

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Phase Overview

Phase	Name	Services	Duration	Status
0	Infrastructure Foundation	K8s, Kafka, DBs, CI/CD, Temporal	4 weeks	Done
1	Identity & Merchant	S10, S11, S13	6 weeks	Done
2	Core Payment Logic	S1, S2, S6	8 weeks	Done
3	Value Movement (MVP)	S3, S4, S5, S7	10 weeks	Done
4	Operational Maturity	S8, S9	6 weeks	Planned
5	Merchant Experience	S12	6 weeks	Planned
6	Intelligence & Scale	S14 + expansion	8 weeks	Planned

MVP (first payment): End of Phase 3 — ~28 weeks Full platform: End of Phase 6 — ~48 weeks

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Dependency Graph

              INFRASTRUCTURE (Phase 0)
                       │
         ┌─────────────┼─────────────┐
         ▼             ▼             ▼
    S10 Gateway   S11 Merchant   S13 IAM
    (Phase 1)     (Phase 1)      (Phase 1)
         │             │             │
         └──────┬──────┴─────────────┘
                │
    ┌───────────┼───────────┐
    ▼           ▼           ▼
 S1 Orch.   S2 Compl.   S6 FX
 (Phase 2)  (Phase 2)   (Phase 2)
    │
    ├───────┬───────┬───────┐
    ▼       ▼       ▼       ▼
 S3 Ramp  S4 Chain S5 Ramp S7 Ledger
 (Phase 3)(Phase 3)(Phase 3)(Phase 3)
                    │
    ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
    ▼               ▼               ▼
 S8 Partner     S9 Notify      S12 History
 (Phase 4)      (Phase 4)      (Phase 5)
                                    │
                               S14 Agentic
                               (Phase 6)

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Phase 0: Infrastructure Foundation (Done)

Deliverables:

• EKS cluster (2 AZs)
• PostgreSQL (RDS, multi-AZ)
• Kafka (MSK, 3 brokers)
• Redis (ElastiCache)
• Temporal server cluster
• HashiCorp Vault
• GitHub Actions CI/CD
• ArgoCD (GitOps)
• OpenTelemetry → Datadog

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Phase 1: Identity & Merchant (Done)

Services: S10, S11, S13 (built in parallel)

Key Capabilities:

• Merchant signs up via API
• KYB verification via Onfido
• Admin user logs in, gets JWT
• Kong validates JWT, routes to backend
• Rate limiting blocks requests beyond tier
• Team management (invite, roles)
• API key management

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Phase 2: Core Payment Logic (Done)

Services: S1, S2, S6

Key Capabilities:

• Payment initiated → compliance check → FX rate locked (full saga steps 1-3)
• Compliance rejection correctly fails payment
• FX lock expiry correctly fails payment
• Cancel request triggers compensation
• Temporal Web UI shows workflow history

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Phase 3: Value Movement — MVP (Done)

Services: S3, S4, S5, S7

MVP Corridor: US → DE (USD → EUR) via Stripe ACH + Base/USDC + Modulr SEPA

Key Capabilities:

• End-to-end: fiat in → stablecoin → fiat out
• Saga compensation on failure
• Double-entry ledger records all movements
• 4-leg reconciliation: fiat in = stablecoin = fiat out
• 3,500+ tests across all services

Exit Criteria:

• 10 end-to-end payments complete successfully
• Failure scenarios compensate correctly
• Reconciliation shows 0 discrepancies
• Temporal resumes after pod restart

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Phase 4: Operational Maturity (Planned)

Services: S8, S9

Goals:

• Partner health monitoring with circuit breaker failover
• Merchant webhook delivery (HMAC-signed, exponential retry)
• Email/SMS notifications
• Travel Rule implementation (Notabene)
• Second corridor: GB → NG (GBP → NGN)

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Phase 5: Merchant Experience (Planned)

Services: S12

Goals:

• Elasticsearch-powered transaction search
• CSV/PDF export
• Daily/weekly/monthly aggregations
• Merchant portal V2 (dashboard, search, export)

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Phase 6: Intelligence & Scale (Planned)

Services: S14 + expansion

Goals:

• AI agent payments via MCP tool manifest
• Spending policies with human-in-the-loop approval
• Multi-corridor: 5+ corridors
• Multi-chain: Base + Solana + Ethereum L1
• Multi-stablecoin: USDC + EURC + PYUSD
• Advanced FX hedging

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Milestone Summary

Month 1      Infrastructure ready
Month 2–3    Merchants can sign up, KYB, log in
Month 4–5    Payment saga works (no real money)
Month 6–7    ★ MVP: First real payment (US → DE) ★
Month 8      Partner failover + merchant webhooks
Month 9      Second corridor live (GB → NG)
Month 10     Transaction search + portal V2
Month 11     AI agent payments (S14)
Month 12     5+ corridors, 2+ chains, 2+ stablecoins

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Team Structure

Phase 0–1: Foundation (8 people)

Role	Count
Platform / DevOps	2
Backend Engineer	3
Frontend Engineer	1
Engineering Lead	1
Product Manager	1

Phase 2–3: Core Payment (12 people)

Add: Blockchain Engineer (1), Compliance Specialist (1), Finance Specialist (1), QA Engineer (1), SRE (1)

Phase 4–6: Scale (15 people)

Add: Frontend Engineer (+2), ML/AI Engineer (+1), Backend Engineer (+1)

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Risk Gates

Pre-MVP

Gate	Owner	Criteria
Security audit	External firm	No critical/high findings
Compliance sign-off	Compliance officer	KYC/AML flow approved
Finance validation	CFO	Ledger entries correct
Disaster recovery	SRE	Temporal resumes after pod kill
Load test	SRE	50 concurrent payments sustained
Regulatory	Legal	Money transmission license confirmed

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Related Pages

• Service Catalog — Service details
• Architecture Overview — System architecture
• Infrastructure and Deployment — Production infrastructure