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Bitcoin is extraordinary at some parts of the payments stack and poorly suited to others. Here's how mio.money's engineering team thinks about the tradeoffs, and why we run a two-layer architecture that uses BTC and stablecoins for what each is actually good at.
Bitcoin has been "the future of payments" and "too slow for payments" in alternating news cycles for more than a decade. Both framings are lazy. The engineering reality is more specific: Bitcoin is extraordinary at some parts of the payments stack and poorly suited to others, and any serious payments product has to make deliberate decisions about which parts it's using Bitcoin for. This post is about those decisions. Specifically, how we thought about Bitcoin's role inside mio.money, where it fits, where it doesn't, and why we still treat it as a first-class settlement layer even when it's not the right rail for a given transaction. --- What Bitcoin is actually good at Strip away the price commentary and Bitcoin is, at its core, a settlement network with three properties that are genuinely…