Choosing how money moves is the part of this you are trusting us with, so what matters is not how clever it is. It is what we promise never to do with your money while we are deciding — and whether you can check afterwards that we kept to it.
Arrival
$40,000 USDC
Considering every option
Illustrative. Route names, reasons and figures are examples of the shape of a decision and the record it leaves, not a depiction of how options are ranked.
Every one of these is a commitment we can be held to, and every one of them costs us something. That is what makes them worth writing down.
Your payment is executed on arrival. Waiting for a better moment means holding a position, holding means currency risk and custody, and custody is the line this whole company is built to stay behind. Every clever idea in routing eventually suggests waiting. The answer is no.
If no acceptable route exists inside your deadline, nothing is attempted. It stops and a person is told. A router that guesses under pressure is exactly how money goes missing, and a delay you are told about is always better than a movement nobody can explain.
Where value must move at all, it moves natively. A wrapped representation is a claim on somebody’s contract rather than the asset itself, and we do not put customer funds behind one to save a few dollars.
Network and transport costs are passed through at what they cost. If we marked them up, the cheapest route for you and the most profitable route for us would stop being the same route, and you would have no way of telling which one you got.
Before anything is compared, candidates are removed outright. This ordering matters: a cheap route that cannot lawfully or operationally handle the payment is not a bargain, and treating it as one is how a system ends up optimising itself into a failure.
Not every route supports every asset and network pair. One that does not is removed, not ranked last.
Routes have real limits, per transaction and per day. A payment above them is not a close call.
A route that has been failing is taken out of service until it is not, rather than being tried again because it happens to look cheap.
An adverse screening result stops the payment entirely. There is no route in that case, cheap or otherwise.
Ruled out on principle rather than on price, so it never reaches the point of being compared at all.
Sometimes the answer is that no movement is required. That costs nothing, takes no time, and there is no transport charge to pass on.
Move half a million dollars the way you would move fifty thousand and you push the price against yourself. The market you are selling into is not infinitely deep, and the second half of your own payment gets a worse rate than the first.
So above a threshold a payment is broken up and worked rather than fired in one piece. You do not do anything differently and you will not see it happen. You see it in the rate you got, and in a receipt that shows what each part achieved.
Most desks handle size badly and almost nobody tells you the cost of it in advance. We would rather show it on the record afterwards than quietly let it come out of your settlement.
Illustrative. Each part is recorded separately, so the cost of size is visible instead of buried in one blended figure.
A routing decision you cannot reconstruct is a routing decision you have to take on trust. We would rather not ask you for that.
Routing is deterministic. Given what was true at that moment, the decision can be replayed and will come out the same way — which is what makes it possible to explain rather than merely assert.
Not only the route that ran. What else was available, and the reason each one was set aside, is part of the record. A list with one entry is not an audit trail.
What moved, by what path, at what cost, and how long each step took. You should not have to ask us for the account of your own payment.
What we do not publish. How routes are costed and ranked against each other is our own work and we keep it that way. What we will always tell you is what was ruled out, why, what ran, and what it cost — which is the part that affects you.
These are commitments, and commitments are only worth something if somebody checks them. If one of them sounds like marketing, say so and we will either prove it or stop writing it.
