India's UPI moved more transactions this year than Visa did

For 30 years, the global consensus on financial infrastructure was: governments set rules, private platforms (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe) build rails, charge per-transaction fees, and network effects keep them entrenched. UPI broke that pattern. Public digital infrastructure — open APIs, interoperability mandated by the regulator, transactions free at point-of-use — outperformed private rails on both adoption and cost. Brazil's PIX (launched 2020) explicitly copied the UPI model; so did Thailand's PromptPay and the EU's instant-payments directive. The lesson is not that government always wins, but that for infrastructure-grade utilities — payments, identity, data exchange — the public-good design beats the platform-rent design. The future impact is sharp: India is exporting this idea, not the technology itself. The next test is whether the Account Aggregator framework and ONDC can repeat the trick beyond payments — and shape the next decade of digital commerce.