A quick summary of the main challenges of the current financial system when it comes to cross-border trade and settlement:

🍀 Financial throttling: Money cannot move faster than the archaic rails on which it currently runs. Upgrades are on the way, but as overlays on the same antiquated system.

🤡 Siloed ecosystems: National and regional “instant” payment networks that do not interoperate or communicate beyond their predefined geographies.

🧨 Bank driven separation of value transfer and settlement: Increased credit risk and single points of failure as value transfer and settlement are two separate transactions when they no longer should be.

😎 The Bitcoin blockchain and the Lightning Network fix this: It allows for the value transfer and settlement as a single, instant transaction without exposure to bitcoin’s volatility, while making payment networks interoperable.