Roots is building a decentralized, full-stack financial operating system and payment rail. Designed to bypass legacy intermediaries like traditional banks, Visa, and Mastercard, Roots provides a closed-loop ecosystem where value moves instantly, programmatically, and securely.
By combining intent-based smart contracts, privacy-preserving distributed ledgers, and AI-driven commerce tools, Roots is redefining how merchants, consumers, and autonomous agents transact.
Legacy networks like Visa and Mastercard charge merchants 2%-3% plus flat fees per transaction, eating into thin margins. Roots provides a closed-loop financial operating system where consumers pay directly from their self-custodied mobile app to the merchant's terminal. By settling instantly on our intent-based smart contracts, we can bypass traditional card networks, helping merchants reduce interchange fees.
Global B2B payments currently rely on the slow, expensive, and opaque SWIFT network, often taking T+2 days to settle. By bridging stable liquidity (like USDC) into the high-performance, privacy-preserving Canton Network, Roots allows enterprises to settle cross-border obligations instantly and programmatically with full cryptographic proof of finality and complete data privacy between counterparties.
In complex supply chains, funds are often tied up in inefficient escrow accounts or letters of credit. Roots' Intent Commitment Architecture allows businesses to cryptographically lock a payment "intent" based on real-world conditions. Once delivery or service SLAs are met via oracle or webhook attestation, the funds are instantly and trustlessly released to the supplier, helping reduce counterparty risk and freeing up working capital.
Mainstream adoption of digital assets has been hindered by clunky UX (e.g., seed phrases, long wallet addresses). The Roots mobile app abstracts this complexity using passkeys, biometrics, and native hardware integrations. This provides consumers with an intuitive, Apple Pay-like "tap-to-pay" experience in physical stores, seamlessly spending digital dollars over our decentralized rails.
Public blockchains expose sensitive corporate transaction data to the world, making them unusable for enterprise treasury operations. The Roots Canton Bridge brings digital assets into a privacy-enabled distributed ledger. This allows financial institutions and large corporations to manage treasuries, pool liquidity, and execute high-value transfers with absolute data privacy while maintaining verifiable, real-time auditability for regulators.
Traditional payment rails require human intervention (i.e., 2FA, OTPs, or manual card entry). Roots enables AI agents to hold their own programmable balances and natively execute transactions. This allows autonomous systems to negotiate, purchase APIs, manage supply chains, and fulfill orders instantly onchain without ever touching a legacy bank account or requiring human sign-off.
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