The card networks were a hack from the 1950s.
Better tools exist now.
We're an Australian protocol team. We think the next generation of payment rails should be open, low-fee, programmable, and owned by the people running them — not the people clipping the ticket.
Why we're building this.
Globally, merchants pay roughly US$412.50 billion every year in in-person card fees — and Australian merchants alone pay about US$3.19 billion of that. That money flows to issuing banks (in two-thirds of cases, abroad), card schemes, and acquirers — most of whom add no marginal value to the transaction at the till.
The technology to bypass this stack already exists, and is in production. Stablecoins clear in seconds. Passkeys give consumers a one-tap, hardware-backed signature flow. EIP-7212 makes the verification cheap enough to do at point-of-sale. The pieces are on the table.
OpenPasskey assembles them into a protocol — not a product. The fee schedule is enforced on-chain. The hooks are open to anyone. The treasury is governed by the participants. Card schemes solved a real problem in 1958. We can solve it better in 2026, and we should.
Six things we believe.
Open beats closed.
Anyone can read the contracts, attach a hook, audit a payment. Closed networks bend toward rent extraction. Open ones bend toward utility.
Caps beat tiers.
One number, capped on-chain, the same for everyone. Tiers and discounts are how legacy networks hide where the money goes.
Settlement is final.
If the transaction confirmed, it confirmed. Refunds are a deliberate action — not an arbitration outcome that happens to the merchant 90 days later.
Hardware should be cheap.
The terminal isn't where the value is. We sell the OPK Pay terminal at cost and run our SDK on every iMin and PAX device.
Programmability is the prize.
The killer feature is not 60 bps. It's that every payment is a smart-contract call you can hook. Loyalty, agents, accounting, compliance — all native.
Australia first.
We're a Sydney team. We launch where we live. Then we expand methodically — Singapore, the UK, the long tail.
Who's building.
Cindy Chuah
15 years of SMB growth experience. Led acquisition and account management for 1,500+ small businesses at Booking.com and Tripadvisor (Viator).
James Brown
Co-founder of Smart Token Labs, lead engineer on AlphaWallet. 25 yrs systems engineering — IoT firmware, secure elements. Ex-CBA.
Victor Zhang
Co-Founder of Smart Token Labs, the team behind ERC-5169, ERC-7738, TokenScript, AlphaWallet, AlchemyNFT, Brand Connector, AutographNFT. Ex-eBay.
Want to help build it?
We're hiring across protocol, terminal, and merchant teams. Sydney, Melbourne, remote AU.