Design Payment Ledger — Stripe — Intervues

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← Stripe
Design Payment Ledger[ OK ] 10 — full content available
[ INFO ] category: System Design  difficulty: hard  freq: high  first seen: 2026-01-05
[HARD][SYSTEM DESIGN][HIGH]System DesignDistributed SystemsDatabasesACIDFinancial Systemsbackend
$ cat problem.md
Design a Payment Ledger SystemDesign a bookkeeping service (Ledger) for Stripe that keeps track of money sent and received on behalf of merchants.
Context:Stripe is a payments platform for online businesses
Merchants like "ShirtyPuff" sell products through Stripe
Stripe collects money from customers on behalf of merchants
Periodically, Stripe pays out to merchants based on aggregated transactions
Requirements:Functional:
Record money sent or received on behalf of a merchant
Get current account balance for a merchant
Get transaction history with pagination
Support multiple currencies
Non-Functional:
Strong consistency (financial data)
Audit trail (immutable history)
High availability
Scale to millions of merchants and billions of transactions
Discussion Points:How do you ensure ACID properties for financial transactions?
What database design would you use?
How do you handle currency conversion?
How would you implement idempotency for duplicate transaction protection?
What's your approach to reconciliation and auditing?
user@intervues:~/stripe$ 