The arithmetic that forces a standard

Count the integrations. Ten wallets, ten gates, every pair needing its own deposit flow, its own login, its own way of asking for a passport photo: one hundred bespoke integrations, and one hundred and twenty-one the moment an eleventh of either shows up.

That is not a hypothetical failure mode. It is what happened to the previous generation of payment plumbing, and it is why sending money abroad has historically meant asking a bank to ask a bank.

There are only two ways out of N×M. One is a monopoly: everybody integrates with the one gate that won, on its terms. The other is a standard — a public document that says exactly how any wallet talks to any gate, so both sides build against the document instead of against each other.

Stellar took the second road, and the documents have a name.