“Can a purpose-built double-entry OLTP database displace general-purpose SQL as the system of record for the world's financial transactions?”
TigerBeetle is a specialized OLTP database purpose-built for double-entry financial transaction processing. Originated in 2020 from Joran Dirk Greef's work on a Gates Foundation central bank switch, it spun out of Coil in 2022 as an independent company. The thesis is that general-purpose SQL databases hit an Amdahl's Law throughput ceiling for debit/credit workloads, and a purpose-built engine can deliver 1000x performance for the ledger layer inside banks, wallets, payments, BNPL, gaming and energy platforms. In 2026 the company shipped a managed cloud offering to move beyond open-source adoption into a commercial infrastructure business.
TigerBeetle processes payments through Stripe.
TigerBeetle runs its ledger on TigerBeetle (in-house) and tigerbeetle.
TigerBeetle's crypto products run on paxos.
The Embedded Finance Index 2026 maps 3 layers in TigerBeetle's stack: Payments / PSP (Stripe); Ledger (TigerBeetle (in-house) and tigerbeetle); Crypto (paxos).
TigerBeetle was founded by Joran Dirk Greef and is founded in 2022, headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.
TigerBeetle has raised $30.4M in total (latest round: Series A, 2024).
Get a read on where your own stack stands against TigerBeetle and the rest of its category — what they built versus bought, which providers they use, and where the gaps in your own strategy and competitive set actually are.