Lease Lease or Moat reading · NO · as of September 2026
Lease (NO).
Observed: sourced facts, as of September 2026
Paystack's documented payment channels run on external rails: card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Verve, American Express), bank accounts and transfers, USSD, and mobile money providers. Paystack, Payment channels (developer documentation)
Protocol reading: interpretation, not a fact
Decisive object → controllerMerchant payment integration → Paystack; the rails → banks and networks.
ReasoningOwns the merchant interface but depends on external rails: owning the interface while renting the decisive constraint.
What would overturn this reading
The merchant workflow becomes embedded enough that the rails become commodity inputs.
What it shows
Owning the customer-facing product is not the same as owning the constraint the position runs through.
From the annex of the paper (Africa), which records the decisive object, the reading and the falsifier for each case.
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