Last week, Australia's Reserve Bank announced it would ban card surcharges from October 1, 2026. The headlines celebrated. Consumer groups cheered. Politicians took credit.
But here's what nobody's saying: the surcharge ban doesn't remove the cost. It hides it.
The Hidden Tax
Today, every time you tap your card, the merchant pays 0.3% to 0.8% to a chain of intermediaries: your bank, the card network (Visa or Mastercard), the acquirer, and various processors along the way. That's roughly $1.6 billion a year extracted from Australian merchants.
When surcharges are banned, merchants can no longer pass this cost to the consumer who chose to pay by card. Instead, they absorb it. Which means they raise prices for everyone, cut staff, or reduce quality. The banks have already warned they'll respond by cutting rewards programs and raising annual fees.
The surcharge was never the problem. The 0.3-0.8% extraction was.
What If You Could Remove the Cost Entirely?
That's what we set out to build at OpenPasskey.
It's a new payment network that uses the same EMV contactless standard as Visa and Mastercard. Same chip. Same tap at the same terminal. But there's no bank behind it, no card network, and no interchange fee.
We secured our own Issuer Identification Number (IIN) directly from ISO, the same identifier system that Visa and Mastercard use. Our card runs a custom applet on a Java Card chip, signing transactions with P-256 cryptography, the same elliptic curve used in modern EMV chip cards and cryptographically stronger than Visa's legacy 3DES.
Settlement happens on-chain in seconds using regulated Australian dollar stablecoins. The merchant gets AUD in their bank account. No three-day settlement window. No intermediary taking a cut.
This Isn't Theoretical
We have 3,200+ users across more than 20 Sydney cafes. Three payment methods: physical card tap, mobile phone tap, and QR scan. All settling through the same pipeline. Built by three people in ten months with zero external funding.
The Real Question
The RBA's surcharge ban is well-intentioned. But it treats the symptom while leaving the disease intact.
The disease is a payment infrastructure designed in the 1960s, maintained by a duopoly, and extracting billions from merchants and consumers who have no alternative.
Now there is one.
OpenPasskey was recently selected for Blackbird Ventures' Giants Cohort 11 and received a Base ecosystem grant. Follow @OpenPasskey on Twitter.
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