What We Learned When We Rewrote Zainpay's Backend in Rust

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0100

In early 2021, Zainpay’s entire backend ran on a technology stack most business owners have never heard of: Scala and something called Akka. To our engineering team, it was elegant. The “actor model” — a way of handling thousands of simultaneous payment requests without them crashing into each other — felt like the right foundation for a payments company.

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What We Learned When We Rewrote Zainpay's Backend in Rust