How studying global trade, the U.S. dollar, and business operations led me to build CNTRAL

I have toyed around for years with the idea of joining the US foreign service. A chance to work directly on things with global implications while exploring the world as a stranger in a strange land has been a career fantasy of mine since I made the decision to work in supply chain. Around a year ago while studying for the Foreign Service exam, I read Chokepoints by former US diplomat Edward Fishman, a book I recommend to anyone when discussing CNTRAL now. I wanted a better understanding of tariffs, global money movement, US foreign policy, and how sanctions affect supply chain and trade. While I learned much about these topics and more, the biggest thing that stuck with me is the bottleneck of the US dollar use as a bridge for nearly all cross border payments. As someone with a career in operations, I hyperfixated on how this chokepoint alongside the outdated tech, numerous bank communications, and compliance concerns had to be improvable. This was not just a payments problem. It was a tech and workflow problem.

I went down the rabbit hole and obsessed over international payments, foreign exchange, blockchain, stablecoin, SWIFT, compliance, treasury operations, and the future of money movement. The result was CNTRAL: Currency Neutral Transnational Remittance and Liquidity. A business plan and product was made using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor to make cross border payments faster, more transparent, cheaper, and more operationally efficient.

The concept sounds complex but is quite simple, bypass traditional cross-border payments headaches and costs by utilizing a programmable smart-routing stablecoin-based payments network. Traditionally, a payer needs to send money in their currency to a bank who processes the conversion into USD then from USD into the recipient's currency, all while having to adhere to intense compliance concerns and using dated bank messaging systems. All these steps add up and it takes up to 5 days for the payment, with fees at every step and foreign exchange rate uncertainty. With CNTRAL, a payer plugs in what currency they want to send and what currency their recipient needs to receive, then they add the amount and a quote is provided and locked in with a small fee and a buffer to account for any change in conversion cost during the transaction, now the payment is sent via the fastest, cheapest, safest route available at the moment, reducing a multi day process to seconds. This amounts to incredible savings of time and money at scale for transactions.

CNTRAL currently sits as an MVP prototype in progress, basically a functioning accounting/ledger system that is built to accommodate partner networks for API connections and webhooks to execute transactions as we build out our network. Alongside the MVP in development, I have used AI to create risk frameworks, revenue projections, marketing plans, operations plans, product roadmaps, and growth strategies. The product has potential to grow in a number of directions including: treasury optimization, compliance workflows, new stablecoin development, and more advanced settlement infrastructure.

The goal is not to build a crypto product for crypto users. The goal is to think through how a new payment infrastructure could be applied to real a business problem. AI has been a major part of that process. Using AI tools, I have been able to move from a broad idea to a more concrete product concept much faster than would have been possible before. I have used AI to research markets, study competitors, think through product flows, understand technical requirements, draft business models, and translate operational logic into early software concepts. AI does not replace experience or judgment. But it does give more leverage to those who know what questions to ask. That is one of the biggest career lessons I have taken from building CNTRAL. The future will reward people who can connect domains that usually sit apart: operations, payments, finance, technology, compliance, AI, and global trade. Companies will need people who understand how businesses actually work, but who can also use new tools to build, analyze, and improve systems faster. That is the direction I am building toward.

CNTRAL started with a basic observation: if global commerce depends so heavily on the movement of money, businesses should have better tools for moving money across borders. That idea has become part of a larger professional direction for me. I want to work on the infrastructure that helps businesses operate better. Payments are part of that. AI is part of that. Stablecoins and blockchain should be part of that. Supply chains, vendors, compliance, data, and treasury workflows are all part of that.