System design interview question
Design a Distributed Transaction Ledger System for a Global Payment Network (like SWIFT or Stripe Connect)
Design a distributed ledger system that processes financial transactions across multiple regions with strict ACID guarantees, audit trails, and fraud detection. The system must handle 50K transactions per second globally, with sub-100ms latency for transaction settlement, support multiple currencies and currencies conversion, maintain a complete immutable audit log for regulatory compliance, and detect anomalies across billions of historical transactions. Transactions must be replicated across at least 3 geographic regions for disaster recovery, and the system must recover from data center failures without losing a single transaction or creating duplicate settlements. Consider that financial institutions depend on this system for critical operations, so availability and consistency are non-negotiable.
Practice this question step by step with an AI interviewer that reviews your requirements, your architecture and your trade-offs, and scores the design.