What is Tobin?
An open-source clearing and settlement preparation system for institutions that move money on Stellar.
Tobin is an open-source clearing and settlement system for financial institutions that already move money on Stellar. Institutions record the payment obligations they owe each other. Tobin computes each participant's net position deterministically, requires a reviewer to approve the exact result, and prepares settlement instructions for only the net amounts.
The problem
When institutions have recurring obligations to several counterparties, the obligations cross and mostly offset, yet each one is usually settled on its own. That leads to fragmented records, manual reconciliation, more settlement volume than the net exposure requires, weak approval structure, and uncertainty about what was actually settled.
A worked example (arithmetic only, not data): A owes B 100, B owes C 80, C owes A 70. Settled one by one, that moves 250. Cleared first, A pays 30, B receives 20 and C receives 10, so only 30 is settled. Net positions always sum to zero.
One valid plan, not the only one
That result is one valid way to settle those net positions. Other plans can satisfy the same positions, and the contract accepts any plan that meets its own rules. See Netting and contract validation.
What is in the repository
The repository holds three connected things:
- An institutional application (
apps/web-console): organizations and memberships, clearing sessions, obligations, calculations, reviewer approval, settlement preparation and wallet-first sign-in. State is persisted in SQLite. - Soroban contracts and a TypeScript SDK (
contracts/,packages/mvp1-sdk): a clearing contract that settles a session atomically in a Soroban token contract, a capped-supply test token, and the netting engine and digest code shared by the application and the tests. - Stellar Testnet tooling (inside
apps/web-console): owner-run tools that verify wallet control, check multisig signer sets, collect real Freighter signatures, submit the settlement transactions one step at a time after the owner's typed confirmation, and read the results back from the network.
Who it is for
Institutions with recurring payment obligations to several counterparties on Stellar: anchors, payment institutions, cross-border payment providers and institutional Stellar applications. Multilateral clearing only helps where several institutions owe each other. Whether real Stellar payment flows are interconnected enough to benefit has not been measured.
What it is not
- It sits above Stellar's existing standards; it does not replace SEP-31, SEP-24 or SEP-38 and defines no protocol token.
- It is not an anchor, custodian, payment processor, DEX, lender or bank, and it does not decide any institution's KYC or regulatory obligations.
- "Non-custodial" is used in a technical sense only: no Tobin operator key can move funds under the contract's rules.
- It is not a universal clearing network and not fully decentralised. The application is a single-instance web app backed by one SQLite file; the on-chain part is a settlement contract plus signatures.
Next: Project status.