The VPA is DNS for money

UPI’s quietest brilliant decision was the address. A Virtual Payment Address — name@bank — does for money what DNS did for the web: it separates the name people use from the account plumbing underneath.

Before the VPA, sending money meant knowing account numbers and routing codes — the IP addresses of banking. Getting one digit wrong sent money to a stranger. After the VPA, the payer holds a stable, human-readable handle, and the resolution to an actual account happens inside the network, changeable without the payer ever noticing. Switch banks; keep your handle.

Every addressing layer that has ever won — domain names, phone numbers, email — won by being portable across the infrastructure underneath it. That’s what makes it a narrow waist: everything above builds on the name, everything below can be swapped.

Agentic payments will need its own VPA moment: a stable way to name who is allowed to pay whom for what, independent of which rail carries the money that day.