It's an interesting topic for study. Being the first to launch wasn't the only factor, but certainly an important one - WhatsApp Pay is available today, but it's nowhere near as popular as Pix. That's why I mentioned it. With that being said, I don't think people need "saving" from choosing to use a service. It's not certain that WhatsApp Pay would really take off as much as Pix did. I also don't think one should be thankful for having one monopoly replaced by another (in the sense of market dominance, you can still use alternative payment methods). Imagine instead of WhatsApp Pay it was WhatsApp itself. Meta is no saint, but at least messages are E2E encrypted. How would GovApp look like? As mentioned in the article, Pix has every transaction go directly through the central bank, as opposed to going through commercial banks like traditional payment methods. It may provide great usability, but also concentrates power and risk, as written in The Economist. So far there is no indication this power has been used in any malicious way, or that any significant breach occurred, but the infrastructure for that is there, and governments change. That should at least be in one's mind, if one values some kind of personal financial freedom.