Interledger Foundation

Last updated
Interledger Foundation
AbbreviationILF
Formation2019;5 years ago (2019)
Type 501(c)(3) organization, Standards organization
Purpose Financial Inclusion
Area served
Worldwide
Method Open-source software, Interoperability
Website interledger.org

The Interledger Foundation is a US-based nonprofit corporation and standards organization established in 2019. [1]

Contents

Its mission is to foster global digital financial inclusion and equitable access to the digital economy through the development and promotion of the Interledger Protocol, a payment interchange standard.

History

Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz published a whitepaper in October 2015 titled “A Protocol for Interledger Payments” while working at Ripple Labs. [2] The document described a communication protocol to enable interoperable payments by acting as a universal translator among different financial networks. [3] The Interledger Protocol was modeled after the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the foundational technology behind the Internet’s ability to transmit data across diverse networks.

In 2015, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) hosted the Interledger Payments Community Group. [4] Members included representatives from Ripple Labs, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and American Express. [5] The group discussed using Interledger Protocol to solve the compatibility issues between global payment networks that inhibited a standardized approach to implementing payments in a web browser. The HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code was reserved in 1997 to indicate digital content is accessible only after a payment is made, but remained largely unused due to the global fragmentation in digital payment methods. [6]

On 6 July 2016, the first payment using the Interledger Protocol was transmitted between two different ledgers, the Bitcoin ledger on Bitstamp and the XRP ledger on GateHub. [7]

In July 2017, the Bank of England carried out a successful test of the Interledger Protocol. This test transaction synchronized payments between the central bank’s core Real-Time Gross Settlement system with a similar core system used by another central bank. The test demonstrated that the Interledger Protocol could reduce the time it takes to settle a large cross-border payment from four days to “a few seconds” and be used by non-cryptocurrency ledgers. [8]

In October 2017, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released the Mojaloop open-source software for financial service providers in developing countries. Mojaloop implemented the Interledger Protocol to provide interoperability between digital financial services and payment platforms. [9]

In 2019, Coil Technologies, Inc. and Ripple Labs established the Interledger Foundation to be a vendor-neutral forum for the continued development of the Interledger Protocol. [1] The first Interledger Summit was held in San Francisco in June. [10]

In September 2019, Coil, Creative Commons, and the Mozilla Foundation announced Grant for the Web, a $100 million fund designed to support the development of technologies, content, and ideas utilizing the Interledger Protocol. [11] Initially managed through a governance structure comprising representatives from those three organizations, [12] the fund’s administration transferring to the Interledger Foundation was announced in July 2021. [13]

Briana Marbury joined as the inaugural Executive Director in 2020.

Throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022, the Interledger Foundation primarily focused on supporting the development and adoption of the Web Monetization standard. The standard allows websites to receive payments from visitors with digital wallets connected to their web browser. [14] The primary use case is for micropayments, small transactions that could enable new business models on the web. Web Monetization relies on wallet providers using the Interledger Foundation’s Open Payments API standard as a unified way for facilitating payments. Wallet providers may use the Interledger Protocol for fulfilling cross-border, multi-currency payments. Web Monetization is being proposed as a W3C standard in the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. [15]

In 2023, the Interledger Foundation’s work shifted to addressing digital financial inclusion by increasing financial services available to the underbanked, particularly in the Global South. Various initiatives, including Mojaloop [16] and the People’s Clearinghouse in Mexico, [17] are being supported to use the Interledger Protocol to facilitate real-time payments in emerging markets across different financial institutions and payment systems. In November 2023, the Interledger Foundation announced a partnership with the Jordan Payments and Clearing House (JoPACC) to lower the cost of cross-border transactions in Jordan. [18]

Projects

The Interledger Foundation oversees the software development activity of both technical standards and open-source software development. It supports other software, financial service, education, and cultural projects through grants.

Technical standards:

Open-source software:

Board of directors

As of April 2021, the Interledger Foundation board of directors has six members: [25] [ needs update ]

Related Research Articles

A micropayment is a financial transaction involving a very small sum of money and usually one that occurs online. A number of micropayment systems were proposed and developed in the mid-to-late 1990s, all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. A second generation of micropayment systems emerged in the 2010s.

OMA SpecWorks, previously the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), is a standards organization which develops open, international technical standards for the mobile phone industry. It is a nonprofit Non-governmental organization (NGO), not a formal government-sponsored standards organization as is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU): a forum for industry stakeholders to agree on common specifications for products and services.

Web Services Discovery provides access to software systems over the Internet using standard protocols. In the most basic scenario there is a Web Service Provider that publishes a service and a Web Service Consumer that uses this service. Web Service Discovery is the process of finding suitable web services for a given task.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LedgerSMB</span> Accounting software planning system

LedgerSMB is a libre software double entry accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, focussed on functionality required by small (self-employment) and medium size businesses. However, companies with millions of journal lines should also feel supported. Accounting data is stored in a free to use database server (PostgreSQL) and a standard web browser can be used as its user interface. The software is suited for hosting locally as well as on various public cloud providers. Commercial support can be obtained from several providers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wireless Application Protocol</span> Technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a now obsolete technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. Introduced in 1999, WAP allowed at launch users with compatible mobile devices to browse content such as news, weather and sports scores provided by mobile network operators, specially designed for the limited capabilities of a mobile device. The Japanese i-mode system offered another major competing wireless data standard.

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct service providers, such as the Fediverse or the IndieWeb. It consists of multiple social websites, where users of each site communicate with users of any of the involved sites. From a societal perspective, one may compare this concept to that of social media being a public utility.

WebRTC is a free and open-source project providing web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows audio and video communication and streaming to work inside web pages by allowing direct peer-to-peer communication, eliminating the need to install plugins or download native apps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Geospatial Consortium</span> Standards organization

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 1994 and involves more than 500 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xsolla</span> Payment service provider

Xsolla is a global video game commerce company headquartered in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 2005 by Aleksandr Agapitov in Perm (Russia), and is incorporated with subsidiaries globally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitstamp</span> Bitcoin exchange based in the UK

Bitstamp is a European cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2011. It is the world’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange. It allows trading between fiat currency, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, such as USD, EUR, GBP, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Algorand, Stellar, and USD Coin. Business operations are conducted from its registered headquarters in Luxembourg City, with a satellite office in Ljubljana.

Ripple Labs, Inc. is an American technology company which develops the Ripple payment protocol and exchange network. Originally named Opencoin and renamed in 2015, the company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Counterparty (platform)</span> Cryptocurrency platform

Counterparty is a peer-to-peer financial platform and a distributed, open source protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and network. It was one of the most well-known "Bitcoin 2.0" platforms in 2014, along with Mastercoin, Ethereum, Colored Coins, Ripple and BitShares.

Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is a W3C specification for providing a communication channel between web browsers and the Content Decryption Module (CDM) software which implements digital rights management (DRM). This allows the use of HTML video to play back DRM-wrapped content such as streaming video services without the use of heavy third-party media plugins like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. The use of a third-party key management system may be required, depending on whether the publisher chooses to scramble the keys.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stellar (payment network)</span> Cryptocurrency

Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matrix (protocol)</span> Networking protocol for real-time communication and data synchronization

Matrix is an open standard and communication protocol for real-time communication. It aims to make real-time communication work seamlessly between different service providers, in the way that standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol email currently does for store-and-forward email service, by allowing users with accounts at one communications service provider to communicate with users of a different service provider via online chat, voice over IP, and videotelephony. It therefore serves a similar purpose to protocols like XMPP, but is not based on any existing communication protocol.

Hyperledger is an umbrella project of open source blockchains and related tools that the Linux Foundation started in December 2015. IBM, Intel, and SAP Ariba have contributed to support the collaborative development of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. It was renamed the Hyperledger Foundation in October 2021.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">IOTA (technology)</span> Open-source distributed ledger and cryptocurrency

IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger and cryptocurrency designed for the Internet of things (IoT). It uses a directed acyclic graph to store transactions on its ledger, motivated by a potentially higher scalability over blockchain based distributed ledgers. IOTA does not use miners to validate transactions, instead, nodes that issue a new transaction on the network must approve two previous transactions. Transactions can therefore be issued without fees, facilitating microtransactions. The network currently achieves consensus through a coordinator node, operated by the IOTA Foundation. As the coordinator is a single point of failure, the network is currently centralized.

Mojaloop is an open-source software project of the Mojaloop Foundation. The project is a reference model for creating interoperable payments platforms for digital financial providers intended to reduce the technical barrier of financial inclusion efforts. It was created and released by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Level One Project in 2017. Moja is a Swahili word meaning "one".

References

  1. 1 2 "Foundation Documents". California Office of the Attorney General. Los Angeles: California Registry of Charitable Trusts. 27 July 2019. Retrieved 11 March 2024.
  2. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20190307171300/https://interledger.org/interledger.pdf. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-03-07. Retrieved 2024-03-11.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  3. ↑ Popper, Nathaniel; Gates, Guilbert (2018-06-27). "A Guide to the World of Blockchain". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  4. ↑ "Interledger Payments Community Group". www.w3.org. 2016-02-17. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  5. ↑ "Participants in the Interledger Payments Community Group". www.w3.org. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  6. ↑ Tufekci, Zeynep. "Shouldn't We All Have Seamless Micropayments By Now?". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  7. ↑ Pungerčar, Enej (6 July 2016). "World first @Interledger payment between @GateHub and @Bitstamp happened today in London. Great job everyone!". X. Retrieved 11 March 2024.
  8. ↑ "Bank of England successfully tests new payment method". www.ft.com. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  9. ↑ "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Releases Open-Source Software to Support Efforts that Expand Access to Financial Services in Developing Countries". Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  10. ↑ ILP Summit 2019 State of the Interledger Evan Schwartz, 17 December 2022, retrieved 2024-03-11
  11. ↑ "A $100 Million Investment to Reshape the Economics of the Web". Mozilla Foundation. Toronto. 16 September 2019. Retrieved 11 March 2024.
  12. ↑ "The Advisory Council". 2020-10-30. Archived from the original on 2020-10-30. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  13. ↑ "Interledger Foundation Launches to Build More Equitable and Creative Opportunities on the Web". www.businesswire.com. 2021-04-14. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  14. ↑ "Web Monetization". webmonetization.org. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  15. ↑ WICG/webmonetization, Web Incubator CG, 2024-03-01, retrieved 2024-03-11
  16. ↑ Foundation, Mojaloop (2023-08-22). "Interledger Foundation and Mojaloop Foundation: A Shared Vision". Mojaloop. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  17. ↑ Foundation, Mojaloop (2023-08-22). "Interledger Foundation and Mojaloop Foundation: A Shared Vision". Mojaloop. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  18. ↑ "Interledger Foundation Announces historic partnership with Jordan Payments and Clearing Company (JoPACC) to advance financial inclusion in the digital economy". Interledger Foundation. 9 November 2023. Retrieved 11 March 2024.
  19. ↑ "Interledger Protocol V4". Interledger Foundation. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  20. ↑ "Open Payments". Open Payments. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  21. ↑ "Web Monetization". webmonetization.org. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  22. ↑ "Hello from Rafiki". Rafiki. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  23. ↑ interledger/testnet, Interledger, 2024-03-01, retrieved 2024-03-11
  24. ↑ interledger/web-monetization-extension, Interledger, 2024-03-01, retrieved 2024-03-11
  25. ↑ Groenfeldt, Tom. "Interledger Foundation Aims To Make Web Payments As Easy As Email". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
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