The Interledger Foundation is a US-based

nonprofit corporation A nonprofit corporation is any legal entity which has been incorporated under the law of its jurisdiction for purposes other than making profits for its owners or shareholders. Depending on the laws of the jurisdiction, a nonprofit corporation ma ...

and

standards organization A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpr ...

established in 2019. Its mission is to foster global digital

financial inclusion Financial inclusion is the availability and equality of opportunities to access financial services. It refers to processes by which individuals and businesses can access appropriate, affordable, and timely financial products and services—which ...

and equitable access to the

digital economy The digital economy is a portmanteau of digital computing and economy, and is an umbrella term that describes how traditional Brick and mortar, brick-and-mortar economic activities (production, distribution, trade) are being transformed by the ...

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 Ripple Labs, Inc. is an American technology company which offers enterprise blockchain products on the XRP Ledger and other networks. Originally named Opencoin and renamed in 2015, the company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, C ...

. The document described a

communication protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics (computer science), sem ...

to enable interoperable payments by acting as a universal translator among different financial networks. 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 The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

(W3C) hosted the Interledger Payments Community Group. Members included representatives from Ripple Labs, the

National Association of Convenience Stores The National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) is a trade association representing the convenience and fuel retailing industry. Founded in 1961, NACS has thousands of member companies, primarily in the United States but also in about 50 ot ...

, the

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States, covers the 9th District of the Federal Reserve, which is made up of Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, North and South Dakota ...

, and

American Express American Express Company or Amex is an American bank holding company and multinational financial services corporation that specializes in payment card industry, payment cards. It is headquartered at 200 Vesey Street, also known as American Expr ...

. 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 HTTP Status Code 402, also known as "Payment Required," is a standard response code in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the RFC 7231 specification ...

“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. On 6 July 2016, the first payment using the Interledger Protocol was transmitted between two different

ledgers A ledger is a book or collection of accounts in which accounting transactions are recorded. Each account has: * an opening or brought-forward balance; *a list of transactions, each recorded as either a debit or credit in separate columns (usua ...

, the Bitcoin ledger on Bitstamp and the XRP ledger on GateHub. In July 2017, the

Bank of England The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694 to act as the Kingdom of England, English Government's banker and debt manager, and still one ...

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 A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...

ledgers. In October 2017, the

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation The Gates Foundation is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was launched in 2000 and is reported to be the third largest charitable foundation in the world, holding $ ...

released the Mojaloop open-source software for financial service providers in

developing countries A developing country is a sovereign state with a less-developed Secondary sector of the economy, industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to developed countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. ...

. Mojaloop implemented the Interledger Protocol to provide interoperability between digital financial services and payment platforms. 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. The first Interledger Summit was held in San Francisco in June. In September 2019, Coil,

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

, and the

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the Open-source software, open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

announced Grant for the Web, a $100 million fund designed to support the development of technologies, content, and ideas utilizing the Interledger Protocol. Initially managed through a governance structure comprising representatives from those three organizations, the fund’s administration transferring to the Interledger Foundation was announced in July 2021. 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. 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. In 2023, the Interledger Foundation’s work shifted to addressing digital

by increasing financial services available to the

underbanked The underbanked is a characteristic describing people or organizations who do not (or volunteer to not) have sufficient access to mainstream financial services and products typically offered by retail banks and thus often deprived of banking serv ...

, particularly in the

Global South Global North and Global South are terms that denote a method of grouping countries based on their defining characteristics with regard to socioeconomics and politics. According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Global South broadly com ...

. Various initiatives, including Mojaloop and the People’s Clearinghouse in Mexico, 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 Jordan, officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Jordan is bordered by Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, and Israel and the occupied Palestinian ter ...

Projects

The Interledger Foundation oversees the

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

activity of both technical standards and

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

development. It supports other software, financial service, education, and cultural projects through grants. Technical standards: * Interledger Protocol, a protocol for interoperable financial networks * Open Payments, an API standard for interoperable payments * Web Monetization, an API standard for tipping digital creators Open-source software: * Rafiki, the

reference implementation In the software development process, a reference implementation (or, less frequently, sample implementation or model implementation) is a program that implements all requirements from a corresponding specification. The reference implementation ...

of Open Payments API for

payment service providers A payment is the tender of something of value, such as money or its equivalent, by one party (such as a person or company) to another in exchange for goods or services provided by them, or to fulfill a legal obligation or philanthropy desire. Th ...

* Rafiki testnet, a

sandbox A sandbox is a sandpit, a wide, shallow playground construction to hold sand, often made of wood or plastic. Sandbox or sand box may also refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Sandbox (band), a Canadian rock music group * Sandbox (Gu ...

for testing Open Payments API requests * Web Monetization browser extension, the

for Web Monetization in web browsers

Board of directors

As of April 2021, the Interledger Foundation

board of directors A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

has six members: * Maha Bahou, Jordan Payments and Clearing Company (JoPACC) * Chris Larsen, Ripple * Briana Marbury (president, CEO), Interledger Foundation * Kosta Peric, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation * Evan Schwartz (co-creator), Interledger Foundation * Stefan Thomas (co-creator, chair), Coil

References

{{Reflist 501(c)(3) organizations Free and open-source software organizations Payment interchange standards