Frequently Asked Questions

Access to financial services is foundational to economic participation, personal autonomy, and the exercise of other internationally-recognised human rights, including the right to work, education, and a dignified standard of living. When people are excluded from payment systems, they are often excluded from the formal economy altogether.

Today, approximately 1.3 billion adults worldwide remain unbanked, and many more are underserved by financial systems that were not designed with them in mind. This affects their ability to save securely, send money to family, access credit, or to start a small business. The Interledger Foundation works to change this by supporting open and responsible payment infrastructure that is interoperable, free to use, and accessible, regardless of geography, currency, or financial service provider.

Sending money across borders, or even across different financial platforms within the same country, remains unnecessarily slow, expensive, and exclusionary. Existing payment systems were largely built for high-volume, established corridors and often fail people who make smaller, more frequent transfers, such as migrant workers sending remittances home, online content creators receiving small micropayments, and small businesses receiving low-value payments.

The Interledger Foundation supports the development and adoption of open, interoperable payment technologies and standards that allow money to move the way information moves on the internet: freely, efficiently, and without requiring a single gatekeeper. Our goal is a world where anyone with a mobile phone can participate fully in the digital economy.

Our work is oriented toward the people most underserved by existing financial systems: communities in low and middle income economies, migrant and diaspora populations, gig economy workers and other low-paid workers, and others who are often invisible to traditional financial institutions.

Digital payments offer real advantages over cash: they remove physical safety concerns, allow people to keep money in interest-bearing accounts, provide income history for accessing credit, and open doors to a wider range of financial services. But those advantages only reach people if the underlying infrastructure is open, affordable, and accessible. That is what we work toward.

In practice, we serve a broad ecosystem: we fund civil society organizations advancing payment access and digital financial inclusion policy, support technical implementers including entrepreneurs and small businesses building on open payment standards, we empower universities and students to build the next generation of open, inclusive payment systems, and engage policymakers and regulators working to shape enabling environments. We currently work across a network spanning more than 40 countries.

We participate actively in the governance and standards bodies shaping the future of payments and the web. This includes the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where we participate in the Social Web Working Group, the OpenWallet Foundation, which is working toward interoperable digital wallet infrastructure, and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, where we serve as rapporteur for the intersessional working group the Dynamic Coalition on Digital Financial Inclusion.

We also engage regularly with multilateral institutions, central banks, and regulators, and our grantees contribute to policy processes in their own countries and regions. We believe that regulators and innovators alike benefit from constructive engagement: governments have a vital role to play in promoting healthy competition, including for new market entrants, in ensuring consumer protections, and in stewarding or maintaining digital public infrastructure. However, we also believe that the communities most affected by financial exclusion should have a voice in the design of the systems meant to serve them.

We believe that financial exclusion is, at its root, an infrastructure problem. The systems that move money around the world were not designed with universal access in mind, and the populations left out are the predictable result of infrastructure built to serve high-value customers in affluent markets.

Our theory of change rests on three interconnected beliefs. First, that open, interoperable payment infrastructure, freely available to any provider regardless of size or geography, is a necessary precondition for universal financial access. Proprietary systems will always prioritize their most profitable users. Open standards create the conditions for a market where more providers can participate, including those serving populations that proprietary systems have never prioritized.

Second, that technology alone is not sufficient. The regulatory, policy, and institutional environments in which payment systems operate determine who can participate and on what terms. We therefore invest in civil society organizations, policy advocates, and researchers who are working to shape those environments in ways that favor new entrants, protect consumers, and preserve digital public infrastructure. We also fund universities and other institutions of higher education, because we consider it important to train the next generation.

Third, the communities most affected by financial exclusion must be active participants in designing the systems meant to serve them. This informs how we make grants, who we fund, and how we engage with the ecosystem we are trying to build.

The internet promised to democratize the ability to earn a living from creative and intellectual work. In practice, the economics of the web have consolidated into something that resembles a feudal structure: a small number of powerful platforms act as lords of the digital economy, extracting rent from the creators, publishers, journalists, and developers who depend on them for distribution and income. Web Monetization is designed to challenge that structure. By enabling any website to receive a stream of small payments directly from visitors, without requiring either party to have a relationship with a platform intermediary, Web Monetization gives creators a way to earn income that they own and control without surrendering that income to a platform.

This connects directly to financial access in two ways. First, platform-dependent income models systematically disadvantage creators in markets that advertisers do not value, regardless of the quality of their work or the size of their audience. Second, receiving direct payments requires access to a payment account, and the prospect of earning income is one of the most powerful drivers of financial account adoption. Web Monetization creates a reason to have an account, not just a mechanism to use one.

The Interledger Foundation is governed by a Board of Directors that provides strategic oversight and fiduciary accountability. Day-to-day operations are led by an executive team with backgrounds in philanthropy, accounting, technology development, and communications.

We are a private operating foundation incorporated in California, and we operate in accordance with the legal and ethical standards applicable to private foundations under US law.

The Interledger Foundation was established in 2020 with an initial contribution of $100 million from a private donor. Those assets are managed by a professional investment firm under the oversight of the Board’s investment committee, which meets regularly to review portfolio performance and ensure the Foundation’s long-term financial sustainability.

As a private operating foundation, the Interledger Foundation files annual Form 990-PF returns with the IRS. These public records can be obtained from the IRS' website. The Interledger Foundation is also subject to an independent annual financial audit, which is conducted by an independent, reputable certified public accounting (CPA) firm. This audit is performed in accordance with applicable professional standards and is intended to provide assurance that the Foundation’s financial statements fairly present its financial position and results of operations in conformity with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

On our website, we routinely publish information about our grantmaking, and we are committed to honest communication about both our progress and our learnings.

We are in the process of developing a publicly searchable, findable grantee database so that you may learn more about those who have received our grants. In the meantime, all of our grantee interim and final reports are published publicly on the community forum.

We hold ourselves accountable through the relationships we maintain with our grantees and partners. Through routine monitoring and evaluation surveys and interviews run by outside vendors, we seek our grantees' feedback on our processes and programmatic activities, and we adjust accordingly to respond to this feedback, because we recognize that the communities we ultimately serve are the most important measure of whether our work is succeeding.

No. The Interledger Foundation does not engage in lobbying, we do not make contributions to political campaigns or candidates, nor do we endorse political campaigns or candidates. Furthermore, our grantmaking does not fund lobbying or lobbying-like activities.

Like many nonprofit organisations with a theory of change rooted in building an ecosystem that disrupts the status quo, we do engage in policy advocacy: sharing research, participating in regulatory consultations with evidence, contributing in good faith to standards processes, and offering technical expertise to policymakers. We believe this kind of constructive engagement is essential to creating the enabling conditions for financial inclusion, and we anchor our contributions in the spirit of speaking up for and on behalf of the broader Interledger ecosystem.

We believe that financial exclusion falls disproportionately on women, people in low and middle income economies, migrants, and other communities that have been systematically marginalized by existing financial infrastructure. If our work does not actively center these communities, it cannot succeed on its own terms. We believe that universal access to digital financial services is unlikely to be achieved solely by existing providers expanding their offerings. New kinds of organizations need to be able to enter the market and offer competitive services. For this reason, in our grantmaking, we prioritize organizations that are led by and accountable to the communities they serve.

In our own operations, we work to ensure that our team reflects the diversity of the world we are trying to serve.

No; this is a common misconception. The Interledger Foundation is a nonprofit grantmaking foundation that was established to steward the development of the Interledger Protocol, which was named because it refers to interlinking disconnected accounting ledgers. The Interledger Protocol is thus ledger-agnostic: it is designed to work with any currency that can be tracked digitally, including traditional fiat currencies, mobile money, and yes, cryptocurrency. It does not use blockchain, and as a foundation, we do not have a crypto token.

We are, however, aware of our heritage and understand that our endowment's funding was born out of research and development conducted by Ripple Labs. One of our board members does sit on the board of Ripple. That being said, we do not receive funding from Ripple, we are not governed or directed by Ripple, and our work is not undertaken on Ripple’s behalf. Ripple does not use Interledger technology, and Ripple has no special status or influence within the Interledger ecosystem.

As an independent foundation, our focus is firmly on how the Interledger Protocol can support real-world financial inclusion: enabling low-cost transfers between, for example, a mobile money account in Kenya and a bank account in Germany. Cryptocurrency is one possible medium of exchange for settlement within that system, but it is neither required nor central to our mission.

Yes. The Interledger Protocol, the Open Payments API, and Web Monetization technology standards are open source and freely available under an Apache 2.0 license. Similarly, our website content and all original Interledger Foundation publications are licensed under CC BY 4.0, unless otherwise noted.

No. The Interledger Foundation is a nonprofit grantmaking foundation. We are not a financial institution of any kind; we do not hold deposits, transmit money, process payments, operate a payment network, or provide financial services to end users.

Our role as a grantmaking foundation is to steward the development of open source technologies, fund organizations working on digital financial inclusion, engage in policy advocacy, and support the ecosystem of practitioners building on Interledger's open technologies.

Interledger’s open source technologies are tools which anyone can download and deploy, and like any tools, the obligations that attach to their use fall on the institutions using them.

We fund work that advances open payment infrastructure and digital financial access and inclusion. This spans several areas: technical development and implementation of open payment standards; education initiatives that train the next generation; policy advocacy and research that shapes enabling regulatory environments; civil society capacity-building so that communities affected by financial exclusion have a voice in the systems designed to serve them; and ecosystem coordination that helps practitioners, policymakers, and technologists work together more effectively. We are particularly interested in funding work in markets and corridors that are underserved by existing financial infrastructure, and in approaches that center the needs of people who have historically been excluded from financial services.

Our grant programs vary in their eligibility criteria and application processes. We engage in a mix of open-call and curated grantmaking. We encourage prospective applicants to review our current open grant opportunities on our website. We do not accept unsolicited grant applications outside of our publicly advertised requests for proposals.

In general, we look to support organisations with a demonstrated track record, a clear connection to our mission, and the capacity to execute on their proposed work. We also value organisations that are embedded in and accountable to the communities they serve, rather than working at a distance from them.

On occasion, yes. While our grantmaking is primarily directed toward registered nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, cooperatives, and similar entities, we do support individuals in specific programs. These include fellowships for practitioners working at the intersection of payments, policy, and financial inclusion, early career scholars through our Call for Papers grant stream, as well as travel grants that have enabled individuals to participate in our annual Interledger Summit. Through the Future|Money arts grant, we have also previously supported individual artists exploring themes related to our mission, though that program is no longer active.

We encourage interested individuals to review our current open opportunities on our website and to review the respective application criteria to see who is eligible to apply for that grant stream.

Occasionally, and with care. As a private operating foundation, we are subject to specific legal requirements governing grants to for-profit entities, including expenditure responsibility obligations that require us to ensure funds are used for charitable purposes. We recognize that much important work in open payment infrastructure is being done by mission-aligned companies and social enterprises, and we do not categorically exclude them from our funding. However, we apply additional scrutiny to ensure that our resources are being used appropriately and that the primary beneficiary is the broader ecosystem rather than private shareholders.

We have admiration and respect for the work that our peer funders do.

Our grantmaking is designed to be the kind of funding we would want to receive ourselves.

We are participatory. We engage with applicants and grantees as partners, and try to learn as much from them as they learn from us.

We intentionally look beyond the usual networks. Many funders in our field gravitate toward established institutions, familiar partners, and organizations with long track records in international funding ecosystems. We deliberately create space for individuals and organizations that may be early in their development, historically excluded from philanthropic funding, or operating outside the traditional centers of power in the field. This often means supporting work led in low and middle income countries, and by practitioners who are closest to the problems financial infrastructure is meant to solve. These leaders may not always have the credentials or visibility that unlock doors elsewhere, but their ideas, experience, and proximity to real-world challenges are exactly what we believe the field needs.

We are experimental. Not everything we fund will succeed, and we are honest about that. We think the cost of excessive caution is higher than the cost of occasional failure, and we try to create the conditions for grantees to take risks, learn, and iterate.

We are agile. We try to move at the speed our grantees need, because we acknowledge that slow, bureaucratic funding processes have real costs for the organizations on the receiving end.

And we give real feedback to every applicant we decline. A rejection from us is not a dead end. We tell applicants honestly what is missing, what would need to change, and what a stronger application might look like, because we hope every rejection is the beginning of a conversation that eventually ends in a yes.

The Interledger Protocol is an open standard for sending payments across different financial networks, much like how TCP/IP allows different computer networks to exchange data seamlessly.

Just as you can send an email to someone regardless of whether they use Gmail, Outlook, or Protonmail, the Interledger Protocol allows money to move between different financial platforms without requiring those platforms to have a direct bilateral agreement. Payments travel through a network of participants who have established trust (commonly through contractual relationships) with one another, moving funds incrementally in small amounts to minimize risk at every step.

ILPv4 refers to version four of the Interledger Protocol, which is the current version of the Interledger Protocol.

Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz co-created the Interledger Protocol in 2015, and the protocol has evolved through several versions over time.

A connector is a routing node within an Interledger network. It sits between other participants, receiving incoming payment packets on one side and forwarding them onward on the other. A connector operator is paid per packet for forwarding payments, and must in turn pay the next connector in the chain, tracking what is owed and due across all its peer relationships. This creates a network of financially accountable participants with a direct incentive to route reliably and competitively, because connectors that are slow, unreliable, or expensive will be routed around in favor of better alternatives.

Alongside the Interledger Protocol, the Interledger Foundation stewards the Open Payments API, the Web Monetization technology standard, and Rafiki.

The Open Payments API is the practical interface built on top of the Interledger Protocol that applications use to initiate and authorize payments between accounts.

Web Monetization is a proposed browser standard that enables websites to receive a stream of small payments from visitors automatically, as an additional stream of revenue to advertising, paywalls, or site-by-site subscriptions. It is designed to give web creators, journalists, artists, and developers a way to earn income from their work that does not depend on surveillance-based business models. Web Monetization is currently being incubated in the Web Platform Incubator Community Group at the W3C, and the Interledger Foundation supports it being adopted as a formal W3C standard.

We also maintain an open source reference implementation of the full Interledger stack, known as Rafiki. Rather than requiring a financial institution to build and maintain its own Interledger connector from scratch, Rafiki packages everything needed to join an Interledger network into a single, well-documented, open source codebase. This includes an Interledger connector, a high-throughput accounting database, admin APIs for managing peering relationships and supported assets, and an implementation of the Open Payments API for third-party payment initiation.

The Interledger Protocol uses a two-phase transfer mechanism. Rather than pushing money directly through the network, where an intermediary could receive funds and choose not to pass them along, the protocol first passes a commitment to pay from the sender, through all intermediary connectors, to the recipient. Only once the recipient confirms receipt does the payment flow backward through the chain, ensuring every participant is made whole. No party is ever left out of pocket.

Additionally, payments move in small increments rather than as large single transfers. This limits the exposure of any individual participant at any given moment, reducing both financial risk and the consequences of any technical failure.

In theory, the Interledger Protocol could. We are working towards achieving that objective. We are not there yet, and we think it would be wrong to suggest otherwise.

What Interledger does is create the conditions for lower costs. By enabling any licensed financial institution to join an interoperable payment network without requiring membership in a proprietary closed system, Interledger can introduce competition into corridors that have historically been served by a small number of incumbent providers with little incentive to reduce their fees. When more providers can route a payment between two points, we think this will create the conditions for prices to fall, because the Interledger Protocol enables dynamic routing where payment instructions can be directed toward the cheapest available path through the network at any given moment, rather than following a fixed chain of correspondent relationships regardless of cost. And by enabling payments to move in small packets rather than large transfers, in theory it reduces the liquidity that intermediaries need to hold, which is itself a cost driver in cross-border payments.

The Interledger Protocol and the Open Payments API are digital public infrastructure; they define how payments are routed, not how compliance is handled. AML and KYC obligations remain with the financial institutions operating on the network, who are responsible for meeting the regulatory requirements of their jurisdictions. This is analogous to how the internet carries communications without itself being responsible for their content: the underlying protocol is neutral, while the entities using it are accountable under applicable law. While the protocol itself is agnostic to compliance, the Interledger Foundation’s free and open source reference implementation, Rafiki, includes tooling to support participants in meeting their own AML/KYC obligations, including encrypted data exchange, which allows participants to exchange the compliance data they determine they need directly with one another.

There is no one Interledger network; any group of participants can use Interledger’s open source technologies to create their own payment network, and multiple independent or overlapping networks may exist simultaneously, some composed of regulated financial institutions, others operating in domain-specific or local contexts, none of them under the control of the Interledger Foundation or any other central body. Each participant in an Interledger network therefore maintains its own compliance posture, and the protocol does not expose sensitive personal information beyond what each participant needs to know.

Existing payment networks are proprietary: participation requires acceptance of their terms, fees, and technical requirements. This creates barriers for smaller financial institutions, emerging-market providers, and the populations they serve.

Interledger is a complementary layer and not a replacement. It operates as an open standard that any financial platform can implement, enabling connectivity with the broader network without requiring membership in any particular closed system. It is also not seeking to eliminate financial intermediaries; rather, our goal is to reduce unnecessary friction between them.

PIX and UPI are excellent examples of what is possible when governments invest in open, interoperable digital payment infrastructure. Both have dramatically expanded financial participation in their respective countries, and we view these systems as validation of the core principle we champion, that open infrastructure produces better outcomes for more people than closed, proprietary networks.

The key difference is scope. UPI operates within India, in Indian rupees, under the governance of the National Payments Corporation of India. PIX operates within Brazil, in Brazilian reais, under the governance of the Banco Central do Brasil. Both are sovereign infrastructure projects, designed to serve the needs of a single national economy. They are not designed to interoperate with each other, or with the hundreds of other payment systems operating in other countries.

This is precisely the gap that Interledger is designed to fill. The Interledger Protocol operates at the layer above national systems, providing the messaging infrastructure that allows different networks, including systems like UPI and PIX, to connect across borders. Rather than competing with national instant payment systems, Interledger is most powerful when working alongside them: a person in Brazil using PIX should, in principle, be able to send money to a person in India using UPI, with the Interledger Protocol handling the cross-network routing between them. In this sense, UPI and PIX represent the vision we want to see realized everywhere. Our work is about ensuring that the benefits they have delivered domestically can eventually be extended across borders, and that countries without equivalent national infrastructure have access to the open tools they need to build it.

SWIFT is a messaging network that financial institutions use to communicate payment instructions to one another across borders. Like the Interledger Protocol, it does not directly move money, it moves messages. The actual movement of funds happens through a chain of correspondent banking relationships, which can involve multiple intermediary banks, each taking fees and adding time to the transaction.

This correspondent banking model works reasonably well for large, high-value transfers between major financial centers, but it is poorly suited to the kinds of transfers that matter most for financial inclusion: small, frequent, cross-border payments in corridors that are not well served by existing correspondent relationships. Fees are high relative to transfer amounts, settlement can take days, and many corridors lack correspondent coverage altogether. Interledger is designed to address this problem. Rather than relying on a fixed chain of correspondent relationships, the Interledger Protocol routes payment instructions dynamically across a network of participants, each of whom has established direct peering relationships with others. In this model, correspondent banking is used for settlement of batches of payments, not individual payments.

What we can offer: near real-time payment initiation; interoperability across different currencies and financial platforms; competitive routing that favors lower-cost and more reliable paths; and privacy-preserving infrastructure that minimizes unnecessary data exposure.

What we cannot guarantee: a guaranteed settlement path between any two given parties at all times; or zero fees or necessarily low fees. Intermediaries set their own pricing, and ILP enables competition, not necessarily free or low fee services.

Legal and compliance requirements are real constraints in cross-border payments, and we seek to work alongside regulatory frameworks.

A payment pointer is an identifier used in an Interledger Protocol context, while a wallet address is the equivalent in the Open Payments context. Open Payments was designed to be backwards compatible with the Simple Payment Setup Protocol (SPSP), the mechanism the Interledger Protocol uses to exchange connection details, before a payment is streamed between two parties, so in practice most wallet addresses also function as payment pointers, but not all payment pointers are wallet addresses. This dual functionality depends on the specific implementation supporting both protocols; it is not a guarantee of the format itself. Regardless, think of wallet addresses and payment pointers as slightly different formats for the same underlying concept: a unique, human-readable address that allows someone to receive payments.

ISO 20022 is a messaging standard that institutions use to format financial messages, while Interledger is a suite of messaging and transport protocols that routes packetized payments across financial systems. The Interledger Protocol uses a much simpler messaging format than the ISO 20022 messaging standard, and the resulting Interledger packet is available as a payment signature method for ISO 20022. An institution that uses ISO 20022 internally can reference an ILP v4 packet as proof of payment over Interledger.

Interledger is a messaging protocol; it does not prescribe the commercial or contractual terms of the financial relationships that operate on top of it. Whether a particular implementation adheres to Islamic finance principles is a question for the financial institutions using the Interledger Protocol, not for the protocol itself. The open and modular nature of the Interledger Protocol means it can, in principle, support implementations that comply with a wide variety of ethical and regulatory frameworks, provided those implementing institutions take the appropriate steps.

We do not currently have a bug bounty or formal mechanism to receive security reports. However, if you report the bug or security issue using our Contact Form, we will forward it to the relevant colleague for their attention.

The Interledger community spans civil society organizations, educators, financial institutions, researchers, technologists, and advocates, and there are many ways to participate regardless of your background or expertise. You can learn more about the ways to participate on our community page.

We also have a membership program open to anyone who is committed to and shares our mission: to build the tech, grow the movement and shift the system to unlock financial agency for all.

A growing number of universities are incorporating Interledger technologies into their courses and research programs, supported in part by the Interledger Foundation’s NextGen Higher Education Grant program, which funds institutions to develop curricula, research, and hackathons.

Current and recent grantee institutions include Bowie State University in the United States, The Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, and the University of Cape Town in South Africa, which is home to the award-winning Financial Innovation Hub.

Interledger is being implemented by a growing number of platforms. A current snapshot of known implementations is maintained in our market availability report. Behind this report is a git repository of data about the wallet providers, their partnering financial institutions, their licensing, and their inter-connectivity (peering arrangements).

Through our grantmaking we are working to bring Interledger to market in open-loop implementations, especially within payment corridors where existing payment infrastructure is costly or unavailable. We are still early in the adoption curve, and we prefer to be transparent about that. Our work is focused on demonstrating viable reference implementations, generating evidence about impact, and building the policy and ecosystem conditions for broader adoption.

If you are a licensed financial service provider looking to get started with Interledger, the most direct path is to review our Open Payments documentation. Open Payments is the API standard built on top of the Interledger Protocol that handles the practical work of initiating and authorizing payments between accounts. A useful early exercise is spinning up Rafiki, our open source reference implementation, which will give your technical team a working local environment to explore how the protocol behaves before touching any production systems.

From there, the typical path involves implementing the Open Payments API on top of your existing account infrastructure, establishing peering relationships with other network participants, and working through the compliance and settlement arrangements appropriate to your jurisdiction. Our community forum and community Slack are active spaces where implementers at various stages share practical experiences, and the Interledger Foundation can help connect you with others who have navigated similar integration contexts.