The Interledger Foundation champions advocacy for Interledger Protocol (ILP), an open protocol that permits frictionless payments and micropayments across currencies and ledgers, enabling opportunities for broader global financial inclusion.
The mission is to build equitable pathways to financial access and digital participation in the Interledger Ecosystem.
Funded projects range from a coalition of credit unions in rural Mexico, tooling to measure impact investing, a program to facilitate cross-border small business loans, and other ideas to expand how people can benefit from the Interledger Protocol.
To build on its mission and goals, Interledger said more people are needed to experiment and innovate in the its enabled network, so they announced twelve recipients of the Financial Services awards.
These twelve projects will receive funds to cover 6-months of research to explore compelling use cases for ILP-enabled digital wallets, neobanks, and community platforms.
“We were thrilled by the response we had to this award program and are excited to support these projects as they learn, grow, and build in the Interledger ecosystem. It is mission critical that we expand the ILP network and activate nodes throughout the globe who will open up new opportunities to expand financial inclusion. I am proud that these projects demonstrate the diversity in our ecosystem and support our core belief that we need the people experiencing the problems to be imagining solutions.” – Briana Marbury, ILF Executive Director
Submitted projects came through a global call for proposals launched in June 2022 and were reviewed by a panel of judges made up of staff and partners of the Interledger Foundation. Successful grantees in our newest cohort come from ten different countries.
Follow the work of all our past and present grantees on the Interledger Foundation Community Space.
Paystreme (MyWalletGuru, LLC, USA)
Wallet Guru is an American financial technology company operating digital currency payment solutions with an initial focus on Latin America. The company is developing a payment streaming platform called Paystreme that enables users to pay in real-time for services. Users can send payments per second as they consume services such as cell phone coverage, broadband internet, pay TV, and content streaming platforms.
BessPay (BessPay, Jamaica)
BessPay is an affordable subscription-based content monetization & hassle-free payment service for creators in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.
It connects creators to Interledger Protocol-enabled platforms and services through Mobile Carrier Billing & other local digital payment solutions.
BessPay aims to enable most Jamaicans and Caribbean nationals with mobile phones to participate in the emerging global digital economy through Content Creation, Web Monetization, and open payment systems.
ENEZA (BITKE Blockchain Consultancy Ltd, Kenya)
ENEZA will provide the general public with the potential to access microcredit capabilities. Due to high interest rates and compliance measures, most people don’t qualify for microlending services.
This solution will expose Microfinance Institutions and Co-operative Societies to global Web3 lending sources with off-chain collateralization and credit scores.
ENEZA seeks to be the transformative gateway for these sectors, acting as enablers for poverty alleviation, prioritizing women in low-income households and rural areas, unemployed youth, and persons living with a disability.
MUDA OTC Escrow (Muda ventures, Uganda)
Building an FX liquidity marketplace infrastructure that will ease the pain points of cross-border payments, MUDA is looking to digitize the process by implementing a solution that will apply the ILP technology to digitize and improve the way the current cross-border liquidity is aggregated, managed, and utilized.
Snake Nation As- A-Tier 1 ILPS (Snake Nation. PYT.Ltd, South Africa/USA)
Snake Nation is a mission driven, culture content and tech company, focused on creating economic opportunities for young M2 (multicultural millennial) creators through a frictionless and diverse digital and creative economy.
One of the significant current gaps in the ILP network is access to local African Nodes with the ability to use a Tier 1 ILP capable wallet on the African continent and other Global South countries like South East – Asia, and South America.
Snake Nation plans to develop a Tier 1 ILPv4 Network through its University Society Network as a foundational solution to an open payment system, a key pillar of Africa 4.0 ( 4th Industrial revolution). The Africa.4.0 rollout will begin in 10 countries, driving adoption of the Snake Nation ILP-enabled wallet.
The Tier 1 ILPv4 infrastructure is a step forward for financial inclusion, and for the creative economy in the Global South.
The People’s Clearinghouse (AMUCSS Mexican Association of Credit Unions of the Social Sector, Mexico)
The People’s Clearinghouse is a social innovation project to benefit the broader public, specifically rural and indigenous people who have organized themselves into co-ops.
Millions of co-op account holders have been historically excluded from the Mexican payment system.
As a result they must deal with time-consuming and risky travel to access their money in cash. This project intends to research how the clearinghouse can be a successful connector for small rural co-ops of Mexico to the Mexican central bank and among themselves using the Interledger Protocol.
An Inclusive Payment Network for the Unbanked and Underbanked in Myanmar (ThitsaWorks, incorporated in Singapore and Myanmar)
ThitsaWorks provides solutions to power financial inclusion, currently focusing on the digital transformation of the Myanmar microfinance sector through enabling digital payments and building their capacities to implement digital strategies.
In this project, ThitsaWorks will conduct research and development to build a prototype of a connector, which will enable Tier-2 and Tier-3 financial institutions, including low-capacity financial institutions such as microfinance institutions, non-banks, mobile money, and rural banks, to participate in an interoperable real-time payment network.
This project seeks to address for the lack of interoperability, siloed networks and inaccessibility of services for unbanked and underbanked in Myanmar.
Cheeri (Divao LLC, USA)
Cheeri helps social purpose organizations, impact funders, and investors create, manage, measure, and fund impact-driven projects. Cheeri aims to make impact funding and investing scalable through automated reimbursement based on impact metrics.
Using ILP, Cheeri enables the exchange of social, environmental, and other common-good impacts for currencies, including fiat and crypto. For example, when an impact funder decides to fund a social purpose organization, they can create a dedicated impact token that the funded organization can redeem for their currency of choice.
Kult’s ILP Open-Source Digital Wallet (Kult (Paginas Esbeltas LLC), Brazil/Portugal)
Kult is a social platform for curating movies, TV series, books, podcasts, and songs that promote diverse cultural exchange between people and communities. With the mission of bringing value to human curation, it aims to create an open-source digital wallet that any platform can easily replicate.
