Making financial access open and fair at a global scale
We’re the Interledger Foundation, a non-profit working to make financial access open and fair.
We’re making our vision a reality by stewarding the open standards that let financial systems connect, supporting and funding the people building on them, and pushing regulators and institutions to clear the way for open financial systems to run in the real world.
We’ve got big ambitions, but we’ve come from humble beginnings.
In 2015, Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz were working at the frontier of technology and finance and saw that the fragmented global payments landscape suffered from the same problems that plagued the early days of the internet. Separate networks, incompatible systems, no shared language.
But the internet had already solved this problem, so they asked a simple question that birthed an ambitious vision: “How do you send a payment as easily as you send an email?” Their answer was the Interledger Protocol.
ILP is an open standard for moving money across financial systems, the same way the internet moves data across different networks. A common language that any system could adopt, without having to build from scratch.
The early years were about proving the concept. A 2017 test conducted with the Bank of England demonstrated that the Interledger Protocol could reduce the settlement time for a large cross-border payment from four days to a matter of seconds. The technology worked.
But Stefan understood early that technology alone wouldn’t be enough. Changing the way a global industry moves money would require building a movement and growing an ecosystem of practitioners committed to interoperability and open financial infrastructure.
That realization led to the founding of the Interledger Foundation in 2020, backed by a founding endowment and a mandate to turn a proven protocol into a global standard.
Today, the Interledger Foundation delivers on three areas of work to achieve one mission: that access to financial services is no longer determined by geography, status, or who you bank with.
We steward the Interledger Protocol and Open Payments API, the infrastructure that allows financial systems to connect and money to move freely.
We also build and maintain Rafiki: open-source software that lets regulated institutions connect to the network without building from scratch.
We support the people making digital financial services more open and accessible.
We fund the developers, researchers, educators, and advocates building open financial infrastructure and bringing down the barriers that shut people out, and grow the movement through community events and education programs.
We work with regulators, policymakers, and institutions to make it possible for open financial systems to operate in the real world.
We back public infrastructure for payments, push for new systems to be tested, and advocate to rewrite the rules that decide who takes part.
We focus our work where open infrastructure can do the most good: with mission-driven and regulated financial institutions serving the communities that traditional systems overlook.
Since 2020, we have already deployed $21 million in grants across 271 projects in 42 countries, established itself as a credible voice in international payments policy, and built a global community of developers, thought leaders, and advocates.
The founders remain active as board members, with their conviction in the mission as strong as it was on the day they started.
Interledger brings together people across technology, policy, research, education, and advocacy to make financial systems open, connected, and accessible to all.
