Quarterly Grant Reports & Updates Roundup

This quarter brings nine grant reports and three new grantee introductions, spanning university classrooms, cooperative banking in Nepal, Colombian instant payments, open-source developer tooling, and global payments policy. One project, Bridgy Fed, has completed its grant. Each summary below links to the full post on the Interledger Community site.

NextGen Higher Education

Benedict College: ILP Pathways

Chantil Wright Galloway · Read the progress report (opens in a new tab)

Benedict College, a historically Black college in Columbia, South Carolina, is building a three-tier model: twelve students (the “Benedict 12”) learn Interledger and Open Payments, then consult with 15 to 20 minority-owned local businesses and mentor 60 youth at a summer camp. The cohort has been selected and the FinTech course, BA 439, is approved for Spring 2027. Aligning with the academic calendar was the main hurdle, so the camp moves to June–July 2027 under a no-cost extension to September 1, 2027. All curriculum will be released under CC BY 4.0 for other HBCUs to reuse.

Western Sydney University: Next-Gen Secure FinTech for Digital Financial Inclusion

Farnaz Farid · Read the progress report (opens in a new tab)

Three milestones are complete. An Open Day booth on 5 July 2026 drew an estimated 100 to 150 visitors, with Pepper the social robot and a Minecraft demo explaining Interledger. An eight-week professional development curriculum prepared cybersecurity and business students, and a hackathon on 26 August brought around 50 participants together to prototype AI-powered, inclusive payment solutions. Student microgrants, a FinTech Career Day, an annual conference and an open-source learning hub are next.

Covenant University: Open Payments Curriculum

Jonathan Oluranti · Read the progress report (opens in a new tab)

Covenant launched two Open Payments courses (four modules, sixty learning units) and selected 35 students from about 253 applicants across computing, business and economics. After an Innovation Week and Demo Day, microgrants funded six teams, and five have deployed working ILP prototypes. Next up: a campus-wide hackathon and, in November, what the team describes as Nigeria’s first Open Payments conference.

Digital Financial Services

Fliqa: Second Interim Project Report

Ela Oblak · Read the progress report (opens in a new tab)

In months 5 to 8, Interledger became a payment method Fliqa users can actually choose: the payment dialog was rebuilt with direct provider selection, upfront fee display and validated Payment Pointer entry, and an ILF Sandbox lets partners test the flow end to end. The biggest milestone was a first sandbox payment on Bre-B, Colombia’s instant payment system, opening a path to offer domestic and ILP payments side by side at checkout. The team also published a detailed assessment of Colombia’s regulatory landscape, flagging savings-and-credit cooperatives as a key underserved group. UAE work remains paused due to regional conditions.

Nepal Internet Foundation: Nepal Interledger Financial Network (NIFN)

Nepal Internet Foundation · Read the progress report (opens in a new tab)

NIFN is connecting Nepal’s cooperatives to a shared Rafiki-based rail. Core wallet and cooperative workflows are built, the platform is deployed on dedicated servers, and fund transfers have run through Planet Earth CBS in a live test environment, with Chanakya and Finacle integrations progressing. iOS and Android wallet apps are in alpha testing, and a bilingual AI knowledge assistant is live. Five orientation programs reached around 140 cooperative participants, and new MoUs with AltPayNet and Denmark-based Hamal Consulting extend NIFN toward cross-border payments and remittances.

Grant for the Web

Bridgy Fed (A New Social): Final Report

Ryan Barrett · Read the final report (opens in a new tab)

The project is complete. Bridgy Fed, which bridges ActivityPub, ATProto and the web, now carries Web Monetization across networks, and the team worked with the Lexicon Community to standardize a shared Web Monetization lexicon for ATProto. The at://work platform has already adopted it, and some ActivityPub developers have begun their own integrations. A New Social is a volunteer-run non-profit and welcomes support.

SDK Grantees

Ruby Language Support for Kiota

Andrea Peruffo · Read the progress report (opens in a new tab)

Two of three months in, a full Open Payments payment now runs end to end using only Kiota-generated Ruby clients, with a public demo repository. Across 29 merged upstream pull requests, the Ruby runtime gems were consolidated and released as 0.24.0, and integration-test suppressions dropped from 15 to 1. Text, Form and Multipart serialization moves to the final month, along with docs and a proposal to promote Ruby from Experimental to Preview.

Supporting GNAP as a Security Scheme in OpenAPI

Chris Wood · Read the progress report (opens in a new tab)

The work has broadened: rather than adding GNAP to OpenAPI directly, Chris submitted a proposal on September 25 for a standalone OpenAPI Security Specification that decouples security from the core spec. GNAP support is behind the original schedule, but once the proposal is agreed it should come together quickly and benefit open banking bodies and the OpenID Foundation as well. He presented progress at Apidays London on October 1.

Policy Activation

AllianceDFA: Questioning IPS Design Inclusivity

Sarah Corley · Read the report (opens in a new tab)

AllianceDFA and Contigo Global ran 17 focus groups across Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia on why fintechs and non-banks struggle to join domestic instant payment systems. The peer-reviewed assessment (opens in a new tab) was published in May and added to FinDev Gateway’s knowledge bank. Its launch included six local events and a global webinar on June 18 with 303 registrations from 57 countries, and all three deliverables are met.

Meet the New Open Payments Accelerator Grantees

Kavodax: Open, Standards-Based Cross-Border Payments Using Stablecoins

Gharsa Amin · Read the intro (opens in a new tab)

Toronto-based Kavodax runs a cross-border payment orchestration layer live in 70+ countries, with balances in USDC, USDT and its own CAD-backed stablecoin, CAGD. The team wants to prove that an outside platform with no prior relationship can resolve a Kavodax wallet address and complete a full payment using only Open Payments, replacing one-off bilateral integrations for corridors like Africa and Latin America.

Wava: Connecting Latin America’s Domestic Payment Rails

Carlos Agudelo · Read the intro (opens in a new tab)

Wava builds collections and disbursement tools on local rails in Colombia and Peru. Its accelerator project tests one corridor: a customer in Peru pays with a local QR method, Open Payments handles addressing, quoting and clearing between two Rafiki nodes, and the merchant receives Colombian pesos. The goal is interoperability that sits on top of national rails without asking them to change.

ShujaaPay: Happy, Open Payments-Native Content Hosting

Rewel Mumbo · Read the intro (opens in a new tab)

Nairobi-based ShujaaPay is tackling a gap for African creators: global platforms rely on credit cards, while most Kenyans pay with M-Pesa. Its Happy Portal lets supporters unlock content for as little as KES 20, routed over Interledger and settled instantly to the creator’s M-Pesa wallet. The team already runs a self-hosted Rafiki connector and plans to open-source reusable signing, GNAP and mobile-money tooling.

How You Can Help

Several grantees asked the community for specific support. If you can help with any of these, reach out through the linked report.