Rafiki recognized by Digital Public Goods Alliance as digital public good
Rafiki, the open source software stewarded and maintained by the Interledger Foundation, has been reviewed by the Digital Public Goods Alliance and recognized as a digital public good. Its profile is now published in the Digital Public Goods Registry.
Recognition requires a solution to satisfy the DPG Standard, a set of nine indicators covering relevance to the Sustainable Development Goals, use of an approved open license, clear ownership, platform independence, documentation, a mechanism for extracting data, adherence to privacy and applicable data protection laws, adherence to standards and best practices, and design that does no harm. The review of Rafiki involved verification of its codebase and documentation, and an accessibility audit.
Rafiki is built for financial service providers that hold customer funds, including banks, mobile money operators, and digital wallet providers. It gives them a working implementation of the Interledger Protocol and the Open Payments API instead of requiring them to build one from scratch from the specifications. The software includes an Interledger connector, a high-throughput accounting layer, administrative APIs for managing peering relationships and supported assets, and a reference implementation of a GNAP authorization server that handles account holder consent for third-party payment initiation. Rafiki is published freely under the Apache License 2.0.
The World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 reports that 1.3 billion adults still hold no financial account. Where accounts do exist, the ability to move money between providers is often a matter of commercial arrangement more than technical capability. Openly licensed implementations of open specifications change the calculation for a provider deciding whether interoperability is worth the engineering cost.
“Interoperability is usually sold as a feature, priced by whoever controls the rails,” said Briana Marbury, President and CEO of the Interledger Foundation. “Rafiki takes that argument away. Any regulated provider can read the specification, run and integrate the software with their core banking system, and connect to anyone else who has done the same. Recognition as a digital public good tells central banks, regulators, and public procurement officers that this is infrastructure they can evaluate and adopt on their own terms.”
“Passing the review meant showing our work on licensing, documentation, privacy handling, accessibility, and how the software behaves once it is deployed,” said Sabine Schaller, CTO of the Interledger Foundation. “Every one of those is a question a financial service provider integrating Rafiki would eventually ask us anyway. We believe answering them in public makes Rafiki faster to assess and easier to adopt.”
The DPG Registry is used by governments, development agencies, and multilateral institutions when they assess candidate technologies for digital public infrastructure. Listing makes Rafiki discoverable to that audience alongside other reviewed solutions.
About Rafiki
Rafiki is open source software that allows a financial service provider to enable Interledger and Open Payments functionality on its users’ accounts, including sending and receiving payments and granting third parties consented access to initiate payments and view transaction history. Learn more at Rafiki.dev.
About the Digital Public Goods Alliance
The Digital Public Goods Alliance is a multistakeholder initiative, endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General, that works to facilitate the discovery, development, use of and investment in digital public goods. Its stated vision is that by 2030 open, collaborative, multistakeholder efforts will have unlocked the potential of digital public goods to contribute to a more equitable world and to accelerate attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals globally. Learn more at Digitalpublicgoods.net.
