We are thrilled to announce that today the Interledger Foundation is officially launched and that the Grant for the Web program is proudly a part of this new open web charitable nonprofit organization.
Our mission is to steward and advocate for Interledger, an open protocol that permits frictionless payments and micropayments across currencies and ledgers, resulting in opportunities for broader global financial inclusion. Although the creators of the internet knew that it was important to incorporate digital payments natively into its infrastructure, a web-native payments feature is still “reserved for future use” according to its 402 error code. As a result, the gap has been filled over the last 30 years with closed, fee-based and siloed payment networks, which have helped accelerate the financial exclusion of the world's 1.7 billion unbanked people. Simultaneously, predatory revenue models such as programmatic advertising and data tracking, combined with the high cost of serving mobile ads, prevent millions from participating in digital creator economies. By using an open payments network in which anyone can seamlessly earn, buy, sell, trade and share, the Interledger Foundation will build equitable pathways to financial access and digital participation.
"The Interledger Foundation aims to bring global awareness to this amazing technology," said Interledger Foundation Executive Director Briana Marbury (read her inaugural blog here). "And the potential impact would be life-changing for one-third of the world’s population. By fostering the interoperability of formerly siloed networks and providing alternatives to traditional earning models on the web, the Interledger Protocol has the power to greatly advance financial inclusion and uplift the lives of billions in the process."
As new content, video or gaming platforms emerge, they create ways to financially support their artists. For example, creators, like Grant for the Web media artist Annie Berman, Director of The Faithful, are using the Coil-enabled web monetized video platform Cinnamon to stage films worldwide, enabling ticket holders to get access to special bonus events and monetize viewing revenue in terms of hours watched. The Puma Browser, the first browser to natively support the Web Monetization standard using Interledger, enables direct value transfer between content and game creators and their fans, creating a great alternative to ads.
“The Interledger Foundation and Grant for the Web are dedicated to driving financial inclusion by supporting innovators that have historically been excluded as leaders in emergent technologies. Open payment networks on the web can decentralize the privilege associated with monetizing content and we are excited to build a community of web advocates, creators and publishers who are developing powerful solutions to control who benefits from the distribution of their work,” said Chris Lawrence, Senior Program Manager, Grant for the Web, Interledger Foundation.
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About Interledger and Web Monetization
Interledger is an open source technology that can send payments across different networks, regardless of currency or platform. Interledger is built based on the same principles of the internet that move small packets of data from one network to another at a very high speed and low cost; instead of moving data, Interledger moves currency. Developed through broad collaboration under the W3C, the Web Monetization feature of the Interledger Protocol is a proposed W3C standard that provides a simple way to transfer very small micropayments across the internet, all the way down to $0.0001, or one ten thousand of one cent.
About the Interledger Foundation
The Interledger Foundation’s vision is a world where anyone can seamlessly earn, share, buy, sell and trade with anyone else on the web. To achieve its mission of global financial inclusion, the Interledger Foundation operates as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization to maintain and advance Interledger as a public good in service of financial inclusion. Any bank, provider, government office or other entity can freely use Interledger when designing inclusive payment systems. Creators, developers or organizations can apply to the Foundation’s Grant for the Web program to fund their Web Monetization initiatives. To learn more about the Interledger Foundation, visit https://interledger.org/ and follow Interledger on Twitter, LinkedIn and Slack.