European summer might sound more of a vacation moment, but for our extended Rafiki team, it was the perfect moment to meet and move forward faster on different sides of this project, as there is always a last hurrah going on before each Interledger Summit. From 26 to 30 August 2024, we regrouped in Cluj-Napoca, the heart of Transylvania, Romania in our partner, Breakpoint IT’s offices. A special shout-out to our hosts for the week. Mulțumim!
We were joined by colleagues from La Cámara de la Gente, the People's Clearing House (PCH) in Mexico, from GateHub in Slovenia, and from the Jordan Payments and Clearing Company (JoPACC) - from Jordan!
It was a full week of work, split into the following subjects: Multi-tenant Rafiki, JoPACC Open Payments integration, Rafiki integration documentation, Interledger platforms, and Rafiki performance improvements. Midweek we took a half-day break and spent some time learning about each other's musical skills as a team-building activity.
Each day we started with a stand-up to check on the progress of each project, what had been accomplished, what was left to do, or if there was any team that needed help or to step up more. Of course, priorities changed a bit during the week, when some Cape Town Summit ‘24 needs had to be handled, but for sure being in the same place helped a lot with everything new that landed on the team’s plate.
JoPACC Open Payments integration
As you may have heard in the Interledger Community call, JoPACC and Interledger are collaborating to integrate Rafiki/Open Payments into the Jordanian banking systems. We've been progressing on this project, developing new payment schemes for recurring payments and Web Monetization payments. Additionally, we’ve made further advancements on the OTP (One-Time Passcode) payment consent integration, started deployment, and engaged in more discussions with our team and partners. You'll get the latest updates on this in Cape Town. Looking forward to seeing you there.
Multi-tenant Rafiki
As we continue to advance our partnership with JoPACC, development on Rafiki continues to suit the unique needs of the Jordanian financial sector. Together with Abdallah, who is the CIO at JoPACC, developers at the ILF began a design process to add multi-tenancy to Rafiki. After multiple discussions and requirement-setting, we were able to finalize a design for multi-tenant Rafiki and begin its implementation. This feature will allow a Rafiki instance to manage multiple tenants, each with their own supported currencies and Open Payments resources. This enables JoPACC’s ambitions to enable Interledger and Open Payments capabilities for multiple banks and will enable similar use cases with other partners.
PCH Integration & Documentation
One of the main goals of our work with PCH is for Rafiki to enable the cross-border flow of funds from a sender in the United States (US) to a recipient in Mexico, including those who have an account with a rural community bank. Together with five members of PCH, we discussed several outstanding requirements that the PCH x Rafiki integration has, and what could be done in Rafiki to meet those needs. Some of the key topics covered were:
- Expand incoming payment processing such that regulatory requirements can be met
- Define how Rafiki could handle and send know-you-customer (KYC) data for transactions in the future
- Discuss how a Rafiki node could handle a status update about a transfer if the Rafiki node had already marked the transfer as complete. We had an interesting debate about the possibility of supporting these notification updates on the play wallet, https://rafiki.money.
As a result, we have a few new issues on the project board, and some PRs have already been merged in the Rafiki repo, thanks to contributions from the PCH developers. Next steps for the PCH integration are setting up the environment for production deployment, and preparations for the 2024 Interledger Summit.
Finally, one of our tech writers, Mohammed, spent time with the PCH team for a deep dive into some of the hurdles the PCH developers faced deploying Rafiki as part of the project’s larger solution architecture. This has been invaluable for us to learn how to improve and add clarity to our documentation for integrators. (Max)
Rafiki Integrator Documentation
Our first order of business was to study a comprehensive document shared with us by the PCH team about setting up their Rafiki developer sandbox. We quickly learned that when Rafiki gets integrated into a larger payments architecture, the integrator has to make decisions about the infrastructure for the solution. Some of the infrastructure decisions directly impact aspects of how Rafiki gets deployed.
For example, the steps for on-premise deployments will differ from cloud-hosted deployments. We also realized that an integrator’s deployment steps could intersperse infrastructure configuration with configuration for Rafiki.
These lessons are helping us expand our documentation for future Rafiki integrators to include more contextualized examples, including key decisions, and using specific tools for a Rafiki deployment.
Interledger Platforms
During the recent work week, the official handover of the website and documentation sites took place from Hui Jing to Sarah. The week primarily focused on upskilling and onboarding, with an emphasis on building knowledge rather than producing immediately visible results. Sarah successfully got Drupal running locally. This process was made much smoother thanks to Hui Jing's excellent documentation and her comprehensive interledger.org wiki (https://github.com/interledger/interledger.org-v4/wiki). A few updates were made, including adding new buttons to improve navigation between the technical and foundation blogs, along with some minor tweaks. The most significant progress was the initiation of the Inteledger Summit schedule design, which is now advancing into the development phase.
Performance Improvements
The team started by walking through the high-level architecture to get everyone on par. We quickly moved to adding measurements in critical points of the software, trying to load the system, and analyzing where the performance issues were found and how the system would break. A few caching opportunities and optimizations were achieved, and the team was able to increase the performance of the system in some specific areas. In the end, the plan is to continue identifying quick performance wins and in parallel discuss the overall architecture with the objective of increasing its long-term performance and scalability.
Replacing Rapyd with GateHub for the Test Wallet
Initially, our goal was to reskin the Fynbos wallet with the Test Wallet branding for hackathons and workshops, because the current Test Wallet faces rate-limiting issues with Rapyd, making it difficult to transfer play money when multiple users access it. During the work week, the focus shifted. Instead of rebranding the Fynbos wallet, we decided to focus on the Test Wallet and replace Rapyd with GateHub to avoid the rate-limiting problems. With the switch to GateHub, key wallet functions will be handled by their services:
- KYC: GateHub Onboarding
- Deposits/Withdrawals: GateHub Ramp
Since with GateHub we won’t run into the same rate limiting issues, we’ll also remove the custom Web Monetization wallet addresses implementation.
On Friday, we organized an impromptu speakers session, as many of our engineers will present at the Interledger Summit. It will be a full week of different events and celebrations in Cape Town, South Africa. We start it with a Hackathon that you are invited to participate in! During the week, we will be at the meetup organized by Cape Town Software Dev Group. And we close the week with the Summit, where we hope you can attend either in person or following online. It was such a great opportunity to get feedback from the group, to share best practices, and to have a small but mighty stage to rehearse, as some of the engineers will be doing this for the first time.
We closed the week with some demos where we could see the progress of all groups.
As we are open source, you can easily check our work on GitHub. If the work mentioned here inspired you, we welcome your contributions. You can join our community slack or participate in the next community call, which takes place each second wednesday of the month.
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A big mulțumesc to our hosts, BreakpointIT (Cristina & team) and our amazing colleagues that joined the work week and also wrote this blog post together. Kudos to our Engineers: Radu Popa, Hui Jing Chen, Sarah Jones, Pedro Barreto, Arpad Lengyel, Jason Bruwer, Max Kurapov, Blair Currey, Beniamin Munteanu, Bogdan Sandu, Dragos Palade,Tadej Golobic, Nathan Lie, oru tech writters Melissa Henderson, Mohammed Islam, and Bradley Dow, executive assistant Erika Keresztes, project manager Matseliso Thabane, product manager Rabeb Othmani, our engineering managers Sabine Schaller, Timea Nagy, and Ioana Chiorean, and our CTO, Alex Lakatos.
We are happy to have met our friends from PCH: Roberto Carlos Cruz Villalba, Emanuel, Palestino Hernandez, Diana Laura Acosta Sebastian, Mario Antonio Ayala Ruiz, Roberto Valdovinos and from JoPACC: Abdallah Mohammad.
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