Monthly Report #3 - AgnostiPay

Project Introduction

Hi, there! First of all, Happy new year! This is our third project update after the third month of the Financial Service Research Grant from the Interledger Foundation. The previous two updates can be found here:

With AgnostiPay we are creating a decentralized open-source payment connector middleware that any developer can add to their websites, apps or services - for free. Simultaneously, the AgnostiPay Technology helps the ILP network to ‘fold the outside in’, because it enables every person to be their own on-and-off ramp using their own financial service providers, such as banks and exchanges. In short: we put ILP to work for a large scale audience.

Progress on objectives

Every month we try to update the ILP community with our progress. We hope that sharing our progress in public helps to connect with like-minded individuals across the globe to make our shared ILP vision a reality. Because together is the only way we can truly make this happen. So if you think you can help us, or if you would like more information, don't hesitate to reach out to us directly. Find our socials and contact details at the bottom of this post.

Technical Feasibility Update

Over the last month, we wrote most of the content for our more technical White Paper. This paper describes our architecture and technical considerations. For the writing of our first draft we integrated various new research findings that were gathered by both deeply studying technical papers and writing code. By diving deeper into the underlying content we discovered more challenges in relation to our aim of creating a completely peer-to-peer architecture. For example, in what kind of ways should we standardize the adding of new providers to our client-side technology, taking into consideration the ease of adding new providers and keeping the flexibility to add completely new and structurally different providers. As we must assume that these will arise in future to which AgnostiPay must be adaptive to provide its value as a ‘connector technology’.

When it comes down to actually writing code, we finished the PoC code for a webshop plugin that enables the webshop owner to use their own bank accounts to handle payments directly. We also nearly finished our client-facing mobile app. This is an example mobile app that utilizes AgnostiPay technology and enables the end-user to control their own bank account and transfer money - for example to a webshop - over a draft network based on AgnostiPay principles.

And last but not least, we are currently figuring out the last details of getting the right certificates back on our client-side API integration. This is a multi dependent situation that currently takes our full attention to find a fitting solution. We expect to overcome this hurdle soon and look forward to demonstrating our technology in the upcoming Grantee progress meeting on 18 January.

Developer & Community Engagement

In comparison to the hectic month of November, we lowered the number of interactions and increased the quality of our interactions. This resulted in some interesting things to share. We got some great feedback on our draft Vision Paper from a broad variety of community members, both in and outside the ILP community and our Financial Service grantee cohort. It is inspiring to see all these globally different perspectives sharing their feedback and subsequently their enthusiasm for the AgnostiPay vision.

For the review of our technical White Paper we did slowly build up a list of developers that wanted to review and give feedback on our earliest draft. It's of course great to see that even very seasoned developers already seem to lighten up on our technical conceptual ideas and are enthusiastic to help the open-source project forward. If you are a developer reading this and also want to get early access to the early draft of our technical White Paper, please drop us an email directly or send us a DM via Twitter.

As a regular part of our community engagement section, this month was also filled with some great informal interactions with developers in the Dutch ecosystem. And also during this month, the conversations were yet again great, awesome, and inspiring to enjoy. What stood out is the slow buildup of word-of-mouth communication by developers to share the ideas and what AgnostiPay stands for. This is of course great to hear and motivating for the journey ahead.

Business Engagement

During the December festive season most of this month's attention went to working through and fleshing out the technical components for our Whitepaper and Technical demo. But during this month we were also pinged by new interest in our open-source payment service middleware, from a European Union based Web3 app and a Dutch online marketplace. Subsequently, we had some interesting follow-up conversations with people and organizations we met at the ILP Summit and came across in the previous months. In short, a great way to end the year.

What’s Next: Planning

In the coming month we look forward to sharing our Vision paper and official Grant Progress report publicly. But we are also very excited about continuing to work on and sharing our technical White Paper and working Tech demo with the community. So, once again, if you would like to have early access to the White paper and share your initial feedback with us on our unpolished version, reach out to us and drop us an email. In the meantime, we are looking forward to all the other follow-up conversations planned for this month as we already feel we are starting this year with a head start and looking forward to continuing to ride this wave together!

Want to reach out directly?
Email: connect ‘at’ agnostipay.io

Or follow other our socials here:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/agnostipay
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/agnostipay
Discord: https://discord.gg/bCtM6jCG
ILP community forum: https://community.interledger.org/agnostipay