The Interledger Community 🌱

Interledger Community Call: PCH Mexico | 10 June 2026

Vineel R. Pindi — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:44:09 +0000

Join us for our May Interledger Community Call on 10 June 2026!

The Interledger community calls shall be once a month, on the second Wednesday of each month.

Deeper Look: People's Clearinghouse (PCH)

For June’s community call, we will have the People's Clearinghouse (PCH) team sharing a deeper look into their project.

About People's Clearinghouse (PCH):

People's Clearinghouse (PCH) is a digital payments platform designed to interconnect community banks and savings cooperatives in Mexico, among themselves, with the national financial system, and with international networks for account-deposited remittances. Built on the basis of open-source technology (Rafiki, Mojaloop, ILP), PCH is led by the Mexican Association of Social Sector Credit Unions (AMUCSS), an organization with four decades of experience building community-owned financial institutions in rural and indigenous regions. By routing remittances directly into community bank accounts rather than into cash, PCH aims to create a virtuous cycle: more local capital, more credit for productive projects, less inequality, and less forced migration.

People's Clearinghouse — ILF Grant Final Report

Roberto Valdovinos for The People's Clearinghouse ・ Mar 31

#finalreports

Open Payments Month and Open Payments Accelerator:

Open Payments Month (June 1 - June 30)

What is Open Payments Learning Month?

Thirty days of hands-on, self-paced learning to take you from knowing that Open Payments exists to running your first transaction running in the test environment. The program includes live talks and sessions throughout the month. The time commitment is flexible, though we recommend a minimum of 6 to 10 hours total over the course of the month. It’s completely free and starts on June 1.

Open Payments Accelerator Launch The Open Payments Accelerator grant program supports early-stage founders and developers building digital financial services for underserved communities, helping them move from idea to Proof of Concept (PoC) through 4 months of intense mentorship and funding.

Our goal is to lower barriers for innovators, grow a pipeline of Interledger-enabled solutions, and bring more people into accessible, interoperable financial systems.

Timeline: Applications opens on Monday, June 1, 2026 and closes on Tuesday, June 30, 2026 (11:59 PM EDT)

Time:

Agenda and Meeting Minutes:

Public note-taking document here.

Meeting joining info:

Community call meeting joining info

Have questions or need help? Join us on Slack here.

The Currency of Community: Finance, Culture, and What Comes Next

Kokayi Walker — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:14:44 +0000

When I was first asked about working on the Future Money podcast, I wanted to know where we wanted to go and what we wanted to say. Shoutout to Lawil and all the amazing interviews she conducted. This podcast explores the intersections of technology, finance, and culture, but as we reimagine and expand the ideas and applications of finance, we must recognize that financial exchange occurs far beyond traditional banking systems, investment spaces, or fintech conversations.

As we look ahead, the idea of value becomes a foundational tenet in finance. Value moves through communities every day in the form of trust, labor, access, creativity, education, wellness, social networks, and cultural participation. As technology continues to reshape the world around us, Future Money is expanding its lens to examine how these exchanges operate across industries that may not immediately see themselves connected to digital finance, interoperable payments, or economic innovation, but absolutely are.

These conversations have started with Blaze Group's Casey Diké, a strategic partner at ILF working on strategic finance programs with HBCU’s, CDFIs, banks, and financial institutions, Modi Oyewole, co-founder of swang, a community first organization addressing barriers to entry in golf, who is redefining what access, inclusion, and ownership can look like in historically marginalized spaces and most recently with Kristina Newman-Scott, Vice President of Arts at Knight Foundation, about the role culture, creativity, and community investment play in shaping sustainable futures.

We’ve also stepped out of the studio to extend our reach directly into communities and global conversations around financial innovation. During interviews conducted at the Interledger Summit in Mexico City, we spoke with a range of innovators, technologists, organizers, and builders working across the financial technology ecosystem. Those conversations reinforced something we have long believed: the future of finance is not only about tools or platforms, but about people and how we assign value while examining cultural understanding, accessibility, and trust.

While the world becomes increasingly connected through technology, it is also becoming more siloed through cultural fragmentation, uneven access, and institutional barriers. Because of this, the language surrounding resources, money, community, and interoperability must evolve alongside the technology itself.

So we’re absolutely looking at the Future of Money, while examining the past and present, through the stories. We’re being intentional about direct community outreach, deeper interdisciplinary dialogue, and bringing in guests whose work reflects how financial systems intersect with everyday life. The podcast will continue to spotlight founders, creatives, technologists, artists, organizers, and thinkers who are building new pathways toward empowerment and self-sovereignty, especially for underserved and underbanked communities. More than ever, we are interested in exploring how value is created, shared, protected, and transformed across every sector imaginable. We are incredibly excited to continue this work, expand these conversations, and build a platform that reflects the complexity, creativity, and possibilities of the future unfolding before us.

I’m excited about where we can go and want to thank Chris, Ayesha, and Briana for rocking with me. Until we talk again
K

See all our latest episodes,

S2:E1 Casey Ariel
S2:E2 Voices from the Interledger Summit
S2:E3 Modi Oyewole
S2:S4 Kristina Newman-Scott

Listen to all full episodes of the Future Money Podcast here or on YouTube.

Our Slack channel is a great place to build new connections, ask questions and stay up to date with the latest news.

Join our monthly community call

My Learnings from Running a Technical Activity for our ILF Community

Bibi — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:35:53 +0000

This is an honest reflection on my first community experiment.

A few weeks ago, I wrapped up something I call a "Learning Month" inside the Interledger Foundation community. The idea was simple: instead of pointing people at our documentation and hoping for the best, what if we created a structured, week-by-week learning journey together? A guided experience that built on itself, starting from the basics and working toward something more advanced.

Rafiki felt like the right place to start, it's one of ILF's core open-source projects.

So I designed a five-week program, shared curated resources every week in our Slack community, and watched what happened. Here's what I found.

The ILF Community Is Not One Audience

Before I get into the data, I want to name something that makes community work at ILF uniquely complex: our community is not a single audience, we have about 5 different personas within our audience.

On one end, we have deeply technical contributors, open-source developers, and engineers who can read a code and immediately orient themselves.

On the other, we have CEOs, policy folks, and ecosystem partners who are interested in the what and the why but have no intention of spinning up a Docker container.

I knew this going in. What I didn't fully anticipate was how sharply that divide would show up in the analytics.

How the Learning Month Was Structured

The five weeks were designed to follow a natural progression:

Week 1 kicked off with high-level conceptual content: what Rafiki is, where it fits in the Interledger ecosystem, and how it relates to the broader protocol.
Week 2 went deeper into core concepts: payment pointers, Open Payments, and Rafiki's double-entry accounting model.
Week 3 shifted into hands-on territory: spinning up a local playground, Docker Compose deployment, and environment configuration.
Week 4 covered peering and liquidity, which is fairly advanced operational knowledge.
Week 5 closed with architecture deep-dives and a path to contributing to the Rafiki repo on GitHub.

Each week ended with an open invitation for feedback, and the whole series wrapped up with a live Rafiki Community Call.

What the Data Said

The #rafiki channel grew from 194 to 299 members over the course of the month. That alone felt like a signal the activity was worth doing. But the more interesting story was in the page analytics.

The pattern was consistent and pretty telling: Concepts performed well. Execution did not.

Week 1 and 2 were the strongest by far, the early resources were conceptual and far from code. The Open Payments concepts page saw a +68% lift in traffic. The accounting page was up +32%. People were reading, exploring, and engaging with the ideas.

Then Week 3 arrived, and we hit a wall. The local playground page dropped 34%. The Docker Compose deployment page dropped 30%. Week 4's liquidity content was largely flat. Week 5, which focused on contributing to GitHub, resulted in zero new pull requests.
The drop-off wasn't gradual, it was a cliff and I felt the free fall.

What I Think It Means

My honest read: the community that showed up for Rafiki Learning Month was less technical than what I had prepared for.

One signal I received was that a lot of people want to understand Rafiki, but not all are ready to run it. Designing five weeks of content that assumed increasing technical readiness probably lost a meaningful chunk of the audience right around week three.

That said, I'm cautious about over-indexing on one month of data. It could be a coincidence... It could be timing. I'm reading the signals, not drawing conclusions in permanent ink.

What I feel more confident about: five weeks is probably too long. Engagement was highest at the start and I suspect a tighter, three or four-week format would hold attention better and end before the drop-off has a chance to happen.

The Hard Part: Getting a Pulse on a Segmented Community

One of the trickiest things about running community programming for a mixed community is that you often don't know who's actually in the room.

When someone clicks a link in Slack, I can see the page view. What I can't easily see is whether that person is a developer trying to understand ILP packet flow or an executive who just wants a plain-language answer to "what does Rafiki actually do?" Without that context, it's really hard to know whether your content is landing or just... passing through.

This is a common problem in developer relations and open-source community work. Communities are rarely homogeneous and most analytics tools aren't built to tell you who is engaging, only that someone did.

One thing I'm planning to experiment with in the next Learning Month is parallel content tracks. One track focused on the technical folks, and one for those who aren’t.

What I'll Do Differently

Use UTM parameters from day one. Tracking engagement through page analytics alone made it hard to understand the full user journey. Next time, I'll tag every link with UTM parameters so I can see exactly where traffic is coming from and how people are moving through the content.

Keep the video format. Posts that combined a short video summary with curated resources consistently outperformed text-only updates. It's more work, but it's clearly worth it. People prefer to consume different types of content, some enjoy reading, some prefer visual accompaniment.

Think harder about the technical curve. If the community is mixed, the content structure needs to reflect that. Maybe that means parallel tracks, or being more explicit upfront about who each week is designed for.

Explore gamification. This one is still just an idea, but I keep coming back to it. What if there were real incentives for completing the series? Swag, community recognition, something that made finishing feel rewarding?

The Signals That Mattered Most

Beyond the page data, a few things happened that I found genuinely exciting.

A conversation that grew out of Learning Month connected us to ILF's Grants team in a way that hadn't happened before. And a community member who engaged throughout the month, is now presenting his own Rafiki project at the next Community Call.

Those aren't metrics. But they're exactly the kind of outcomes that make a community activity feel worthwhile.

What's Next

For our next Learning Month, we’re going full steam with Open Payments. This ties into our upcoming hackathon in late 2026 and will be a fantastic opportunity for those interested in grasping key concepts early on.

To learn more or chat with me directly, join us on Slack.

Catch y'all next time!!

Safeguarding financial data, empowering civil society — ILF Grant Progress Report

Michael Caster — Thu, 07 May 2026 07:34:17 +0000

Brief Project Description

Authorities in closed societies have increasingly employed financial lawfare to restrict civil society access to needed resources, amounting to an undue interference with their freedom of expression and association. This has adversely affected both national and diaspora civil society actors, sometimes magnified through tactics of financial transnational repression. This project sets out to create a knowledge base on relevant laws and policies affecting financial institutions and digital payment companies handling of sensitive user data, and to enhance the capacity of target civil society and payment companies to improve civil society financial resilience and payment company rights-based due diligence.

Project Update

To date, we have completed a detailed legal analysis of relevant financial and data privacy regulations in the United States and United Kingdom, identified as the prevailing registered location for leading target payment companies. In addition, we have completed a significant draft of target company policies focused on user data handling. The legal and policy analyses are valuable outputs in their own right, but will primarily inform the development of a targeted manual for civil society actors in relevant jurisdictions to better understand their rights and risks in setting up and managing relevant payment platform accounts. A first draft of the manual has been completed and is currently being reviewed through a tiered consultation.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

While we are progressing well and have had positive feedback from the target community, the project is at an interim point of output creation whereby more substantive impact has not yet been measured. We look forward to the final outputs and more in depth engagement and evaluation of impact.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

The original proposal outlined legal and policy analyses, which are nearly completed. We are also nearing a final draft of the practical manual we set out to produce. The proposal also outlines the creation of recommendations to digital payment platforms, which will be informed by the legal and policy analyses and tiered consultation. This has not begun yet but will start next month. We especially look forward to sharing the output for digital payment platforms with the Interledger Community and hope it may likewise be helpful in their own research or advocacy on rights-based policies at digital financial institutions.

Communications and Marketing

We have not disseminated outputs in public yet, as this will come with the final outputs at the end of the project. But look forward to sharing and receiving community input at that time.

What’s Next?

Over May and June we will be working with the project team and external tiered consultation participants to finalize the project materials. We are looking forward to the final outputs release and the ability to hopefully move onto a second stage with more targeted capacity building and advocacy around these issues.

Community Support

We are eager to learn more about what others are doing!

Additional Comments

Relevant Links/Resources (optional)

Nepal Interledger Financial Network

Nepal Internet Foundation — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:21:40 +0000

Brief Project Description

Nepal Interledger Financial Network (NIFN) is a non-profit initiative led by the Nepal Internet Foundation to enable interoperability across Nepal’s fragmented digital payment ecosystem. It connects underserved Type C cooperatives to modern digital finance using the Interledger Protocol. By developing a middleware layer compatible with ISO 8583 and integrating with the Rafiki platform, NIFN allows seamless, low-cost transactions between previously disconnected and isolated systems. The project focuses on financial inclusion, enabling millions of cooperative members to send and receive money and merchant payments across banking and financial institutions (BFIs) efficiently, securely, and in real time.

Project Update

Nepal Interledger Financial Network (NIFN) project is progressing steadily and remains on track with its overall timeline. During this period, the focus has been on building a strong technical foundation while also engaging closely with cooperative and BFI partners.

On the technical side, NIF has made good progress in developing the middleware system and initiating integration with the Interledger (Rafiki) platform. The system is currently in the testing and simulation phase, where we are validating how transactions will work across different institutions. While this has been a complex process, especially bridging ISO 8583 with ILP and other protocols, the team has been able to manage it well with expert support, service and continuous iteration.

A major highlight has been the trust and interest shown by cooperatives and BFIs. Through field visits, training, workshop sessions, and one-on-one face-to-face meetings, we have signed MoUs with 13 cooperatives who are willing to participate in the pilot. These engagements have not only helped us refine the system based on real needs but also built confidence among stakeholders.

One of the challenges we faced was varying levels of digital understanding and financial literacy among cooperative members, especially in semi-urban and rural areas. To address these issues, we took a more practical, orientation-first approach, focusing on clear communication rather than technical complexity.

Overall, the project is now moving from installation and integration to development toward pilot implementation, which will be a key milestone in the next phase.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

Nepal Interledger Financial Network (NIFN) is designed to create meaningful impact by improving access to digital financial services for underserved and often excluded access to finance communities in Nepal. Its primary target audience includes members of cooperatives and, simultaneously, other BFIs, which collectively serve millions of people, particularly those in semi-urban and rural areas who have limited access to formal banking systems.

Intended and Emerging Impact:

NIFN enables interoperability between previously disconnected cooperative systems, allowing members to send and receive money across institutions, merchant payments easily, securely, and at low cost. This directly improves financial inclusion, reduces dependency on cash-based transactions, and increases efficiency in local economies.

Target Beneficiaries:
• Women and Girls: A large proportion of cooperative members in Nepal are women, especially in savings and credit groups. By enabling easier access to digital finance, NIFN supports women’s financial independence and decision-making power.
• Rural and Marginalized Communities: Many cooperative members come from underserved regions with limited digital infrastructure. NIFN helps bridge this gap by connecting them to modern financial systems.
• Low-income and Informal Sector Workers: These groups benefit from affordable and accessible financial transactions without needing traditional banking access.
• Other marginalized groups: Including socially and economically disadvantaged communities who rely on cooperatives as their primary financial institutions.

Alignment with Interledger Foundation Mission:

NIFN aligns its mission with the Interledger Foundation by creating open, reliable, and secure digital financial systems using the Interledger Protocol. The project is not just creating new technology (middleware that connects ISO 8583 with ILP) but also raising awareness, building skills, and encouraging the use of open and secure payment systems among local financial institutions.

By combining technical innovation with community engagement, NIFN is helping create a more inclusive, connected, and equitable digital financial ecosystem in Nepal.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

Platform Development

NIFN platform development has made strong progress during this reporting period, focusing on building an open, secure, and interoperable financial infrastructure that connects Nepal’s cooperative and BFIs systems with the Interledger Protocol. The team has completed key foundational work in system integration, architecture design, and system integration testing, while also preparing the infrastructure for real-world deployment and pilot implementation with partner cooperatives and BFIs.

Key technical achievements include:

Initiation and partial completion of Rafiki API integration, enabling ILP-based payment routing.
Development of a middleware translation layer implementing ISO 8583 message formatting to ensure compatibility with existing Nepali financial institution systems (cooperatives, BFIs).
Architecture design finalized for the cloud-native deployment environment using Docker/Kubernetes for scalability and data sovereignty.
Integration of a PostgreSQL-backed ledger system for reliable data storage, double-entry accounting, and liquidity tracking.
Security layer defined and development commenced, ensuring atomic transaction processing.
Partnered with Silverlining Pvt. Ltd. to host our ISO-aligned Rafiki node in a production-ready cloud environment with full stack Data Center and Disaster Recovery (DC/DR) capabilities, supporting a smooth transition from SIT to pilot deployment.

The platform is currently in Phase 1 as outlined in the NIFN phased roadmap. Development is progressing on schedule toward a controlled pilot involving cooperative and BFIs institutions for domestic transfers.

Community Outreach

NIFN has carried out active grassroots outreach to build awareness and understanding of the Interledger Protocol and the potential of open, secure, interoperable digital finance among cooperative and BFI stakeholders.

Community Engagement Highlights

Training Session 1 – Hetauda, Makawanpur (Ward No. 2, 17–18 April 2026): A two-day field engagement was held at Hotel Samana, Hetauda, combining an orientation program with a Detailed Requirements Gathering (DRG) session. Around 15 representatives from 10 cooperatives participated in focused technical, operational, and compliance discussions, helping to map real operation, system needs, and integration challenges.
Discussion Session – Chabahil, Kathmandu (Ward No. 7): A community leaders outreach discussion was conducted in the Kathmandu Valley, Ward No. 7, with the ward chairperson targeting cooperative members and financial stakeholders to introduce the NIFN model and its role in enabling interoperable digital payments.
Stakeholder Engagement – Lalitpur: Direct discussions were held with the leadership of WEAN Cooperative, Mahalaxmi Sthan, Lagankhel, to present the NIFN framework and assess institutional readiness for onboarding.
Executive-Level Consultations: One-to-one face-to-face meetings were conducted with CEOs, executive directors, board members, and senior managers of target cooperatives. These meetings focused on explaining the NIFN with Interledger protocol value proposition, addressing operational and compliance concerns, and exploring practical pathways for integration.

Overall, these engagements have helped build trust, clarify technical expectations and compliance issues, and strengthen the foundation for upcoming pilot implementation with cooperative and other BFI partners.

Partnerships Established and agreements:

NIFN has made significant progress in formalizing partnerships with cooperatives, BFIs and technology partners, which will serve as the primary participants for the Phase 1 pilot. These engagements are a critical step in building trust and ensuring real-world readiness of the Interledger-based interoperability model. During the Hetauda field visit, as well as subsequent engagements in Kathmandu and Lalitpur, Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) were actively pursued with cooperative stakeholders to formalize their commitment to the NIFN network and its shared vision of interoperable digital finance.

Nepal Internet Foundation operates NIFN as a neutral, non-commercial initiative, ensuring that all partnerships align with national digital transformation priorities. This includes alignment with the Digital Nepal Framework and Nepal’s Financial Inclusion Roadmap. The approach emphasizes collaboration, transparency, and long-term sustainability, positioning cooperatives as active partners in building an inclusive and interoperable financial ecosystem for Nepal.

Activity / Milestone	Status	Progress Summary / Notes
Rafiki ILP API Integration	In Progress	Core integration is underway; ISO 8583 middleware currently being developed to enable interoperability
ISO 8583 Middleware Development	In Progress	Message translation layer under development and testing to bridge legacy banking systems with ILP
Platform Architecture Finalized	Completed	Cloud-native architecture (Docker & Kubernetes) finalized and approved for deployment
Community Orientation — Hetauda	Completed	Engagement with 10 cooperatives (~20 participants); Digital Readiness & Governance (DRG) session conducted
Community Outreach — Chabahil, Kathmandu	Completed	Awareness and onboarding session conducted with local cooperative stakeholders
Community Outreach — WEAN Cooperative, Lalitpur	Completed	Executive-level stakeholder engagement successfully completed
MoU Negotiations with Cooperatives	In Progress	13 cooperatives across Hetauda, Kathmandu, and Lalitpur engaged; agreements in finalization stage
Executive-level Stakeholder Meetings	Completed	Meetings conducted with CEOs, Board Members, and Senior Management
Team Mobilization (10 staff + 2 consultants)	Completed	Full project team operational since late January 2026
Project Website Launched	Completed	Official website launched and publicly accessible

Communications and Marketing

During this initial implementation phase, NIFN has taken a focused and relationship-driven approach to communications, prioritizing trust-building and technical clarity over strong partnership. The team has intentionally avoided major public announcements at this stage, as the project is still in development and undergoing internal SIT and UAT and pilot preparation with cooperators and partners.

Instead, communication efforts have been centered on direct engagement with stakeholders, including cooperatives, financial institutions, and technical partners. These interactions have focused on explaining the Interledger-based model, addressing operational concerns, and ensuring a clear understanding of the system before public rollout.

As part of foundational communication infrastructure, the official NIFN website has been developed to provide a central information hub about the project, its objectives, and its progress. This will serve as the primary platform for future outreach and public communication.

Looking ahead, NIFN plans to transition into a broader communications and marketing phase after successful completion of pilot testing. A “big bang” launch strategy will be implemented at that stage to publicly showcase the results, scale awareness, and support wider adoption across Nepal’s cooperative and financial ecosystem.

What’s Next?

For the next phase of implementation, the NIFN team will focus on completing core system development and conducting system integrations test (SIT) with in a controlled live pilot. This stage is critical in moving from technical validation to real-world usage with cooperative partners, in line with the approved grant work plan.

Key Planned Activities

Complete full setup and configuration of the ILP integration environment, including the Rafiki stack and ISO 8583 middleware.
Finalize middleware translator logic and ensure full ISO 8583 compliance across all test scenarios.
Execute Proof of Concept (POC) for end-to-end ILP-based transactions between ILP (NIFN), a wallet, and a cooperative in a controlled environment.
Conduct System Integration Testing (SIT) to validate interoperability, data integrity, and compliance across all system components.
Carry out User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with cooperative partners to gather feedback from real operational scenarios
Complete onboarding preparations and technical integration mapping for all MOUs signed cooperatives.
Technical and operational training will be provided to cooperative staff, along with user guidelines, SOPs, and onboarding documentation to ensure sustainable operations.
Strengthen coordination with additional cooperatives to assess system compatibility and prepare onboarding pipelines.
Finalize the teller-facing user interface to ensure readiness for real-user testing and operational use.
Launch the controlled live pilot, enabling cooperative staff to conduct real inter-cooperative transfer transactions within a monitored environment.
Continue strategic engagement with coperatives, BFIs, and Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) to strengthen regulatory alignment and expand the partner ecosystem.
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and monitoring dashboards to track transaction volume, system uptime, and adoption metrics. Collect feedback from pilot participants to make iterative improvements to the platform.
To prepare for scaling NIFN to more cooperatives and financial institutions, develop a roadmap that encompasses discussions on long-term sustainability, governance, and additional funding models beyond the pilot phase. The next phase will move from development to real-world deployment and validation, ensuring that NIFN becomes a production-ready interoperable payment network capable of scaling across Nepal’s financial ecosystem.

Community Support

As NIFN moves closer to pilot implementation, we deeply value collaboration, shared learning, and ecosystem support that can help strengthen both the technical system and its real-world adoption.

Rafiki Technical Troubleshooting:
We are currently finalizing our ISO 8583 mapping and would greatly appreciate opportunities to connect with peers who have experience integrating Rafiki with high-availability financial messaging systems. In particular, having a sounding board to discuss edge cases in transaction states, failure handling, and reconciliation flows would be extremely helpful as we refine system reliability and robustness.

Networking for Scalability:
We are actively looking to connect with organizations, fintechs, and infrastructure partners who are working on grassroots financial inclusion and interoperable payment systems. If there are opportunities to present our middleware architecture and pilot approach to a wider audience, we would greatly appreciate introductions that can help us explore scalability beyond the initial pilot phase.

Knowledge Sharing & Peer Learning:
We are always eager to learn from others in the ecosystem. If you have worked on interoperability, cooperative financial systems, or digital payment infrastructure, we would value the opportunity to exchange insights and learn from experience. Practical lessons on simplifying financial data exchange and improving system interoperability would be especially useful.

Post-Pilot Outreach & Global Visibility:
Once the pilot phase is successfully completed, we plan to move into a broader communication and outreach phase, including global promotion of the model. At that stage, we aim to share learnings, technical outcomes, and impact stories internationally to encourage adoption of interoperable financial systems in other regions facing similar challenges.

Overall, any guidance, collaboration, or connection will play an important role in helping NIFN grow from a national pilot into a scalable, globally relevant model for inclusive digital finance.

Additional Comments

NIFN project is progressing steadily and remains on track with its planned timeline. While still in the development and pre-deployment stage, strong foundations have been built both technically and through partnerships with cooperatives.
A key highlight has been the trust developed with cooperative institutions. Their willingness to engage, sign MoUs, and actively participate reflects growing confidence in the NIFN approach. At the same time, the technical team has continued refining the system based on real-world feedback, ensuring it is practical, secure, and aligned with the needs of Nepal’s financial ecosystem.
In the coming phase, the focus will be on completing integration and delivering a successful pilot. NIFN remains committed to building an inclusive and interoperable financial network that creates meaningful impact for communities across Nepal.

Relevant Links/Resources (optional)

Nepal Internet Foundation: https://www.nif.org.np
Nepal Interledger Financial Network: https://nifn.nif.org.np/

Covenant University Partners ILF on the Next Gen Program

Jonathan Oluranti — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:23:45 +0000

The global financial system is on the brink of a major transformation, and the next wave of innovation is being nurtured right here in Nigeria. Covenant University has officially partnered with the Interledger Foundation (ILF) to launch the Interledger Next Gen program, an initiative designed to bring open payments education directly into the classroom.

For tech enthusiasts, budding developers, and future financial leaders, this is a massive leap forward. Here is everything you need to know about this exciting launch and what it means for the future of fintech in Africa.

The Problem: A Fragmented Financial World

If you have ever tried to send money across borders or between different mobile money providers, you know that the current global payment ecosystem is heavily fragmented. Consumers and merchants are forced to navigate a patchwork of cash, debit cards, mobile money, and digital wallets.

These systems rarely communicate with one another, creating "walled gardens" that trap capital, hike up transaction fees, and delay settlements. Money that could theoretically settle in seconds often takes days.

The Solution: Open Payments and the Interledger Protocol (ILP)

To solve this, the Interledger Foundation is advocating for an open, interoperable payment network powered by the Interledger Protocol (ILP). ILP allows different currencies and distinct financial systems to seamlessly connect, acting essentially as a universal translator for money, much like how the internet routes data.

To make open payments the global standard, the ILF realized they needed to invest in the architects of tomorrow.

What is Happening at Covenant University?

As one of the leading tech and innovation campuses in Africa, Covenant University is at the forefront of this initiative. Through this grant and support from the Interledger Foundation, the university is integrating open payments directly into its curriculum to equip students with highly sought after skills.

Dedicated open Payments Courses: At Covenant University, we are launching two new courses entirely focused on financial inclusion, open payments and the Interledger Protocol.
Hands on Innovation: Theory is backed by practice. Students will gain practical experience building real world, interoperable fintech solutions that address actual market gaps.
Hackathons & Innovation Labs: The campus will host dedicated innovation labs, competitive hackathons and Demo Days where students can test their ideas, build prototypes, and solve pressing financial access challenges.
Incubator Program: The Incubator program will serve as a launchpad designed to help covenant university students transition their hackathon projects and coursework into market ready fintech startups
Micro Grants: We will ignite a Student Microgrant Program to provide direct financial support for student driven ILP projects.
Open Payments Innovation Week: The OPIW will be a hands on week dedicated entirely to problem solving, building and prototyping. Students will collaborate in teams to build payment solutions utilizing the Interledger Protocol and Rafiki.
Open Payments Conference: Covenant University will host the first Open Payments conference in the country, bringing together thought leaders across the industry, students and university faculty. Ps: More details about this will be shared publicly in subsequent months.

Key Updates

We've curated a robust curriculum comprising of 2 courses with 4 modules and 60 learning Units.

People's Clearinghouse — ILF Grant Final Report

Roberto Valdovinos — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:21:03 +0000

Brief Project Description

Project Update

The arc: January 2024 to March 2026

When we signed with the Interledger Foundation in January 2024, we had a clear idea, a strong team of social finance leaders, a fresh cohort of eight young developers recruited mainly from the Technological University of the Mixteca in Oaxaca, and a simple prototype of the Cross-Network Provider (CNP), the connector that translates Rafiki cross-border transfers into the PCH switch format that community banks would connect to. What we didn't have was a production system. Or a mobile app. Or real integrations with core banking software. Or a connection to SPEI, Mexico's national real-time payment network. Or a production-grade infrastructure. Those are the things we built over the following two years.
It was a longer path than we anticipated because we had to adapt all our platform to a very specific regulation set by the Central Bank. And also because as we went deeper into the communities, we realized the scope of what "real financial inclusion" actually demands. A clearinghouse that connects financial institutions is not enough. You also need the institutions' clients to have a way to interact with their accounts digitally. And for that you need a mobile application. And for that application to be useful (rather than immediately abandoned for cash) you need AML compliance, settlement reports, fees management, QR payments, push notifications, a PISP security architecture. Each of these components was built, tested, demoed, and refined.
The grant was extended to support the final sprint toward a fully operational platform: SPEI integration, core banking system integrations, production deployment, and the live demo at the 2025 Interledger Summit in Mexico City.

The capstone: the live demo at ILF Summit 2025

The Interledger Summit in November 2025, held in the heart of Mexico City, was the moment everything came together. We presented on the main stage in front of an international audience, and then, live, we ran intra-clearinghouse and CNP-to-clearinghouse transactions.
We showed a Rafiki remittance launched from the ILF test wallet. Within milliseconds, the phone lit up: 223 Mexican pesos received, with a push notification showing the sender, the amount, the transaction ID, and a QR shareable receipt. Then we switched to the PCH mobile app and did a P2P transfer between two accounts on the switch (scanning QR code and with an instant audio notification). Then a merchant scenario: request-to-pay, pre-filled amount, biometric confirmation, instant settlement. Right after the demo, the audience of 200+ people downloaded the PCH demo app and were paying community producers from Oaxaca, Pahuatlán, and elsewhere who had come to the Summit to sell their crafts, using virtual balances topped up with Rafiki remittances from the ILF and PCH teams.
Behind each of those transactions ran a real-time AML engine inspecting every transfer in under a second, a gRPC-based switch routing funds through a modular bounded-context architecture, a PISP layer securing the mobile connection with public-key cryptography, and a compliance dashboard generating regulatory PDF reports with one click (the same reports that may have taken a money transmitter hours to produce manually).
The presentation also included a reference to a future development: a working offline payments prototype. Along many visits to rural communities we had realized that the internet is very unstable and that a successful digital payments network that impacts these regions requires new forms of connectivity.
The presentation closed with the entire PCH development team standing on the main stage in front of their work. Most of them had never imagined being there when they started their training on Rafiki and Mojaloop two years earlier in Oaxaca.

A reflection: from clearinghouse to full digital ecosystem

One thing changed significantly over the grant period, and it's worth being honest about it: our conception of what PCH needs to be.
We started with a clearinghouse: a technical infrastructure for routing transfers between financial institutions. That remains the core. But through community visits to places like Ejutla, San Pablito and Pahuatlán, we understood that connecting institutions is not the same as including people. If a community bank receives a real-time remittance but its clients still have to take a six-hour round trip to check their balance, nothing fundamental has changed in their lives. So we first built a Whatsapp payment bot solution, and then, after a series of discussions with the Central Bank, a mobile application so that the main payment channel would be entirely under our control. In building it, we had to build the PISP model (with its consent token architecture), all so that someone in a rural market could check their balance or pay for tortillas without touching a bank teller or having to take a bus.
This deeper scope is why the timeline extended, and we think it was worth every extra month.

Technical deliverables: completed

By March 2026, all four deliverables defined in the grant extension have been achieved:

Rafiki/CNP cross-border scheme: complete. The CNP is fully production-ready: it handles ILP routing from a US-based Rafiki wallet to a Mexican community bank account, performs real-time AML inspection, manages FX rate integration, produces compliance reports, and exposes an operator admin portal for liquidity management and reconciliation. The CNP architecture has been refined since the first successful demo in August 2024, now including idempotency, error handling, and a complete transfer lifecycle model that keeps Rafiki and PCH in sync.
Production deployment: complete. PCH's infrastructure runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on GCP, with managed services for databases (Cloud SQL, Firestore), messaging (managed Kafka), security (GCP KMS for certificate management), and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch/Kibana). CI/CD pipelines automate testing and deployment. Backups are retained according to Central Bank requirements. The environment was stress-tested with 200+ simultaneous users during the ILF Summit demo before being hardened into the current production configuration. A walkthrough of the production environment is available.
SPEI integration: complete. PCH can now send transfers to any account in Mexico's national financial system. The integration uses a Hermes, deployed in PCH's own environment, which is a SPEI gateway provided by Conecta, one of the main SPEI specialists in the country. When a user sends money to a phone number that doesn't belong to a PCH participant, the switch automatically looks up the recipient's CLABE through a Central Bank service and routes the transfer through SPEI. From the user's perspective, the experience is identical to an internal transfer. A demo of this integration is available.
Core banking system integrations: complete. Two CBS integrations are now production-ready. Mifos, an open-source core banking system with broad adoption among social financial institutions, was the first to be fully integrated, with a reusable gRPC client library published in a public GitHub repository. This effort was possible through the invaluable work of Fintecheando, a main tech actor in the Mexican fintech ecosystem. The integration was showcased at the Interledger Summit 2025. Sinefi, a core banking system used by approximately 25 financial entities serving around one million clients in Mexico, was integrated second, with its CEO participating in the final integration demo. Both systems authenticate to the PCH switch using certificate-based mutual TLS, follow the same gRPC synchronous connection protocol, and can perform lookups and fund transfers in real time. The expertise acquired in the process means that onboarding additional CBS providers now requires far less custom development. Demos of the Mifos integration and the Sinefi integration are available.

Authorization process: at the threshold

The Central Bank authorization process has been one of the longer threads of this journey, and one that has required us to stay close and responsive to regulatory feedback at every stage. The good news is that every required element is now in place: the switch software meets all regulatory requirements, the operational documentation and compliance manuals have been updated to reflect the final architecture, and the formal submission package is complete. We are, genuinely, at the threshold of a new phase. Our expectation is that PCH will receive its clearinghouse authorization and be ready for launch by the summer of 2026.
When that happens, our intention is to reach several hundred thousand customers through our partner financial institutions (AMUCSS' network of 140 community banks, four of Mexico's five largest savings cooperatives, and Sinefi's network of 25 financial entities) before the end of the year. For most of those customers, it will be the first time they have had access to digital payments, real-time transfers, and account-deposited remittances. That is the moment the entire project has been building toward.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

PCH exists because certain communities have always been left out of the equation, not by accident, but by design. National banking systems optimize for scale and profitability. Rural communities, indigenous regions, and the migrants who send money back to them don't fit that model. PCH is built specifically for them.

The communities and their financial institutions

The most direct beneficiaries are the members of the social financial institutions that PCH connects: AMUCSS' network of 140 community banks, four of Mexico's five largest savings cooperatives, and Sinefi's network of 25 financial entities. Together, these institutions serve several million individual account holders in rural, semi-rural, and peri-urban regions across Mexico, predominantly in areas where commercial banks are absent or inaccessible. In the near term, these are the people PCH will serve at launch.
Looking further, the social financial sector as a whole (savings cooperatives, community banks, and social-purpose financial institutions) counts some 17 million users across Mexico. PCH is built to serve all of them over time, as a sector-wide shared infrastructure rather than a product for any single institution.
Two thirds of AMUCSS' users are women. Many are speakers of indigenous languages (Zapotec, Mixtec, Nahuatl, and others) in communities where cultural and linguistic barriers compound the financial ones. Many are the wives, mothers, and daughters of migrants working in the United States, managing household economies that depend on remittances arriving in cash, at significant cost and risk. For them, the difference between a cash remittance and an account-deposited one is not a technical detail. It is the difference between money that arrives safely, is captured by a local institution that can lend it back productively, and multiplies, versus money that arrives in an envelope, gets spent immediately, and leaves no trace in the formal financial system.
PCH's design reflects these realities. The platform already supports multilingual interfaces and at launch will include indigenous-languages. The mobile application is designed for low-connectivity environments (because a payment platform that only works on a strong LTE signal is not a platform for Oaxaca's mountains or Puebla's high valleys). The switch connection protocol was engineered for resilience on unstable internet lines, with automatic reconnection, because many community bank branches operate on basic subscriber lines that go down. And the offline payments prototype will be developed too, aimed squarely at communities where the internet does not reach at all.

The migrants

On the other side of the transfer flow are the millions of Mexican migrants living and working in the United States, the largest remittance corridor in the world, with over $60 billion USD sent annually. Today, most of those transfers arrive as cash, delivered through agents, at fees that eat into money that families need. PCH's CNP offers a path toward account-to-account remittances via Rafiki, directly into the recipient's community bank or savings cooperative. The Mexican migrant in the US can use a Rafiki-compatible wallet. Their family in Oaxaca or Hidalgo receives the funds in their account, in seconds. No cash agent. No distance-based fee. No trip to town.
This is not a marginal improvement. It is a structural change in how remittances work and in what they can do for the communities that depend on them.

The developers

One impact of this project that is easy to overlook, but worth naming, is what happened to the team that built it. Eight young developers were recruited from local Oaxaca universities in indigenous regions through a rigorous selection process that prioritized strong coding skills, English proficiency, and genuine commitment to social justice. Most of them had no prior exposure to ILP, Mojaloop, or Rafiki. Over two years, they became the heart of the project. They even contributed pull requests to the Rafiki repository. They debugged the vNext Mojaloop switch alongside its original architects. They presented their work at international summits in Cape Town, Cluj and Mexico City. They stood on the main stage at the 2025 Interledger Summit in front of an audience from around the world.
We believe this matters: not just as a feel-good story, but as a model. An innovative fintech ecosystem does not need to be built only in San Francisco or London or Singapore. It can be built in Oaxaca, by people who have a direct stake in the communities the technology is meant to serve.

Alignment with the Interledger Foundation's mission

PCH is the ILF mission made concrete. It is built on the basis of open standards and open-source software to move value across networks that previously could not communicate. It prioritizes the populations most excluded from existing financial systems. And it demonstrates that ILP-based technology is not only viable for global finance: it is specifically well-suited for the places global finance has forgotten. The communities that will benefit from PCH are exactly those the ILF exists to reach: women, indigenous communities, rural populations, migrants, and the institutions that have chosen to serve them for decades, without waiting for the market to catch up.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

The CNP: Rafiki-to-PCH bridge

The Cross-Network Provider was PCH's original technical bet: the idea that a single entity could sit between the Interledger network and a Mojaloop-based clearinghouse, translating the language of one into the language of the other. By the summer of 2024, the CNP was working: a Rafiki transfer initiated from a US-based wallet could reach a community bank account in Mexico, end to end, passing through the CNP and the PCH switch. We demonstrated this live at the Oaxaca Workweek in August 2024 and again at the Interledger Summit in Cape Town in October 2024 (the first public proof that this kind of cross-network bridge was not only theoretically sound but practically buildable).
Since then, the CNP has grown considerably. The core architecture remains: Rafiki on the Mexican side receives the ILP transfer, the CNP backend processes it, the PCH switch routes it to the right participant, and the community bank credits the recipient's account. The CNP also handles real-time FX rate queries, idempotency logic to prevent duplicate transfers, a complete error-handling model that keeps Rafiki and the switch in sync even when things go wrong on one side, an operator admin portal with liquidity dashboards and reconciliation tools, and automated compliance reports that previously required hours of manual work. What was a working prototype in 2024 is now a production-ready system.

The switch: building on Mojaloop

The PCH switch — the clearinghouse hub that routes transfers between participants, manages the position ledger, and handles settlement — is built on Mojaloop vNext, the next-generation version of the Mojaloop open-source payment switch. The decision to use Mojaloop was one of the best we made: it gave us a mature codebase, detailed technical documentation, an active global community, and direct access to the people who built it. The support we received from so many people and organizations familiar with Mojaloop vNext has been foundational.
We took the Mojaloop vNext switch and adapted it significantly for PCH's specific regulatory and operational context. Settlement logic, fees management, and compliance reporting were either absent or insufficient in the open-source version: not because Mojaloop neglected them, but because they depend on the specifics of each jurisdiction's financial regulation. We built them for Mexico, for the Central Bank requirements, and for the practical realities of small financial institutions. We also introduced a synchronous gRPC connection model that allows community banks to connect to the switch without implementing a full asynchronous message queue (a practical necessity given the technical resources available at these institutions). We also took advantage of the switch's architecture around bounded contexts, making the codebase modular enough to evolve quickly without breaking existing functionality.

Core banking system integrations

Connecting the PCH switch to a core banking system (CBS), the software that a community bank or savings cooperative uses to manage accounts, transactions, and clients, is the step that makes the platform real for participants. Without it, the switch has nowhere to route funds.
PCH uses gRPC as its integration protocol: a high-performance, contract-based remote procedure call framework developed by Google that uses Protocol Buffers for serialization. It is fast, secure, and built for bidirectional streaming. As such, it seems a good solution for a payment switch that needs persistent connections with participants. The challenge is that gRPC is essentially unknown in the Mexican financial sector. Every integration has had to begin from scratch: explaining the protocol, walking technical teams through the connection model, explaining client libraries, debugging certificate-based authentication flows, and running joint tests before the first successful lookup could be made.
That investment is now paying off. Mifos (an open-source CBS with broad adoption among social financial institutions globally) was the first to be fully integrated, with a reusable TypeScript gRPC client library published in a public repository. Fintecheando, a key partner in the Mexican fintech ecosystem with deep Mifos expertise, was essential to making this integration happen. Sinefi, a proprietary CBS used by approximately 25 Mexican financial entities serving roughly one million clients, was integrated second, with Sinefi's CEO participating directly in the final demo and validating the result.

SPEI integration: connecting to Mexico's national payment network

SPEI, Mexico's real-time gross settlement system, operated by the Central Bank, is the backbone of the country's financial system. Any payment that needs to reach a bank account outside the PCH network has to go through SPEI. Getting there required not only a technical integration but a careful architectural design, because SPEI is an RTGS system (settling each transaction individually and in real time) while PCH operates as a net settlement platform, a fundamental difference with regulatory and operational consequences that took months of analysis and design sessions to resolve properly.
The integration was made possible through close collaboration with Conecta, one of Mexico's leading SPEI specialists and the provider of Hermes, the SPEI integration platform deployed in PCH's own environment. Conecta's team held weekly sessions with PCH's developers throughout the integration process, clarifying SPEI's operational logic, validating the transfer flows, and helping navigate the certification requirements. Their knowledge saved PCH an enormous amount of time that would otherwise have been spent reverse-engineering a regulatory system from documentation alone.
The result: when a PCH participant's client sends money to a phone number that doesn't belong to a PCH participant, the switch queries the Central Bank’s CLABE registry to retrieve the recipient's bank account identifier, formats the request according to SPEI's specifications, routes it through Hermes, and receives a webhook confirmation from the Central Bank when settlement is complete. From the sender's perspective, it looks exactly like any other transfer. Behind the scenes, it reaches any bank account in Mexico.

Production environment: built for the Central Bank

The infrastructure that runs PCH is not the same infrastructure that ran the 2024 demo. After the November 2025 ILF Summit, which stress-tested the system with over 200 simultaneous users in a live public setting, the team spent three months rebuilding the environment from the ground up according to Central Bank requirements and Kubernetes production best practices.
The current production environment runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on GCP, with managed services for all critical components: Cloud SQL and Firestore for databases, managed Kafka for messaging, GCP Key Management Service for certificate creation and storage, and a dedicated observability cluster running Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, and Kibana. CI/CD pipelines automate building, testing, and security scanning end to end (a code change triggers a build, a security scan, a deployment, and a Slack notification); deployment to the production environment includes a manual approval gate as required by security policy. Backups are generated daily and retained on a schedule that meets the Central Bank's specific archiving requirements. Pod security policies enforce least-privilege principles throughout the cluster.
Every architectural decision has been made with the authorization audit in mind. The documentation that accompanies the technical build is as complete as the system itself.

Mobile app and PISP: banking for institutions without apps

The majority of community banks and savings cooperatives in Mexico do not have a mobile banking application. Building one is expensive for a small financial entity, requires technical teams they don't have, and requires regulatory approvals they'd need years to obtain. PCH's mobile app solves this problem simply: it connects not to the bank but to the PCH switch, which connects to the bank. Any institution that joins the PCH network gets a branded mobile banking experience for its clients on day one, without writing a line of code.
The security architecture behind this is called the PISP model (Payment Initiation Service Provider). When a client onboards to the app, a cryptographic key pair is generated on their device. A consent token issued by the community bank, signed and stored by the switch, governs exactly what the app can do on the client's behalf: which accounts are accessible, whether transfers can be initiated, and under what conditions. The bank retains full control. The client has full transparency. The switch is the trusted intermediary.
The current app supports balance checks, P2P transfers by phone number, QR-code payments, request-to-pay flows, and real-time push notifications with audio alerts, useful in market settings where someone is handling goods rather than watching a screen. It is not yet as polished as the mobile apps of Mexico's major commercial banks. But it works, it is secure, and it gives institutions and their clients a foundation to build on. We will continue developing it until it is.

AML: real-time compliance as a shared service

Anti-money laundering compliance is one of the heaviest operational burdens for small financial institutions. Mexico's financial regulator (CNBV) requires AML validation in real time for every transaction. Most community banks and savings cooperatives lack the technical infrastructure to do this, and even if they had it, building and maintaining a real-time AML engine is a significant and ongoing investment.
PCH's AML engine solves this as a shared service. When a transfer enters the network, particularly a cross-border remittance arriving via the CNP, the AML module intercepts it before it reaches the recipient's institution. It queries the client's profile in an AML database, checks against official blocked-persons lists, evaluates the transfer against the client's historical transaction pattern, and assigns a risk score. The whole process runs in under a second. If the transfer passes, it proceeds. If it's flagged, it's held for review.
The key innovation here is that the CNP can perform all these validations itself, using the party data it has already gathered during the lookup phase of the transfer. The community bank does not have to do anything. This is especially significant for remittances, which are the highest-risk transfer type from a regulatory perspective and the ones that community banks were least equipped to handle compliantly on their own.

Settlement, fees, and reporting

Settlement, fees, and compliance reporting tend to be underestimated in fintech projects and overdue in production. They are also the ones that regulators care about most.
In the Mojaloop vNext open-source base, settlement logic exists but is not calibrated for Mexico's regulatory framework, fee management is non-existent, and reporting is not designed for the specific formats and periodicities required by the Central Bank. PCH built all three from scratch, aligned with the specific requirements of the authorization process. Settlement reports are generated automatically. Fee calculations are configurable per participant and per transaction type. Compliance reports can be produced with a single click, in the formats required by Mexican financial regulators. These are not glamorous features, but without them the platform cannot legally operate. They are done.

Documentation and regulatory submission

The process of building a clearinghouse in Mexico requires submitting to the Central Bank a complete package of technical documentation, operational manuals, compliance procedures, risk frameworks, and internal norms, all of which must reflect the final, production-ready state of the system. For most of the grant period, the documentation process ran in parallel with the development process, which meant that every time the architecture evolved, the documents had to evolve too.
That cycle is now complete. The switch software meets all regulatory requirements. Every component of the operational documentation has been updated to reflect the current architecture. The formal submission package is ready. We expect to submit it imminently and to receive authorization in the summer of 2026.

Key social and collaborative activities

The technical work was never the whole story. Over the course of the grant, PCH was part of an extraordinary set of collaborative moments, some that shaped the technical direction of the project, others that expanded its human and institutional reach. Here are the main ones.

Oaxaca Work Week, August 2024

In the second week of August 2024, a team of five from the Interledger Foundation joined 20 PCH developers and collaborators for a full work week at a coworking space in Oaxaca City. It was the first time the two teams had worked in the same room. The week began with PCH's first major live demo: a complete end-to-end remittance from a US test wallet, through the CNP and the PCH switch, arriving at an account in a Mexican community bank. The ILF team was impressed.
The rest of the week was spent in deep technical sessions on the CNP's outstanding requirements, the settlement model, the SPEI integration architecture (with Conecta and Sinefi representatives present), and production deployment planning. On the third day, the entire group celebrated with a traditional Oaxacan calenda (a brass-band street parade with giant papier-mâché puppets) that wound through the streets of Oaxaca City, picking up curious locals along the way. On the fourth day, the group visited three community banks in the Oaxaca region: the offices of Red Oaxaca (a network of microbanks serving families across the greater Oaxaca area), a visit to Acreimex (a savings cooperative with 62 branches and 425,000 account holders), and a trip to Ejutla, a rural town an hour and a half away, where the team saw what day-to-day banking looks like for people in a small community (including what happens when the internet goes down). They also visited a mezcalero (an artisanal mezcal producer), whose business expansion was being financed by a Red Oaxaca microloan. The week closed with a clear shared roadmap toward the Cape Town Summit.

Rafiki Work Week, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, August 2024

Four PCH developers attended the Rafiki Work Week organized by the ILF at BreakPoint IT's offices in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a gathering that brought together 20+ engineers from Rafiki, GateHub, JoPACC, and PCH. The PCH team worked directly with ILF's engineering and technical writing teams on outstanding Rafiki integration requirements, including how to handle KYC data flows, how to manage transfer status updates, and how to improve the deployment documentation for Rafiki integrators. Several of PCH's real-world deployment challenges directly informed improvements to Rafiki's official documentation. PCH developers also had pull requests merged into the Rafiki repository during the week.

Interledger Summit 2024, Cape Town, South Africa

At the annual Interledger Summit in Cape Town in October 2024, PCH presented on the main stage for the first time to a global audience. The presentation covered the social and economic rationale for the project: the Dutch disease paradox of remittances, the untapped potential of community banks, and the role of ILP in connecting them, and closed with a live demo. A transfer was initiated from the ILF test wallet using a phone-number-based wallet address, routed through the CNP and the PCH switch, and confirmed as received at a community bank account. The CNP dashboard showed the transaction in real time. A compliance report was generated with one click. A WhatsApp notification arrived at the recipient's phone. The audience, including Interledger community members from around the world, saw for the first time that this model was not theoretical: it was running code.

Payments Canada Summit panel, Toronto, February 2025

PCH participated in an Interledger Foundation panel at the Payments Canada Summit in Toronto, bringing the project's perspective to one of the most important payments industry forums in Canada. The panel addressed cross-border payments innovation, the US-Mexico remittance corridor, and the potential of innovative fintech to serve populations that commercial payment systems have not reached. It was an opportunity to speak directly to the North American financial sector about what PCH is building and why.

Rafiki Work Week, Cluj, Romania, July 2025

PCH was again represented at the Rafiki Work Week in July 2025, now held in the broader Transylvania region and gathering 38 participants from 8+ organizations. The week focused on Rafiki's next architectural evolution: a full event-driven redesign for horizontal scalability, new Open Payments documentation in multiple languages (including Spanish), a Kubernetes Operator for simplified deployment, card and POS integrations, and a Payment Pointer to SEPA flow. PCH's team participated across workstreams, contributing to the ongoing alignment between Rafiki's roadmap and PCH's production requirements.

Oaxaca Work Week, 2025

A second Oaxaca Work Week was organized in 2025 at La Clínica, a space in the heart of Oaxaca City that became PCH's workshop home for the week. The gathering brought together PCH's full development team alongside ILF engineers and partners for an intensive five-day sprint. The week featured demos of the consumer mobile app, the admin portal, the DevOps pipelines, the Kubernetes operator, and the CBS integrations; technical workstreams on PISP/3PPI, the Rafiki integration, settlement, performance, and scalability; and in-depth planning for the production environment and the November Summit demo. It was the most complete convening of the PCH and ILF teams to date and the last major collaborative technical sprint before the platform went into final production hardening.

Mexico Student Hackathons, September 2025

In September 2025, the Interledger Foundation organized four university hackathons across Mexico (in Oaxaca, the State of Mexico, Aguascalientes, and Mexico City) with PCH's active participation, both in organizing and tutoring during the hackathons. Over 500 students from 40+ higher education institutions explored solutions using the Open Payments API, from remittance tools to agricultural payment platforms to accessible transport systems. The Oaxaca hackathon was held at UABJO (the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca). Students from the Technological University of the Mixteca (PCH devs’ main alma mater) participated alongside students from eight other institutions.

Mumbai Fintech Fest, October 2025

People’s Clearinghouse participated in the largest fintech festival in the world alongside representatives of CECOBAN (an important clearinghouse in Mexico) and Interledger Foundation, to present its platform in a cross-border panel in front of an audience of 200 people. The visit included a private full day of analysis and discussions at the headquarters of the National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI) in order to understand how India’s national RTGS and the country's financial inclusion strategy work. It also included invaluable discussions at the HQ of the amazing Savatra Technologies team, responsible for 80% of UPI integrations in India, and a key model for what PCH aspires to become.

Pahuatlán Workshop, October 2025

In preparation for the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the ILF's Summit Program Committee organized an immersion workshop in Pahuatlán, a mountainous community in Puebla known for its centuries-old Amate paper craft. The workshop brought together technologists, grant makers, community builders, and open-source advocates alongside AMUCSS community bankers and local artisans. The group learned about the financial realities of rural communities: the cooperative savings systems, the harvest-season loans, the three-hour round trips to check a bank balance, the predatory lenders who fill the gaps at rates exceeding 500%. We discussed how open payment infrastructure can be designed around these realities rather than in spite of them. The experience directly shaped both the agenda of the Mexico City Summit and PCH's own thinking about what the mobile application needed to provide.

Interledger Summit 2025, Mexico City

The Interledger Foundation chose Mexico City for its 2025 Summit. PCH presented on the main stage to an audience that had already seen the documentary film about PCH before the session began (more on that below). The presentation covered the evolution of the platform from clearinghouse to full digital ecosystem, with a particular focus on why that evolution was necessary, not as a technical decision, but as a social one. Live demos showed the complete transfer flow: Rafiki remittance arriving with a push notification, P2P transfer by QR code, merchant payment with audio notification, and the PCH admin dashboard confirming every transaction in real time. Isabel Cruz, AMUCSS' Executive Director, closed the session by presenting the producers and speaking about 40 years of community finance work: the human story behind every line of code.

Communications and Marketing

International press coverage

PCH's story has reached audiences well beyond the Interledger community. A coordinated press effort, developed in partnership with the ILF communications team, resulted in coverage in some of the most respected outlets in global finance and fintech.
The Banker covered the US-Mexico corridor angle in depth. PaymentsJournal explored the cross-border payments dimension. Finextra focused on the community banking angle. The Paypers covered the ILF partnership announcement. Fintech Finance News and Citybiz reported on the project's launch. The Global Treasurer covered the remittances angle, and Financial IT also published pieces on the project.
PCH has deliberately kept a relatively low public profile in Mexico itself while the Central Bank authorization process is ongoing: a deliberate choice to ensure the regulatory conversation remains fluid and direct, without external noise. Once authorized, that changes.

"The People's Code", a documentary film

In September 2025, a documentary film about PCH premiered at Cine Tonalá in Mexico City: The People's Code, produced independently by a Mexican production company with Interledger support.
The film matters for reasons that go beyond press coverage. A project like PCH lives at the intersection of social history, economic theory, indigenous communities, open-source software, and financial regulation: a combination that is almost impossible to communicate in a press release or a conference slide. The documentary does something different: it shows what this work actually looks like from the inside. It shows Isabel Cruz and AMUCSS' community bankers in the field, their relationships with communities that have been organizing their own finances for decades without external validation. It shows the developers in Oaxaca: young people from indigenous regions building fintech infrastructure that most of the global financial world has never heard of. It shows the farmers and artisans who are the reason any of this matters. And it shows the friction, the uncertainty, and the slow accumulation of trust that a project of this kind actually requires.
We believe that a social-technological project that cannot explain itself in human terms is a project with a communication problem and possibly a mission problem. The People's Code is our evidence that PCH has neither. It is a record of the "behind the cameras" of building technology for a purpose, and of the communities that gave us the reason to build it.

"The Missing Link": academic paper on remittances and development

In September 2025, PCH co-authored a major academic and policy paper alongside Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda (UCLA), Isabel Cruz Hernández (AMUCSS), and Yvonne Su (Oxford): The Missing Link: Remittances & Socially Trusted Financial Intermediation as Key Elements for Addressing Root Causes of Migration.
The paper makes a rigorous empirical case for something PCH has always argued intuitively: that cash remittances, in the absence of proper financial intermediation, do not foster regional development: they often undermine it. Drawing on data from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the authors document what they call the "vicious cycle of remittances": cash inflows into communities without productive infrastructure cause localized inflation, reduce competitiveness, and paradoxically deepen economic dependence on migration. Remittances growing at 165% in Mexico over the past decade (now exceeding $60 billion annually, far outpacing foreign direct investment) while rural communities remain structurally underdeveloped is not a paradox. It is a predictable consequence of the wrong delivery model.
The paper then describes the "virtuous cycle": what happens when remittances arrive into community-owned financial institutions that can convert them into savings, credit, and local investment. Employment grows. Productive projects are funded. Economic dependence on migration decreases. The authors document that this model already exists, partially, in the network of savings cooperatives and community banks that AMUCSS and its peers have been building for four decades. What has been missing is the fintech infrastructure to make it work at scale, which is exactly what PCH is building.
The paper closes with six concrete policy recommendations across regulatory, technological, and social dimensions, and includes a textbox specifically describing PCH and the Interledger Protocol as a working implementation of the virtuous cycle framework.
The paper was distributed as a designed, printed booklet at fintech events in Mexico and India, reaching several hundreds of practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. It was also published digitally and shared through ILF channels. It is, we believe, the most complete intellectual articulation of why PCH exists, and one that places it within a broader conversation about migration policy, development finance, and the responsibilities of technological innovation.

Broader outreach: Toronto, India, and beyond

Communications and marketing, for a project like PCH, are never just about getting our name in the press. They are also about listening to other regions, other systems, other approaches to problems that look like ours from a distance and turn out, up close, to be both different and illuminating.
The panel at the Payments Canada Summit in Toronto was a case in point: speaking to practitioners from one of the world's most regulated and sophisticated payment ecosystems about why fintech infrastructure for isolated areas matters for countries generated conversations we wouldn't have had otherwise about regulatory philosophy, about what "inclusion" means to people who design systems from the top down rather than from the community up, and about the potential of the US-Mexico corridor for the North American financial sector. Also, remittances are not a Mexican problem: the vicious cycle of cash remittances is a global pattern. And the policy recommendations that emerge from studying Mexico apply, with adaptation, to corridors across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central America. Sharing PCH's work in those contexts has helped us understand which parts of our model are genuinely transferable and which are specific to Mexico's regulatory and social landscape.

What’s Next?

Authorization and launch

The most important milestone ahead is the one we've been working toward since January 2024: Central Bank authorization. The documentation package is complete, the software meets all regulatory requirements, and we expect to submit the final version to the Central Bank imminently. Our expectation is that PCH will be authorized and ready for commercial launch by the summer of 2026.

Cross-border operations: finding the right partners

With the CNP production-ready and the Rafiki scheme complete, the cross-border layer of PCH is technically operational. What comes next is building the commercial and institutional relationships that will make it real. Starting this summer, we will be actively seeking new partners on the US side: financial institutions, money transmitters, and Rafiki-compatible wallets that want to participate in a genuinely different remittance model. We have been in contact with MiPlata, a fellow ILF grantee with a growing presence in the US-Mexico corridor, and see great potential in this collaboration, not as a commercial arrangement alone, but as a shared contribution to the communities both projects are committed to serving.

Commercial rollout: a fieldwork process

Launching a digital payments platform is not the same as delivering it. The community banks and savings cooperatives that will join the PCH network are institutions with deep roots in the communities they serve, and many of those communities have had little or no exposure to digital financial tools. We cannot release an application, send a press announcement, and assume adoption will follow.
What we are beginning instead is a much more deliberate process: conversations with the representatives of partner institutions, but also with community leaders, with the people who use those banks and cooperatives every day, and with the local organizations that have been building trust in those communities for decades. We are designing training strategies and community support models that account for the reality that someone receiving their first digital remittance may never have interacted with a financial app before. We are planning field visits, pilot programs, and feedback loops that will shape how the platform is introduced and how it evolves after introduction.

Offline payments

A meaningful portion of the communities PCH aims to serve have unreliable or no internet access. We believe that digital financial inclusion in those communities requires a payments model that does not depend on a continuous connection, one in which transactions can be initiated and confirmed locally, then cleared to the network when connectivity is restored. We are committed to developing this capability, because without it, the platform's reach has a ceiling that we are not willing to accept.

Community Support

We have been fortunate to build PCH surrounded by a community that has been generous with its time, expertise, and belief in what we are doing. We would like that community to continue growing, and there are specific areas where new collaborations could make a real difference.
The most immediate need is on the cross-border side. If you are working in remittances, as a money transmitter, a Rafiki implementor, a wallet provider, or a fintech operating in the US-Mexico corridor or similar corridors, we want to talk. PCH's CNP is ready to connect to the right partners. MiPlata has been a promising point of contact, and we are eager to expand that circle. Every new Rafiki-compatible entity that connects to our network extends the reach of the platform directly into the communities waiting for it.
Beyond remittances, we are always interested in connecting with organizations working on financial inclusion in rural and indigenous contexts, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. The problems PCH is solving are not unique to Mexico, and the solutions we are building are designed to be adaptable. If you see a parallel between your context and ours, we would genuinely like to hear from you.
Finally: if you know policymakers, regulators, or researchers working on migration, development finance, or remittances policy who should know about The Missing Link paper and the model it describes, please share it. The academic and policy case for what PCH is doing needs to reach people who can act on it, not just people who already agree with it.

Additional Comments

We want to close this report with gratitude. The Interledger Foundation has been far more than a funder to PCH. The ILF team — its grant program team, its engineers, its communications colleagues — has been present at every stage of this journey: in Oaxaca, in Cape Town, in Cluj, in Pahuatlán, in Mexico City, and in countless calls across time zones in between. The patience, the technical depth, and the genuine care for the mission that characterize the ILF staff have made an enormous difference to what PCH became. We thank them sincerely.
We also want to acknowledge the extraordinary network of people and organizations who contributed to this work in ways that don't appear in grant reports but are indispensable to how projects like this actually get built. The Mojaloop Foundation and its community, particularly those who gave generously of their time to support our work on the switch. ThitsaWorks, whose Mojaloop expertise was essential in the early phases. Fintecheando, whose knowledge of the Mexican fintech ecosystem and commitment to open-source collaboration was invaluable. Conecta, for their patience and expertise in walking us through SPEI. Sinefi's team, for embracing a new integration model in an environment where gRPC was entirely unfamiliar. The team at Breakpoint IT in Cluj, for twice hosting us with warmth and excellent coffee. And the many others (developers, advisors, community leaders, artisans, mezcaleros, and bank tellers) who shared their knowledge, their time, and their lives with us over these two years.
Most of all: to the development team in Oaxaca, who built this. You know who you are, and you know what you did. The communities this platform will serve are lucky to have had you building for them. We are not done. We are just getting to a new stage.

Five Years After Being a Grantee: How Things Are Going for Me

Radhy — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:02:19 +0000

So I got email about upcoming newsletter so I reckon I'd write some updates regarding my journey as a grantee from 2021.

A word about my project

First things first, the grant funded project that I was working on, ProgNovel, was officially dead - though not simply. Shortly after Coil discontinued in 2023, I put my project on hiatus and put development on hold due to many reasons. I had few inquiries about the project but the adoption rate was abysmal so the hiatus decision wasn't so damaging.

At that time one of the main reason for my hiatus was a technical one. One Javascript framework, Astro, was rising at the time and it has things that my project was all about. So I explore and dabble some projects with it and see if I can learn one thing or two. It was so good and as the exploration went on, some things came to my mind thinking about my hiatus project: "well, it's cooked now" or "what's the point continuing if this framework has it all". Fast forward to 2026 I thought it again and realized that it was really cooked from the start. Seeing the technical prowess and inovation that Astro team has (that led them acquired by Cloudflare) left me no room to compete with them.

The project ProgNovel went hiatus in 2023, it was never returned, archived in 2024.

What comes after that

So during my exploration on Astro framework gave birth of a social media project that I named ProgForum - the prefix Prog because it was a spritual successor for my archived project ProgNovel. I didn't choose to build novel platform again and pick a social media because the previous experience wasn't going well for me, a decision that proved quite right since now that community was filled with industrialized AI generated slop content that even prominent creators had since "pulled out" of the scene by cashing out and sold their platform to some Korean IT giants. The dead internet theory was so true in that community that beginners starting out creating content won't ever have chance to compete with contents pumping out of ChatGPT or Gemini.

Anyway, back on ProgForum topic; this thing is built on Astro, the thing that made me gave up on my previous project. And one thing that so good about Astro is that it's an agnostic framework, meaning my years of learning of Svelte framework during building ProgNovel wasn't wasted - many codes even reused in the new project. While Astro had its own edge I had fun building a social media with it. Astro was a framework that was ahead of its time adopting next gen tech like View Transitions - the most fun I ever had working on a project. Seeing that one component seamlessly morphing into other component as the page transitions make me want to give a chef kiss every time.

As a social media, ProgForum has two tightly knitted spaces - tweet feed à la Twitter where users can, well, tweet, and another one is a good old fashioned forum where people can discuss things at great length.

There's a plan for Web Monetizaton in this: later on users can set payment pointer so they can stream revenue when people engaging with their tweets or forum post the made. It was pretty simple at that front. The real challange however come from another (that I thought pretty rad) freature that I'd like to call emoji clapping. It is a emoji "like" button like any other reactions button in other social media like Discord but instead of toggling a button you clap (like clapping mechanic in Medium website). So one user can give multiple emojies and claps on them multiple time because I thought sometimes one thumb up might not enough - sometimes you just want to slap multiple thumbs up, even thousands if you can (ignoring the fact that is's phyiscally imposible in real life), just so you can express how you enjoy tweets or contents people made. Now here's the Web Monetization comes into place: or rather, it has more to do with Interledger payment than Web Monetization API, as emoji claps can be used as "currency" to reward creators. There wasn't a solid final plan on how to do this but the general idea is that by the end of the month or so you can setup a tipping budget (either by subscription or one time payment) that split tips to creators based on how much you spend mouse clicks clapping emojies on them. Clap clap clap. Money money money.

ProgForum started around 2024. Around 2 years in, it wasn't actively developed and I haven't picked it up since last year. The thing about Astro is that it is a Javascript framework. And the thing about Javascript is that it moves fast and break things even faster. One morning (let's call it morning because I don't remember the exact time) I just happen to chill and see - oh cool, a new update! Run the command to update dependencies and immediately starting to regret it. Not only it breaks the dev server, even after rolling back, the dev start command won't even start anymore. The error message I see wasn't helping much because the thing about shiny new toy in coding is that because it's new, there wasn't enough people to share their error problems and not much posts on the internet for me to fix my problem. I didn't know whether Astro framework, or Svelte, or Tailwind CSS v4, Drizzle, or Bun that gives the problem (all of them was quite new and or was in unstable version at the time because I fancy myself creating "next-gen" social platform), after amateurly diagnosing the problem myself and failed at it only to rage OS restart, the problem somehow went away on its own later on. I don't know which one that has the new update that fix the problem, but anyway I could still continue developing the project. However, despite some feature ready to test like emojis, tweets, and comments, and so on, the previous errors left me jaded and I felt like I don't want to give a chef kiss anymore.

I didn't touch it again somewhere in 2025 because my focus went to another side project (a Javascript game) and some hackatons. The code is just sitting there, and since it was a project that I had the most fun and had the feature that I proud of (like emoji claps and the transition animation), I got a complicated feeling whenever I accidentally see the project folder. I'm not sure if I want to continue with it because after the fun and hype I had with it, I know now that building a social media was a huge undertaking. A short lived enthusiasm won't cut it. What I had now is still far away from being a proper, realiable social media to be used for people to enjoy. In short, I was burn out.

2026 - what now?

While now I'm not actively developing anything related to the project from five years ago I occasionally checking out things on Interledger space, like the Interledger payment API, how things going with Web Monetization spec, and so on. I remember now I had few small projects that I share back a while ago that I forgot about until I write this. I even checking out Interledger blockchain-based rival, x402 initiated by Coinbase, though that one isn't exactly one-to-one rival to Interledger since the two focus on two different use case (Interledger focus being agnostic and inclusive while x402 focus on crypto and automated payment made for AI agents). Earlier this year one particular online hackaton that I participated in was memorable, since I create a freelancing platform with blockchain escrow via Solidity with it - something that I wish Interledger could do that too.

As someone who live in a country that a credit card wasn't a mainstream I still thought Interledger (and x402 too) is cool and still want to use them in my future projects. (Unfortunately no ILP wallet available in my region at the moment).

Hackomania 2026

Nicholas Loo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:11:27 +0000

1. Introduce Your Team

We are Team Punch the Monkey — three DigiPen Singapore students who signed up for HackOMania 2026. I'm Nicholas, from the Real-Time Interactive Simulation (RTIS) programme. Benjamin is also from RTIS, and Shu Hng comes from Interactive Media & Game Development (IMGD). Although foreign, we covered the full stack between us and ventured into roles we had never tried.

Winning moment — left to right: Timea Nagy, Benjamin, Nicholas, Shu Hng, and Ioana Chiorean.

2. Hackathon Experience

HackOMania 2026 was a 24-hour sprint, carried across 2 days, and the Interledger Foundation's challenge brief was what drew us in: design a programmable, community-driven emergency fund using Open Payments to collect micro-contributions and disburse aid based on verified disaster triggers. Reading it felt like a genuine engineering puzzle, not a contrived hackathon prompt. The turning point came early from the pre-event when we dug into the Open Payments API and realized the grant negotiation and wallet settlement logic could handle both inbound contributions and automated outbound payouts natively. That unlocked the whole architecture in one shot and gave us clarity on what to do for our 24 hours building.

3. Our Hackathon Background

This was our first hackathon for all three of us. We're students heading into internships soon, and there's something about a hackathon that feels like a rite of passage in computer science that we didn't want to skip. It's one of those experiences you hear about constantly, and we figured: if we're going to do it once before the next chapter starts, let's actually go for it. What surprised us was how different the pressure felt compared to coursework or even crunch on a game project. Every decision is permanent. You don't iterate; you discuss your ideas fast and move forward with resolve. That constraint turned out to be liberating.

4. The Problem We Tackled

When a disaster strikes, the people who need financial help fastest are usually the last to receive it. Traditional emergency funds are slow to mobilize, opaque in their rules, and rarely reach individuals directly. The Interledger Foundation's challenge asked: what if the fund were always funded, always on, and paid out automatically when conditions are verified — with no central authority making the call? That's the core of SafePool. Anyone can contribute before disasters happen, and when real-world disaster conditions are met, payouts flow automatically based on transparent, community-governed rules. Interledger's Open Payments protocol was the right foundation precisely because it's currency-agnostic and borderless. The protocol doesn't care where you are, which made a global fund actually feasible rather than aspirational.

5. Our Tech Solution

SafePool is a single global emergency fund platform, built in 24 hours:

Frontend: Next.js 16 + React 18 + TypeScript, with an interactive 3D globe dashboard (react-globe.gl) rendering live disaster events and contribution activity in real time
Backend/Database: Supabase (Postgres) for transactional flows; ClickHouse (admittedly overkill for a hackathon project) for high-throughput real-time analytics
Payments: Interledger's Open Payments protocol for all contribution and payout rails — grant negotiation, wallet addressing, and cross-border settlement
Realtime Layer: Server-Sent Events (SSE) streaming live activity to the globe
Governance: Community proposal and voting system for transparent, on-chain-style payout rules

The biggest architectural call was committing to a single global fund model rather than per-disaster pools. It simplified the contribution UX dramatically while preserving the rules for payout governance — you're always participating, not waiting for a specific disaster to fund. The trickiest part was handling the Open Payments grant flow for automated outgoing payouts, particularly managing grant expiry cleanly when a disaster trigger fires. We abstracted the payout trigger into a background polling service that checks disaster conditions and initiates payment grants automatically.

And then, somewhere around 3 AM, we also added the monkey.

Punch the Monkey — our 3 AM mascot making his globe debut.

6. The Pitch

We were nervous. We had a live demo, a 3D globe, and a 24-hour build behind us — and we'd only tested the full payment flow successfully a handful of times before walking up. But the moment the judges saw the monkey on the globe, the energy in the room shifted. That idea came out of a very tired 3 AM conversation. We needed something that would make people remember us, and give the demo a personality. It worked better than we expected. The judges enjoyed it, and it became the thing people mentioned when they talked about our project afterwards. Beyond the mascot, the feedback that mattered most was that SafePool felt like a real product concept, not just a protocol demo. Winning first place for the Interledger Foundation Challenge out of 15 teams as first-time hackathon participants is something we're still incredibly grateful for.

7. Mentorship

We had the chance to consult with Timea Nagy, Ioana Chiorean, and Sid Vishnoi from the Interledger team throughout the 24 hours. Rather than just technical guidance, the conversations were more like product reviews. They pushed us to think about what we wanted SafePool to feel like in a real-world scenario, what the payout governance should prioritize, and how to use the Open Payments tooling in a way that served the user experience rather than just satisfying the integration checklist. That clarity helped us make faster decisions during the build and kept us from going down rabbit holes that wouldn't have made the final demo stronger. We're grateful they took the time to come down to this event, especially with other teams competing for their attention.

With the Interledger mentors who helped shape SafePool — left to right: Team Punch the Monkey, Sid Vishnoi, Timea Nagy.

8. What's Next

SafePool is live at safepool-two.vercel.app and open source at github.com/struccomaker/safepool. As we head into our internships, the project is something we're genuinely proud to have shipped. The next meaningful step is moving off the testnet onto real Open Payments wallets and integrating more robust disaster oracle data so the trigger logic doesn't rely on a centralized source. If you're working on Open Payments, disaster relief infrastructure, or just want to hack on the governance layer, we'd love to hear from you.

Reach out to us here:

How to Share Your Hackathon Story

Bibi — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:19:27 +0000

Use this guide to shape your hackathon story, keeping in mind that this is a suggested format, not a requirement. Write as much or as little as feels natural, the goal is an authentic account of your experience.

1. Introduce your team

Share your names, backgrounds, and what each person contributed. Help readers understand who you are before diving into what you built.

Prompts: Where are you from? What do you study or do professionally? How did you come together as a team?

Example: We are PayFlow — three developers who met during the Interledger Hackathon and immediately bonded over a shared frustration with how broken cross-border payments are for freelancers. Amara is a backend engineer from Lagos with five years of fintech experience. Priya is a full-stack developer based in Bangalore who has been building Web3 tooling for the past two years. And I'm Diego, a product engineer from São Paulo who spent three years at a remittance startup watching people lose money to fees on every single transaction.

📷 Team photo — A candid from the event works great. Add a caption with everyone's name.

2. Hackathon experience

Reflect on the hackathon and the challenge you tackled -- what did you learn, and how did it shape your approach going in?

Prompts: Which resources stood out? Was there a moment that shifted how you thought about the challenge?

Example: The overall experience was more hands-on than we expected. The Open Payments API session was the turning point for us. Before that, we had been thinking about our problem in terms of traditional payment rails. Afterwards, we scrapped our original idea entirely and started over.

3. Your hackathon background

Give readers context about your experience with hackathons. Is this your first? Your tenth? What keeps you coming back?

Prompts: What do you enjoy about the format? What surprised you about this one specifically?

Example: Amara and Priya are hackathon veterans. Between them, they've competed in over a dozen events. For me, this was my second. What makes hackathons different from regular sprint work is the permission to be reckless in the best possible way: you prototype things you'd never get sign-off for in a normal product cycle. What surprised us about this one was how much the mentorship changed the experience.

4. The problem you tackled

Lead with the "why." What issue did you set out to solve, and why does it matter? Then explain how Interledger technology made your solution possible.

Prompts: Who is affected by this problem? Why was Interledger the right tool?

Example: Freelancers in the Global South lose between 5% and 12% of every payment to international transfer fees — before taxes, before platform cuts. For someone earning $500 a month, that's money gone. We wanted to build something that made cross-border micropayments fast, cheap, and programmable. Interledger was the foundation: the protocol doesn't care about currency or geography, and the Open Payments standard gave us a clean API to build on top of rather than reinventing settlement logic from scratch.

5. Your tech solution

Walk readers through how your project works: the architecture, the stack, the key decisions, and any pivots along the way.

Prompts: What technologies did you use? What tradeoffs did you make? What would you do differently?

Example: PayFlow is a lightweight invoicing and payment layer built on top of the Open Payments API. A freelancer generates an invoice link in under 30 seconds; the client pays into an Interledger-compatible wallet; the freelancer receives a notification and the funds settle within seconds. We built the frontend in Next.js, used Rafiki as our local ILP node for testing, and integrated with a testnet wallet for the demo. The trickiest part was handling the grant negotiation flow cleanly in the UI — we ended up abstracting that into a single hook that other developers could reuse.

🖼 Screenshots or demo visuals — Add captions so readers know what they're looking at. A short demo clip or Loom works great here too.

6. The pitch

What was it like presenting to the judges and other participants? Be honest — vulnerability makes for great reading.

Prompts: Were you nervous? What questions came up? What did you learn from the feedback?

Example: We were nervous. We had 10 minutes and a live demo that we'd only tested successfully three times. One of the judges asked us how we'd handle regulatory compliance across different jurisdictions, and honestly, we didn't have a clean answer. But the question itself was clarifying. It told us exactly where the product needed to grow. The feedback from other teams after the presentation was just as valuable as the judges' comments.

7. Mentorship

Reflect on your interactions with mentors from Interledger and beyond.

Prompts: Was there a conversation that shifted your direction? What's one insight you're still thinking about?

Example: We had a session with one of the Interledger mentors on day two that saved us probably six hours of debugging. We'd been fighting with the incoming payment polling logic, and within 20 minutes he spotted that we were misreading the grant expiry behavior in the spec. Beyond the technical help, something he said stuck with us: "Don't build for the protocol. Build for the person who will never know the protocol exists." That became our north star for the rest of the hackathon.

8. What's next?

Are you continuing to develop your solution? Share your next steps or what you're taking with you even if the project pauses.

Prompts: What would v2 look like? Are you pursuing partners, funding, or open source contributors?

Example: We're continuing. The plan for the next 90 days is to move off the testnet and onboard five real freelancers as beta users — people in our own networks who are already dealing with this problem. We are exploring whether there's a path to building PayFlow as an open source tool that other developers can deploy for their own communities. If you're building on Open Payments and want to collaborate, we'd love to hear from you.

🏆 Closing photo — team with prize — End on a high note, celebrate the win!

The Interledger Hackathon Team

Break the Pattern: IWD Medellín 2026

Marian Villa 🇨🇴 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:40:56 +0000

There’s something we’re still not saying enough in tech:

The system works exactly as it was designed.

And if we want to change what we’re seeing, participating in the system isn’t enough.

We have to rewrite it.

Medellín: a fork in the system

IWD Medellín 2026 wasn’t just an event. It was a fork.

A moment where we chose not to follow the default flow.

Communities that usually operate in parallel decided to synchronize:

To build something together:

Resilient. Coordinated. Purpose-driven.

What we talked about

⚡ Technology as a tool for emancipation

Using tech not just to optimize processes, but to redistribute power.

⚡ Web + AI in production

The question is no longer “how do I build?”

It’s: how do I capture value in a system that’s already running?

The web has changed. If you don’t understand that, you’re building for a past that no longer exists.

⚡ AI in DevTools

Friction in development is shifting.
Debugging is no longer just reading logs.

It’s interacting with systems that understand context. That changes how we learn, iterate, and think about code.

⚡ Multi-agent systems (ADK)

We’re moving from applications to ecosystems of decisions.
Multiple agents that collaborate, negotiate, and execute.

This isn’t just technical. It’s a paradigm shift.

⚡ AI in HealthTech

This is where it gets real.

When AI enters healthcare, errors stop being bugs. They become consequences.

Break the Pattern (for real)

In this amazing celebration:

People showed up.
Speakers shared.
Communities collaborated.
Ideas emerged.

Break the Pattern isn’t an event. It’s what we do next.

Want to keep building with us?

If you're exploring how to design more open, inclusive, and interoperable systems, come join the conversation:

👉 Join the Interledger community: https://interledger.org/community
👉 Connect with builders around the world: http://bit.ly/ilfslackcommunity

UCT Financial Innovation Hub — ILF Grant Final Report

Allan Davids — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:45:40 +0000

Brief Project Description

At the Financial Innovation Hub. our focus is on providing world-class education in financial technology to students at the University of Cape Town. Through our partnership with Interledger, we are developing and implementing an open payments curriculum for students. Outside of UCT, we are also working to expand Interledger's reach among students in South Africa and at other universities through workshops, bootcamps, and hackathons. You can find our initial progress report, here.

Project Update

MPhil Class of 2025 and Scholarships

We concluded another successful year for our MPhil class. We had a really vibrant class this year and many standout moments. My favourite one involves the class project that our 2025 class took on, developing a solution called Nkadime, a decentralised micro-lending platform leveraging Open Banking APIs, alternative credit scoring, and XRPL smart contracts. Here I am with the class of 2025.

With the support of Interledger we were able to provide scholarships to 7 students this year! Here are some of our bursary recipients talking about their future aspirations.

Open Payments Workshop and Hackathon

This year, we ran our second iteration of the UCT / Interledger Open Payments Bootcamp and Hackathon, where we introduce students to Open Payments over 5 days during the mid-year break and challenge them to develop a fully functional application at a full-day hackathon. This year’s iteration had many highlights, including

Increasing the number of students who attended from 40 to 70
Increasing representation of students to having students from 4 different universities attending

Here is a post-hackathon photo with everyone.

This hackathon is a formative moment for the students, as it represents the first experience of a hackathon for most attendees. This year’s winning solution, Direla, used open payments to turn smartphones into a POS terminal, allowing merchants to accept payments via NFC, QR codes, and WhatsApp aliases. Dylan, a member of Direla and Interledger Bursary Recipient, did a blog post on the forum about his experience. Here is also a photo of the winning team with Raul and I.

If you haven't seen it already, here is a great short video about the 2025 Hackathon.

Women in Tech Campaign

We all know that the financial services and technology sectors have historically been under-representative of women. As a result, empowering women to be successful in the FinTech space is something very important to us. Under the guidance of Lindi, our Hub Manager, this year, we wanted to showcase and tell the stories of women doing amazing things in Tech. This led to the “Women Stories in Tech” campaign we ran around Women’s Day. In this series, we featured seven interviews with inspiring women working in tech. We ran the campaign on LinkedIn, and the interviews are available on our YouTube channel, here. We kicked off the campaign speaking to the ILF's own Matseliso Thabane!

Practitioner seminars

An important part of our degree programme are our practitioner seminars, where we invite people doing amazing things in the FinTech space to give a talk to our students telling them about their work and sharing their experiences and life lessons from working in the space. These sessions are tremendously insightfull for our students and help to connect them to what is happening in the FinTech space. This year we were delighted to host 10 practitioner seminars, roughly one a month for the academic calendar. Some of our notable speakers included: Brenton Naicker, Principal & Head of Growth at CVVC, Mark McChlery, Co-founder and Chief Data & Analytics Officer at PayJustNow, the largest Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) company in South Africa and Thomas Brennan: CEO & Co-founder at Franc (who won SA FinTec of the Year at the recent SA FinTech awards), a savings and investment app, aimed at increasing financial inclusion through reducing the barriers to saving and investment. Here is Brenton delivering his practitioner seminar.

Some areas where we fell short and lessons learned

Despite these success, we also had some goals we didn't achieve and learnt some important lessons in the process.

The major being the fact that we wanted to be successful in putting out more academic research on payments. To enable this, we hired a research fellow, but she could only work on a part-time basis and that slowed us down a bit. That being said, we did manage to produce one paper exploring the current payment system reforms in South Africa and it's implications for financial inclusion.

Another important lesson for us what that as your ambitions grow, so should your team. We are a lean team, currently with only 5 members. We felt that this year given the increasing scope of our work and started to hit a resource constraint relative to our time vs our ambitions. We'll be growing the team next year to help us scale!

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

Scholarships

Darryl Nyamayaro and Siphiwe Bogatsu, both Interledger scholarship recipients in 2024, have been making waves with their startup iDini, a platform which helps people manage their insurance policies. This is an important use case in South Africa where the average household has three to five policies and where the policy lapse rate is 55%. This means that for many people, a single missed payment renders their policy null and void. iDini helps people manage their policies and keep their insurance.

Hackathons and student innovation

Continuing with Darryl and Siphiwe's story, not only were both of them Interledger scholarship recipients, but they also won the 2024 UCT/Interledger Hackathon for iDini. Here is a photo of Siphiwe, Darryl and the rest of the iDini team from our most recent student start-up pitch night.

We've seen a similar success story in 2025. The 2025 winning team (containing two Interledger scholarship recipients) have continued to develop their hackathon-winning idea, Direla, and have gone on to recently take 2nd place at the Africa Tech Week MCP Hackathon. They are now in the early fundraising phase as they look to develop a full MVP.

Many of the other Interledger scholarship recipient for 2025 have also been pursuing start-up ventures. Keba and Victor, are developing ProcureLink, a blockchain procurement system that ensures tamper-proof records, transparent bidding, and automated contract management and Marc is developing CaseCleared,a legal finance platform that tokenizes pending invoices and settlements, giving law firms and expert witnesses faster access to cash. Here is a photo of Keba and Victor from our most recent pitch-night ...

... and another of Marc, pitching CaseCleared to the audience.

Arguably, the biggest success we've had comes from Gregory Andrews, another one of our students, who has had tremendous success with his start-up, Tata iMali, which provides low-cost point of sale (POS) machines to vendors. Tata iMali was named of one of the FinTech Startups to watch in South Africa by TechCabal and Greg successfully raised seed funding from no other than Interledger's own Stefan Thomas as an angel investor.

These stories highlight the vibrancy of innovation at the Hub, the critical role of the hackathon as the idea bed for many startups,, and the quality of these ideas, despite the young age of the founders, all of whom are students. Most importantly, all of this would not be possible without the Interledger scholarships for our students, many of whom would otherwise not be able to afford the costs of tuition.

We look forward to building on this success into 2026!

Representation in our degree

We've always taken pride in the extent of representation in our students, with 51% of the students we've so far admitted into the degree across the 8 years of its inception being women, an especially marginalized group in the FinTech. Despite our best efforts, the share of women in our degree fell to less than 25% last year.

To address this, we did several things, most notably

Sponsoring and working closely with the Women in Computer Science (WiCS) student society at UCT to increase our visibility with women on campus
Undertook a Women in Tech campaign (details in the previous section)

Given these efforts, I'm proud to say that we've more than double the representation of women in our class of 2026, with women making up 50% of the cohort!

Recognition for our work

In November, we had the great honour of winning an award for Enchancing Financial Inclusion for the Hub's work in conjunction with the ILF. This award affirms the vital role universities play in advancing inclusive financial innovation through nurturing and empowering young people to build the technologies that will power the financial system of the future: one that is open, inclusive and shaped by the needs of the communities it serves.

Here is a photo of Lindi receiving the award on stage ...

... and another of Lindi and Greg (who was also at the awards, having been a nominee in a different category himself - once again showcasing the talent of our students!)

Communications and Marketing

We’ve been fortunate to have had a lot of media coverage highlighting the work we’ve been doing at the Hub.

This year, our hackathon received a lot of attention, including coverage on MSN South Africa BizCommunity, FinTech News Africa, ITWeb, Lifestyle and Tech, Silicon Africa and Connecting Africa. Media analytics provided to us from a marketing firm told us that the combined media following our hackathon reached a staggering 545,000 people!

We also did a lot of work to create more awareness about the NextGen Education Grant among South African universities. One example of this was an interview that Lindi did on ENCA, one of the largest news channels in South Africa. You can watch that here. We believe these efforts will see more South African universities become part of the ILF ecosystem going forward.

Our students have also been in the news. Greg, who I mentioned earlier, has been making waves with his start-up, Tata iMali, and profiled in an article by UCT, and Tata iMali was named one of the FinTech Startups to watch in South Africa by TechCabal.

Darryl and Siphiwe have been highlighted by UCT for placing 7th (out of 200 student startups!) in the 2025 Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) Entrepreneurship Intervarsity Competition!

Finally, UCT also did two features on us this year,one highlighting a pitch night we held for all of the student startups we are currently working to incubate at the Hub and another more recent one profiling our successes this year.

What’s Next?

Extended Hackathon reach

The hackathon has quickly become one of our flagship initiatives with the Interledger Foundation, attracting over 110 student participants across its first two years. In 2025, we took the vital step of inviting students from other Western Cape universities, which significantly enriched the diversity of perspectives and ideas. In 2026, we will extend this momentum nationally by making the hackathon accessible to students from disadvantaged regions across South Africa.

New coursework

Given the rapid rate at which technology is evolving, we will starting an extensive refresh of our academic programme over the next two years. Next year, we'll re-fresh one of our course Digital Economics. The revised course will be structured around four broad themes: digital payments and interoperability, digital platforms and market structures, financial products, and artificial intelligence.
By approaching digital payments, platforms, financial products, and AI through the lens of developing country realities, the course ensures that issues of equity and inclusion are placed at the centre of analysis. Over the coming years, this course will expose hundreds of UCT students to these debates, helping to build a pipeline of graduates able to engage critically with the design of digital financial systems in South Africa and beyond. A one-page brief outlining the structure of the course is included as an annexure.

Innovation that builds on Open Payments

Several promising Interledger-based ideas emerged from the 2024 and 2025 student hackathons. These ideas, however, did not progress beyond the hackathon, mainly due to the lack of structured support and encouragement.

Conversely, the Hub runs a successful nine-month pre-incubator programme, where we assist aspiring student entrepreneurs in developing their start-ups. Our start-ups have been highly successful in fundraising, having raised $1.48 million so far.

Going forward, we want to work to combine these two worlds. We will work to incubate a start-up building on Interledger, ideally one from the hackathon itself, each year, and provide them with the business development and technical support (from our technical specialists) to grow their idea. The goal being to create a pipeline of student start-ups building on Interledger, who in the future would be eligible to apply for the digital financial services grants.

The Interledger Community 🌱

Interledger Community Call: PCH Mexico | 10 June 2026

Deeper Look: People's Clearinghouse (PCH)

People's Clearinghouse — ILF Grant Final Report

Roberto Valdovinos for The People's Clearinghouse ・ Mar 31

Open Payments Month and Open Payments Accelerator:

The Currency of Community: Finance, Culture, and What Comes Next

My Learnings from Running a Technical Activity for our ILF Community

The ILF Community Is Not One Audience

How the Learning Month Was Structured

What the Data Said

What I Think It Means

The Hard Part: Getting a Pulse on a Segmented Community

What I'll Do Differently

The Signals That Mattered Most

What's Next

Safeguarding financial data, empowering civil society — ILF Grant Progress Report

Brief Project Description

Project Update

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

Communications and Marketing

What’s Next?

Community Support

Additional Comments

Relevant Links/Resources (optional)

Nepal Interledger Financial Network

Relevant Links/Resources (optional)

Covenant University Partners ILF on the Next Gen Program

The Problem: A Fragmented Financial World

The Solution: Open Payments and the Interledger Protocol (ILP)

What is Happening at Covenant University?

Key Updates

People's Clearinghouse — ILF Grant Final Report

Brief Project Description

Project Update

The arc: January 2024 to March 2026

The capstone: the live demo at ILF Summit 2025

A reflection: from clearinghouse to full digital ecosystem

Technical deliverables: completed

Authorization process: at the threshold

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

The communities and their financial institutions

The migrants

The developers

Alignment with the Interledger Foundation's mission

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

The CNP: Rafiki-to-PCH bridge

The switch: building on Mojaloop

Core banking system integrations

SPEI integration: connecting to Mexico's national payment network

Production environment: built for the Central Bank

Mobile app and PISP: banking for institutions without apps

AML: real-time compliance as a shared service

Settlement, fees, and reporting

Documentation and regulatory submission

Key social and collaborative activities

Oaxaca Work Week, August 2024

Rafiki Work Week, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, August 2024

Interledger Summit 2024, Cape Town, South Africa

Payments Canada Summit panel, Toronto, February 2025

Rafiki Work Week, Cluj, Romania, July 2025

Oaxaca Work Week, 2025

Mexico Student Hackathons, September 2025

Mumbai Fintech Fest, October 2025

Pahuatlán Workshop, October 2025

Interledger Summit 2025, Mexico City

Communications and Marketing

International press coverage

"The People's Code", a documentary film

"The Missing Link": academic paper on remittances and development

Broader outreach: Toronto, India, and beyond

What’s Next?

Authorization and launch

Cross-border operations: finding the right partners

Commercial rollout: a fieldwork process

Offline payments

Community Support

Additional Comments

Five Years After Being a Grantee: How Things Are Going for Me