The Interledger Community 🌱: Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay

Summer Update - AgnostiPay

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 09:27:47 +0000

Project update

As the summer comes to a close, we wanted to provide an update on the last quarter and the changes that have taken place.

For those who are new to AgnostiPay, we would like to introduce our project. Our goal is to go beyond the traditional Payment Service Providers by creating open-source decentralized software that enables users to become their own "Payment Service Providers", using their own Financial Service Providers such as banks and exchanges.

Through our SDK, users can access their financial services from any device, platform, or wallet service. Our direct core banking/financial service integrations allow for convenient multi-hop transactions, which enables demand-driven transaction volumes to flow toward the ILP network.

In essence, we provide practical tools that allow new users to conveniently join the ILP network by directly connecting their accounts to an ILP-enabled wallet or node service. If you want to learn more about how AgnostiPay's decentralized customer-centric tooling can benefit your ILP-enabled service, please reach out to us.

Progress on Objectives

As we transition from the Research phase to the Prototype Development phase, we have the support of a local and international community of developers, stakeholders, and interested parties. Our objectives are adapting to fit the new milestones, and we will provide more detailed updates on them soon. We have made slight changes to the original three objectives, which were to prove 1) technical feasibility, 2) Developer and community engagement, and 3) Business engagement. The "technical feasibility update" is now called the Technical Update, as we have already validated the core technical premises in the previous phase. In this section, we will share development updates, new technological insights, and added features to our tech stack. The other two objectives of Community Engagement and Business Engagement will also slightly change as we are adding a consortium of stakeholders and business service contracts. More on these changes in the future updates.

Technical Update
Even though summer is typically a slow time in Europe, it hasn't stopped the flow of creativity. We've had many discussions with developers both locally and internationally, and have received valuable insights and suggestions from members of the community and prospective companies. These have led to slight adjustments and added features that will improve the value and security of AgnostiPay technology, particularly with regard to key management and transaction Playbooks. For instance, the addition of provider-side playbook hosting creates additional incentives for Providers to actively use and contribute to the open financial ecosystem. We plan to share these insights with the community in the upcoming months. If you're interested in reading our Technical Whitepaper and getting early access, please contact us directly.

Developer & Community Engagement
We have attracted new developers through various channels such as events, emails, and direct messages, and we are grateful to ILF for featuring us. We engaged in both one-on-one and group meetings with developers to delve deeper into specific areas of our technology stack. We appreciate the experts and enthusiasts who shared their insights and knowledge with us. Some of these individuals were pioneers in the creation of online Payment Service Providers, serving as founders or CTOs of companies that have established themselves as industry leaders over the past two decades.

Furthermore, we've taken a step forward by establishing a consortium of local stakeholders who are keen on creating a public and decentralized payment infrastructure that empowers end-users. We'll share more details on this in the upcoming months.

Business Engagement
We're in discussions with several major companies to launch pilot projects within their organizations. The feedback we've received from C-level managers, product owners, and developers working at these companies has given us confidence that we're on the right track and can successfully execute these initiatives. We look forward to continuing our work with these organizations in the road map ahead.

What’s next, Planning:

One of the important next steps for the prototype phase is building the actual MVP SDK that can be directly used as a pilot within these prospective companies and can be played with by developers. This MVP SDK can showcase our product value to our local European community (or, broadly speaking, all countries that fall under the EU-wide PSD2 law). And direct fiat transaction volumes towards the ILP network.

Contact
Want to reach out directly?
Email: connect ‘at’ agnostipay.io
Website: https://agnostipay.org/

Or follow other our socials here:
X: https://x.com/agnostipay
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/agnostipay
ILP community forum: https://community.interledger.org/agnostipay

Progress report - #2 - AgnostiPay

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Wed, 03 May 2023 09:58:13 +0000

Project Update

Hi there! This second Progress Report concludes our first Prototype phase, where we did research and searched for technical validation. We will provide an enriched summary of our previous monthly updates and add some updates that happened during March and May. All the last monthly reports of our Financial Service Research Grant you can read back here: https://community.interledger.org/agnostipay

Our open-source project AgnostiPay aims to create decentralized financial connector technology based on 'transaction playbooks' that can be sent between end-users and direct client-side integrations with end-users' own financial services providers (e.g., banks, exchanges, wallets) to execute transactions and request account information. Any developer or company can add the AgnostiPay SDK to their own app, node or website to enable reduced payment fees and add more convenience for end-users. Via the ‘AgnostiPay ILP Provider’ we plan to build, the fiat network is connected to all possible ILP nodes. This can increase the number of transactions sent to the ILP network.

As the amount of open-source integrations with financial service providers worldwide in the AgnostiPay library grows, the value of the project will increase and it will be easier for developers to add their own local financial service provider to the open-source library.

AgnostiPay acts as a financial service integrator and enabler of ILP technology. We support the adoption of ILP by being on the client-facing or people side of the tech stack. AgnostiPay can help ILP node and wallet builders enable their end-user to directly connect their financial service providers (e.g. the end-user's current banks, exchanges, and wallets) to ILP nodes. For the end-user, this means they can manage all their financial services conveniently and unlock currency-agnostic (peer-to-peer) payments.

"In other words, AgnostiPay connects people on the client-side and ILP connects ledgers on the back-end side, combined they can make agnostic value exchange possible for anyone worldwide."

In relation to our original grant proposal, one of the important learnings was that we discovered that adding a centralized 'federated service' (a concept explained in our technical White Paper) into the network can be a pivotal catalyst for the adoption of AgnostiPay and ILP. As this centralized service would need to be licensed by the local authorities, we currently have three scenarios to get to this license.

‘Build’ it from the ground up (requiring a hefty investment and lead time).
‘Buy’ a licensed player (option pending, higher initial cost, drastically decreasing go to market time. Reach out for an inquiry).
‘Collaborate’ with a licensed player (option pending, currently the favorable road as it allows us to focus on the core AgnostiPay technology).

During the next MVP building phase we shall make a decision which of the three options will be the best fit to reach adoption efficiently.

Progress on objectives (and related key activities)

In our original research proposal, we set out to validate three objectives: technical feasibility, gain developer & community engagement, and discover business value.

Technical Feasibility Update

The most important of our three objectives was proving the technical feasibility of initiating payments and getting account information, client-side and based on end-users' credentials. During our research phase, we have proven this feasibility by building a technical demo consisting of an example webshop and a mobile app with the AgnostiPay core technology installed and executing direct account-to-account transactions.

In addition, we condensed our research over the last couple of months into a 25-page technical White paper. This collaborative and iterative process helped us to discover that adding an Open Payments integration as a 'provider' gives us an elegant way to speak ILP and communicate directly with Rafiki (and, in time, Dassie) nodes. In return, this enables Rafiki nodes to connect with an end-users own financial services that they are currently using.

As described in the introduction, and as a result of the same iterative research approach, we also discovered that by adding a centralized - and licensed - federated service, we could provide a pivotal catalyzer for the adoption of AgnostiPay and ILP. This centralized federated service, that will store end-user credentials on a central server, could be a great way to directly offer a GNAP enriched ILP communication service, fully covering the European market. It can also increase end-user convenience and a way to conveniently connect a Rafiki node - all based on the open-source code to decrease costs drastically and stimulate adoption and contributions for the benefit of all.

Developer & Community Engagement

The second most important objective was gaining developer and community engagement, both in a local and international context. The engagements and interactions helped us to better understand, research and communicate the core components and technical ideas behind AgnostiPay. We have various data points to share. For example, over 50 developers and stakeholders worldwide have helped us write our Technical White paper. In the last couple of months, we also have gotten reach outs of new enthusiastic developers that want to chip in with building the open-source code. We are grateful for the genuine interest and are building a group of developers to help us build and grow in the next phase.

Lastly, we have successfully organized the first version of our Open Tech Jam Sessions event. In this event we have shared our project's progress and invited developers from our local community to take part in an open-panel discussion, which invited the audience to take part in the conversation. The event was wrapped up with great drinks and bites, resulting in an exhilarating evening where the participants enjoyed conversations on AgnostiPay, Interledger and open-source technology. The event resulted in new developers wanting to actively join us on our shared journey and new stakeholders in the Dutch ecosystem offering us access to new potential use cases to showcase value. In short, we look forward to our following events in the coming period!

Business Engagement

The third most crucial objective in this phase was clarifying the problem-solution fit, underpinning the long-term feasibility of AgnostiPay open-source technology. Since we allocated more time to talk to the various stakeholders, we gained a deeper understanding of the various underlying problem-solution fits. Especially for webshops, (webshop) SaaS platforms and fintech (wallet) apps. These areas will be the main focus of our MVP SDK in the next MVP phase.

Over the last three months, we also experienced a significant increase in interest and traction by market players. In the local context this was - among other factors - significantly increased by attending the Dutch two-day event called the Web Winkel Vakdagen, one of the largest conferences for webshops in Northern Europe. All in all, this helped us create a list of leads that want to use our SDK once it is ready and are committed to contributing to our consortium of stakeholders, which both helps us with a "buy signal" of our technology proposition and as a possible way to ensure the long term feasibility of the open-source project.

Moreover, the business and the community engagement in this first Research phase also helped us to create an additional backlog of potential use-cases. During the next phase we will order them in relation to how much value they can add to ILP and AgnostiPay.

Communications, marketing and business development

We want to highlight our exciting communication and marketing efforts. During the early stages of our project, we prioritized direct interaction with stakeholders in our local ecosystem to gain valuable insights and feedback. Additionally, we created informative and engaging communication materials in Dutch for webshop owners and webshop SaaS parties.

To share our vision and technical knowledge with the broader public, we developed a comprehensive Vision paper, which was shared on the ILP forum, and a detailed White paper, which we shared with over 50 stakeholders in the ecosystem. As this information can be substantial, we plan to make it more easily digestible for a wider audience by sharing it in an open git book format, providing an initial answer to feedback received.

We hosted our first successful event in line with our commitment to community building. Attendees were thrilled with the community's incredible energy, food, and enthusiasm. We are already looking forward to hosting our next event, which promises to be even more exciting and engaging.

What’s next?

In the MVP building phase we will take the initial research work and product concept to the next level by developing a MVP that addresses real-life use cases. The next stage will involve stakeholders collaborating to ensure that the product meets their needs and adds value in real-world scenarios.

As we continue to develop our product, we will continue to grow our list of leads interested in using or distributing our SDK. This will involve targeted outreach and engagement with potential partners, stakeholders and end-users, as well as ongoing efforts to improve and refine our messaging and value proposition. To support these efforts, we will establish an AgnostiPay "Technical Service Provider" (TSP) as a separate entity, in addition to the open-source code foundation, during the MVP phase. The TSP will be able to provide DevOps to businesses looking to use our technology commercially.

Finally, we will be directing more energy toward growing our community of developers and stakeholders. This will involve creating opportunities for engagement and collaboration, such as hosting events, participating in online forums and communities, and providing resources and support for developers interested in working with our technology. Building a solid and engaged community will be critical as we prepare for the scale-up phase of our project, and we are committed to creating an inclusive and supportive environment for all stakeholders involved in our ecosystem.

What community support would benefit your project?

Community support is critical to the success of our project, and we welcome any feedback or contributions that can help us improve and grow. Specifically, we are looking for support in two areas:

Firstly, we would appreciate any critical feedback on our White Paper, which is a crucial resource for understanding the technical aspects of our project. We welcome all feedback from stakeholders interested in engaging with our project and contributing to its growth and development. While we plan to publish the White Paper in a dynamic open git-book format in the future, it is currently available in Google doc format.

Secondly, we are actively seeking talented and passionate developers interested in contributing and participating in the next MVP phase. A diverse and engaged community of developers is essential to the success of the AgnostiPay project, and we are committed to providing opportunities for collaboration and engagement. If you are a developer interested in working with our technology and contributing to the next development phase, we would be thrilled to hear from you. Please don't hesitate to message us to learn more about how you can get involved!

Relevant links/resources (optional)

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

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

Website:
https://agnostipay.io/

Monthly Report #5 - AgnostiPay

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 10:45:28 +0000

Project Introduction

Hi, there! In our fifth month of being part of the international cohort of Financial Service grantees we are creating great traction, both among our local Dutch community of online businesses and within the ILP ecosystem. For those who are not aware yet, we at AgnostiPay are creating an open-source ‘toll-free financial highway’ accessible for everyone. With our technology you can connect with the end-users' needs to conveniently take control of their own local financial services from a signal place - in your app, webshop or platform. By conveniently onboarding and enabling value flow - through easy top-ups into the ILP network, it puts ILP to work for a large scale audience.

If you want to read up what we did and learned before, our previous updates can be found here:

Progress on objectives

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

Technical Feasibility Update

Over the last month we gathered feedback on our technical White paper, by a great group of enthusiastic developers supporting AgnostiPay - you know who you are, many thanks for that! Due to this feedback and subsequently diving even deeper into the underlying content, we did further research into possible decentral communication architectures and frameworks. Among those are WebRTC, Noise protocol and libp2p, which seem to be interesting solutions to our challenges.

Also we used this month to further research and prototype financial service Providers, to better understand how we should define the specific integration ‘Manifests’ and ‘Plugins’ for the Providers (such as exchanges and other local banks). We also dove deeper into defining transaction Playbooks - which we use to govern transaction flows across the different Providers. Specifically into the concept of ‘Playbook lifecycles’ that defines the beginning and end of a transaction flow.

As you may have noticed - because of the reason described above - we therefore did have some delays with sharing the technical White paper in public. We are nearly there and would love one additional round of feedback. So if you are a developer and interested in our technology, don't hesitate to reach out and get a sneak preview at our current draft version.

Developer & Community Engagement

During the last month we continued the conversations with various stakeholders in the local ecosystem. We shared our vision and progress with some newly interested developers and received great feedback on our Whitepaper from an international ring of enthusiastic developers. We are looking forward to hosting a physical meetup to bring all of the stakeholders and developers together to celebrate what we achieved so far and look forward to the exciting steps we are about to take.

Besides the tech-side of the community we also started extensively engaging with other stakeholders in the local ecosystem. When it comes to a ‘toll-free financial highway’, specifically online businesses such as webshops and saas platforms seemed to be very interested in our proposition - as it can drastically reduce their operating cost and allows them to take back control over their online payments. In the next section we elaborate on how we are setting up a consortium of online businesses to move beyond the problem-solution fit and move towards a product-market fit of a beta version of the AgnostiPay SDK.

Business Engagement

In the last month we started to build a consortium of Dutch online business owners. We connected with various webshop owners and webshop integrator service platforms, of various sizes, but among them are the most important in the region for SMB’s - covering both pure online webshops and offline-online hybrid forms. Through these market stakeholder conversations we collectively discovered that we should first build a consortium with webshop integrator service platforms. Because they can then later conveniently provide the AgnostiPay infrastructure to webshop owners - who are more often prioritizing operations above the tech side of their webshop business.

Interestingly enough, we already found the first providers of such webshop integration services willing to be actively involved in building, deploying and maintaining this ‘toll-free financial highway’. We believe that by going step-by-step and truly understanding the different problem-solution fits for each stakeholder we can find the right product-market fit to provide the most leverage value each step of the way.

What’s Next: Planning

We look forward to making more progress on building the local consortium, and further formalize collaborations with (ILP) community partners. In the coming month we aim to share our technical whitepaper in a more public way - since we are finally getting to the level we are (almost!) comfortable sharing it. So, once again, if you would like to have a bit earlier early access to the more technical White paper and share your feedback with us on our new draft version, reach out to us directly. In the meantime, we are looking forward to all the other follow-up conversations planned for this month and continuing to ride this wave together!

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

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

Progress report - #1 - AgnostiPay

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 10:49:25 +0000

Project Update

Hi there! In this first Progress Report we will provide an enriched summary of our previous Monthly updates and add some updates that happened during January. All the previous monthly reports of our Financial Service Research Grant you can read back here: https://community.interledger.org/agnostipay

With AgnostiPay we are creating decentralised open-source payment connector middleware (or technically an SDK) that any developer can add to their own app, website or SaaS platform. The AgnostiPay library is open to any developer to easily add their own local financial service provider, which then in turn can be used by any other developer worldwide.

AgnostiPay acts as an financial service integrator and enabler of ILP technology. We support the adoption of ILP by being on the client-facing or people side of the tech stack. AgnostiPay can help ILP node and wallet builders to enable their end-user to directly connect all their own financial service providers (e.g. the end-user’s current banks, exchanges and wallets) to the ILP services. For the end-user this means that they can manage all their own financial services in a convenient way and unlock currency agnostic peer-to-peer payments.

“In other words AgnostiPay connects people on the client-side and ILP connects ledgers on the back-end side, combined they can make agnostic value exchange possible for anyone in the world.”

One of the important changes in relation to our original grant proposal came through the rise of Dassie, which also aims to create client-side ILP nodes. Something we set out to do in our original research proposal. Once the client-side Dassie nodes are live we currently pivoted to provide a direct integration possibility for a personal Dassie node. This will enable the Dassie end-user to not only use the ILP technology directly for e.g. streaming payments, but also directly connect their own financial services providers to orchestrate all their own financial transaction flows, both inside and outside the ILP network.

Progress on objectives (and related key activities)

Technical Feasibility Update

In our original research proposal we set out to validate three objectives. The most important one was getting technical feasibility of our specific solution, that in contrast to current financial service solutions in the market, runs completely client-side and peer-to-peer. Our technical fully open-source solution allows the end-user (whether that is for example a webshop owner or a mobile app user) to take control of their own financial service providers (e.g. banks, exchanges or wallets), and manage their own internal transaction flows through their own services and enabling payment streaming to ILP enabled providers. We just finished our first technical demo that demonstrates the value of both an AgnostiPay webshop and a mobile app use-case - and currently is live for a local Dutch bank.

Developer & Community Engagement

The second most important objective is getting developer and community traction on the idea behind AgnostiPay and active engagement by developers in our local Dutch community and through our global network of the ILP community and cohort members. We are delighted to share the traction we are getting in our local Dutch network, through direct community interactions and word-of-mouth among developers. In addition, we are also getting many positive indications of interest from the broader ILP community and cohort members worldwide. Something we aim to build and expand on in the coming months and future development phases.

Business Engagement

The third important objective for this prototype phase was clarifying a problem-solution fit in the business context, in order to validate the long term feasibility of AgnostiPay open-source technology. Also on this business side we already got great initial confirmation on our problem-solution fit, ranging from webshop, app and platform use-cases, both in and outside the ILP community. In the coming months we are aiming to solidify the partnerships and use-cases to underpin our MVP case.

Communications, marketing and business development

In addition to the activities described above, in relation to the core objectives, we want to highlight some of our communication efforts. First off, we are happy to share that we just published our Vision Paper on the ILP forum, which describes the ideas and vision behind AgnostiPay. The Vision paper is aimed at the broader ecosystem of stakeholders and hopefully enthuses developers to look forward to our technical White paper - which is currently 80% ready.

In our effort to get the (local) ecosystem of developers and stakeholders on board for our journey ahead we did a number of things: we shared monthly updates on the ILP forum, actively engaged with local developer, tech and crypto communities, set-up dozens of one-on-one conversations and reached out to our cohort members. The cadence and combination of these efforts helped us to fold in developers that want to work on AgnostiPay (both locally and globally), achieve initial positive word-of-mouth and build momentum.

this AI generated image is a representation of an open-garden technology creating momentum.

What’s next?

We are currently looking forward to releasing our technical White paper. So if you are a developer, and want to get early access to our draft version, feel free to reach out via our website, socials or the comments below. For the coming period we are also excited about fleshing out the details to underpin the case for our next MVP phase. Thus, in relation to the latter we are looking forward to continuing the conversations with our cohort members and online businesses (both locally and globally) to truly and deeply understand the problem-solution fit and working towards product-market fit in our next MVP phase.

What community support would benefit your project?

We would greatly appreciate it if we can get feedback on our Vision Paper, technical White paper draft, or if you want to join us on future workgroup sessions that will help to define the initial SDK outline. Something we want to set-up during this prototype phase, so we can build and deploy it in our MVP phase.

Relevant links/resources

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

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

AgnostiPay - Vision paper

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 11:00:06 +0000

Imagine 2033

Imagine a world ten years from now where anyone can directly exchange any kind of value with anyone in the world. Human centric convenient payments and the separation of ‘end-user credentials’ or keys from ‘services’ have become the standard model in the financial infrastructure. Once the individual has the keys to a diverse set of financial services and available resources, being in control to automate any value conversion or transaction flow becomes the default reality for everyone.

With AgnostiPay open-source technology we envision a world wherein we collectively empower the individual to take control over their own keys and thereby conveniently manage their financial services, resources and values. And thus empowering the individual - with AgnostiPay technology for developers - in a similar way as one should be able to freely speak their own languages and hold, develop and mix one's own customs and culture.

Just as technology made it possible to this day to communicate and share information with anyone in the world, so should the exchange of value within the next ten years. And doing all this while the individual stays in control of their own value(s), keys and services.

Global effort on the development of AgnostiPay could promise this future in under ten years.

The current situation: closed-gardens

and fractured solutions

If we look at the current options an individual has, we see a globally fractured landscape of closed-garden financial solutions. Meaning, various separate third parties - or closed-gardens - that provide financial services to the individual, always do so for an additional cost above a basic bookkeeping or ledger fee, which they ask through their gatekeepers. Such closed-gardens are fragmented in their global reach, only selectively integrating with other financial services - reducing convenience for the individual - and due to their additional use cost they inherently exclude humans worldwide to participate in a global financial system. So, in other words, very far from the ideals of a fair and equity based access to the global financial system.

However, it is the current shift in legal thinking by governments in, for example the European Union, that puts the individual ‘end-user’ back in control of their own financial services and provide legal momentum for a new reality to grow. When we combine this with the rise of new technologies - such as the Interledger protocol (ILP) that makes it possible to send and stream value payments between ledgers for free - we can see light through the cracks of the problem described above. Especially, if we factor in the important shift in end-user’s needs to centralize management over their own financial services for their own convenience.

Our contribution: an open garden technology

Our contribution to the current landscape of solutions is an open-garden technology that empowers the individual end-user to conveniently take control of all their own financial services from their own device. More precisely, AgnostiPay is an open-source payment connector technology, based on ‘end-user credentials’ or API-keys, that a developer can add as a 'software development kit' (SDK) to their own app, ecommerce store or SaaS platform to connect with the end-users needs, whether that end-user is an individual human or business organization.

this AI generated image is a representation of an open-garden technology.

Our open-source technology is also designed to empower developers worldwide to add their own local financial service provider integration as a ‘provider’. The reciprocal structure then allows that same developer to directly use all the other ‘providers’ for their own end-users. This possibility to add your own localized integrations to the open-garden gives our solution a built-in adaptability to changing services and needs, and allows the enabling of localized value networks to connect with the global financial system. As any end-user can become their own on- and off-ramp to any kind of network they are personally connected with.

Tech architecture

We elaborate in-depth on our tech architecture in our dedicated technical Whitepaper. In this paper we provide a short overview of our technology. The AgnostiPay core architecture is setup in a completely decentralized way, meaning that the technology runs completely client-side on a device and does not require a 3rd party back-end server to operate. The AgnostiPay SDK is built from a ‘legal first’ principle and fully complies with the local KYC and AML requirements. The open-source technology does so by delegating these requirements to the underlying financial services of the individual end-user itself, and is based on the legal principle that any sovereign individual should be able to fully control their own financial services.

AgnostiPay consists of three simple layers and starts with a ‘credential layer’ that enables the end-user to store their own ‘end-user credentials’ or API-keys of their own financial services, client-side, directly on their own devices. In the ‘service layer’ our playbook protocol enables the set-up and orchestration of any possible kind of transaction flows, enabled by the end-users own services. On the bottom ‘ledger layer’ we will find the specific client-side integrations with the underlying ledgers connected to the end-users own financials services executed by their own stored keys.

How do we get there?

By placing the end-user and its needs in the center of our technological solution and by creating an actual open-garden through open-source code. This open-source approach enables developers to add integrations to their own local financial services (in a standardized way). Allowing the end-user to use, transact and exchange any kind of currency or value, independent of what kind of platform, protocol or value they would like to use.

In addition, the ambitious goal is achievable through generating both international and localized awareness working on community collaboration among developers and stakeholders. But most importantly working together with enthusiastic and inspiring individuals and communities like Interledger, who bring positive and constructive energy and are aligning behind the principle idea of an financial open-garden, that is open to any human being.

We will set up a foundation whose sole purpose is to keep AgnostiPay’s code open-source and free for everyone to use. Above and beyond this, we will focus on aligning stakeholder values and interest as we will elaborate in the next section.

Stakeholders and business value

The AgnostiPay solution builds and grows on aligning the various stakeholder interests. For the developer it becomes easy and free to integrate a payments module in their app, ecommerce store or saas platform. For online businesses, such as webshops or SaaS platforms it becomes easy to take back control over their own payments - as they don't need a third party service to control their own payments infrastructure. For decentralized Web3 projects it allows the end-user to be their own off and on-ramp, while being compliant with the local laws, removing current business adoption hurdles.

In a similar fashion AgnostiPay helps the Interledger protocol to create a foothold in the world outside of the Interledger network and simultaneously creates a beachhead for ILP to unlock its potential to the general public.

*Helping the ILP to fold the outside in, by allowing the end-user to directly connect their own services to ILP enabled services, wallets and nodes.

How you can help

Inspired by the vision? You can help by:

Writing or reviewing code.
Join the discussion on our technical White Paper
Providing input for potential use-cases.
Write awesome copy to spread the word.
Help to create visuals and other forms of communication. Reach out to us directly on: connect ‘at’ agnostipay.io

Stay up to date, follow our socials:
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/agnostipay
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/agnostipay
ILP community forum: https://community.interledger.org/agnostipay

Website:
https://agnostipay.io/

Monthly Report #3 - AgnostiPay

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 12:37:41 +0000

Project Introduction

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

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

Progress on objectives

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

Technical Feasibility Update

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

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

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

Developer & Community Engagement

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

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

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

Business Engagement

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

What’s Next: Planning

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

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

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

Monthly Report #2 - AgnostiPay

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:17:54 +0000

Project Introduction

Hi, there! This is our second project update after the second month of the Financial Service Research Grant from the Interledger Foundation. The first project update - that includes a short part about why we do this with AgnostiPay - which you can find here. In short: we put ILP to work for a large scale audience.

But to make the rest of the report more easily digestible for both old and new followers of our project we shall repeat what we do with AgnostiPay. With AgnostiPay we are creating a decentralized open-source payment connector middleware that any developer can add to their websites, apps or services - for free. Simultaneously, the AgnostiPay Technology helps the ILP network to ‘fold the outside in’, because it enables every person to be their own on-and-off ramp using their own financial service providers, such as banks and exchanges.

Progress on objectives

Every month we try to update the ILP community with our progress. Hopefully this public sharing helps us to connect with like minded individuals across the globe to make our shared ILP vision reality. Because together is the only way we can truly make this happen. So if you would like more information, or think you can help us at the points we are currently at, don't hesitate to reach out to us directly via email to set up an introduction call.

Technical Feasibility Update

We have finalized the different architectures that will be available, their differences and listed their dependencies and associated risks. We have decided to start a new research iteration with a PoC that aims to prove a basic vertical working of our architecture. This includes the creation of a client-facing PoC that will allow users to control a Dutch bank account via their phone and transfer money via a draft network based on Agnostipay principles. After the bank integration has been completed, we will focus on webshop and crypto-exchange draft integrations.

For the other assumptions - like a fully decentral network architecture with a federated services structure - we are waiting on the maturity of several dependencies to continue.

Finally we have laid out the structure and topics for the technical whitepaper and have started filling in the first paragraphs. We have done a lot of research and it’s now a great moment to summarize those learnings in text. The coming month we will have a first draft with most of the blanks filled in.

Developer & Community Engagement

Over the last month a lot of interesting community engagement happened, and there were multiple things that stood out. Firstly it was of course the ILP Summit in New Orleans that opened up a massive amount of new relations within the ILP community. (We wrote about it earlier here. During the summit we got an overwhelmingly positive response from the developers and other attendees on AgnostiPay. Specifically on how they could potentially add our middleware to their applications and services to provide value to their end-users. Among them were cool co-book writing apps, streaming platforms and other interesting projects such as Rafikie, Fynbos and Dassie.

Moreover, since this month it's not only Latin America and Africa, but also founders and developers from Asia that are interested in the AgnostiPay solution for their own local financial services. More specifically we heard that our AgnostiPay middleware is “exactly what we need for our ILP enabled service”. That is, of course, always great to hear!

Within the scarce time left last month we also had some informal followup conversations with community dev’s in the local dutch ecosystem. Specifically during the Dutch Blockchain Week - which Jasper helped to co-organise (the biggest Dutch Blockchain/Web3 event in The Netherlands) - was a great moment to get feedback during the many informal interactions.

Business Engagement

As an additional consequence from the ILP Summit, we had a massive amount of positive business related interactions. For example on how we can collaborate with others to: set-up AgnostiPay powered ILP nodes, get an overview of potential use-cases of AgnostiPay in various apps and gain additional insight on how AgnostiPay can provide value to the ILP end-user.

During the Dutch Blockchain Week, various additional interested contacts were created. Ranging from the biggest players in the Web3 space to coincidental interactions with full service ecommerce platforms that were especially interested in AgnostiPay’s open-source proposition for their customers.

Similar responses were gathered during events in the beginning of last month in Lissabon. Among them were Web3 parties that were enthusiastic about the potential value AgnostiPay could add to their own end-users and overcome certain business hurdles they were facing.

What’s Next: Planning

For the next month we are looking forward to continuing working on our Vision Paper, creating a draft for our Technical Whitepaper and focus on getting all the technical feasibility checked off for the first version of our demo. In other words, the technical part has the main focus this month. But we shall also use this coming month to set up follow up calls with potential partners for this early research phase.

Want to stay up to date with our latest news?
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/agnostipay

Follow our other socials here:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/agnostipay
Discord: https://discord.gg/vXQPkBG4nk
ILP community forum: https://community.interledger.org/agnostipay

Or send us a direct email here:
connect@agnostipay.io

ILP Summit Reflections - AgnostiPay

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 11:16:03 +0000

We at AgnostiPay, an ILP Financial Service Provider grantee, had a great time at the last ILP Summit and we wanted to share some reflections on the great event.

Our goal in attending this event was to share our open-source proposition and get feedback. The response was overwhelmingly positive and ended up with many new connections and awell well as many new ideas to connect as to how to tune our proposition to the broader ILP ecosystem.

Introduction

I’m Jasper Voorendonk, flew in from The Netherlands to New Orleans, and currently being the representative for AgnostiPay. With AgnostiPay we create an open-source payment-service integration middleware that developers can use to integrate their end-users financial service providers directly into their own services, websites, or apps. This empowers everyone to become their own ‘payment service provider’ and helps the Interledger Protocol to fold the outside in, and increase the adoption of the ILP network and the value of the ILP nodes for the end-users.

I saw the ILP Summit as a great opportunity to learn about the current state of ILP, the strategic direction, and which challenges lie ahead. But most importantly I looked forward to meeting in person all the other grantees that I have sought out prior to the event in one-on-one video calls and continuing the conversation on potential synergies AgnostiPay could create for the ILP ecosystem and the end-users.

Key highlights about your participation at the Summit

Out of the many many highlights of this inspiring weekend the following two stood out:

The opportunity to present our open-source project AgnostiPay to all of the attendees during the first Summit day in the Conference hall. This was a great way to collect the initial (positive!) feedback on our proposition and planted the seeds for plenty of follow on conversations with attendees during the rest of the conference.

Meeting the other cohort members, the ILP foundation team members, and all the other active players within the ILP ecosystem in real life was the other big highlight. It was amazing to share good vibes, ideas, and new relations to co-create a positive impact in the world with the use of open-source tech.

The sheer amount of avenues of interest that opened up during the summit has been overwhelming. It created many further possibilities to connect our open-source middleware proposition with the Summit attendees and create synergy value for the end-user, and help the ILP ecosystem to ‘fold the outside in’.

Key takeaways from the Summit

The following two key takeaways stood out from the Summit:

Getting a direct line into the current state of the ILP, the ecosystem, and the related projects such as Rafiki, Dassie, and back-end services such as TigerBeetle was invaluable. Getting all the information from stakeholders directly gave us at the AgnostiPay team great insight in the current state of ILP and the direction of travel.

And last but not least, it was great to experience what happens when you get people from all over the world together who share a vision in a single location for an amazing weekend. A shared believe that open-source fintech is the future, an amazing opportunity to co-create valuable services for people in an increasingly interconnected world. This event is an absolutely amazing platform to help interested and interesting people to mingle, meet and connect with inspired ideas and good vibes. I guess they call this a Summit and this ILP Summit in NOLA was a truly special one! It has made me super excited for the future in general and ILP events to come in particular!

Want to stay up to date on the progress of AgnostiPay?
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/agnostipay
Follow us on The Interledger Forum:
https://community.interledger.org/agnostipay

Monthly Report #1 - AgnostiPay

Jasper Voorendonk - AgnostiPay — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 11:03:36 +0000

Project Introduction

Hi, there! This is our first project update after the first month of the Financial Service Research Grant from the Interledger Foundation. Because it’s our first time here on the forum we would like to briefly introduce our project and then directly jump into the progress on our objectives in relation to our technical, community and business aspects and the things we will do next.

The goal of AgnostiPay is to directly connect everyone with everyone and exchange any kind of value or currency between them without the need for a commercial third party. This will allow us to not only communicate and share information with anyone in the world directly - as we were able to unlock in the last 15 years - but also exchange value directly. A free and open-source technology stack that can make this happen can potentially change the form, speed and scale of our transactions and interactions - and can help us to collaborate on a global scale in a direct way.

How do we do this? By creating an open-source technology repository that allows any developer to add their own local financial service provider and simultaneously allows the end-user to operate these providers directly using their own credentials. We are convinced that the ILP protocol can fulfill an important role in our technology ecosystem, because it was designed as an open-source protocol to execute transaction sequences between any ledger in a decentralized way. Over the next 6 months we plan to demonstrate technical and practical feasibility, and grow our community of developers, both locally and globally to create localized integrations with local financial service providers.

However to reach the goal we can only do it by truly contributing and collaborating together. Do you want to be part of this movement and community? Reach out and jump in! Mail: connect@agnostipay.io.
Discord: https://discord.gg/E9bgHuRn

Progress on objectives

Every month we try to update the ILP community with our progress. Hopefully this public sharing helps us to connect with like minded individuals across the globe to make our shared vision reality. Because together is the only way we can make this happen. So if you would like more information, or think you can help us at the points we are currently at, don't hesitate to reach out to us directly via email to set up an introduction call.

Technical Feasibility Update
We investigated the possibilities around ILP for Agnostipay. These include setting up our own node, connecting to existing nodes, and researching possibilities to create an Agnostipay provider for Rafiki. For now, our main focus will be on the latter. This means we will be following the Rafiki process and will try to create a client based on the reference implementation (when both we and Rafiki are ready).

Moreover, we have worked on different possible architectures (varying in complexity, scale, and decentrality). These have been mapped in a global manner and we will be choosing what designs we will choose in which manner.

On the application side, we have started creating templates for both transaction playbooks and provider manifests. In the coming weeks we will be working on finishing v0.1 and be building a first playbook and provider to test the feasibility.

Developer & Community Engagement
Over the last month we had some great first introduction calls with many of the other ILP cohort members. Besides hearing the ambitious and inspiring ideas they are building we were excited by the positive initial interest we got for AgnostiPay. From founders and developers in Latin America to Africa they saw potential use-cases of AgnostiPay as an open-source middleware within their services, and the value it could add for their own end-users. Even more touching was that some of them directly saw the potential and added value of introducing the AgnostiPay idea within their own local developer communities to help build the truly localized financial service providers integrations in the shared open-source repository - while outlining the value that it could bring both locally and globally in tandem.

During this month we also reconnected in an informal way with local community leaders and members within The Netherlands and got a lot of positive feedback and interest to support Agnostipay. More developments will follow in the coming months.

Next month we are looking forward to the ILP conference in New Orleans and our follow-up conversations with the developers, founders and communities, both locally in The Netherlands and in the world.

Business Engagement
Via informal connections in our local Dutch network we are getting introduced to local online business within the Netherlands. Although our current main focus in this research grant is to prove the technical feasibility of our solution, we will also use this time to find a potential fit with Online businesses that want to take back control over their own payments. We are looking to interact with as many companies as possible to select the most promising use-cases that can serve as pilots for AgnostiPay during our next phase.

What’s Next: Planning

We are happy about the results and positive feedback we gathered and learned from in our kick-off month. In the coming months we are looking forward to sharing our Vision Paper and later our more technical Whitepaper on AgnostiPay. Simultaneously while we will be keeping the technical feasibility as our highest priority, we will continue being open to listen to the ways the open-source code can help developers, online apps and businesses, ILP cohort members and the people that want to spin up Tier 1 ILP nodes along the way. And last but not least: if you are looking to set up a Tier 1 node in Europe, please reach out! We are looking forward to team up and help with our local legal knowledge, network and open-source code to make this a success.

Follow our socials here:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/agnostipay
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/agnostipay
Discord: https://discord.gg/E9bgHuRn