The Interledger Community 🌱: Max Kurapov

Rafiki Updates - February 2026

Max Kurapov — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 11:36:59 +0000

Hello everyone!

February welcomes us with the first Rafiki release of the year: v2.3.0-beta. This version brings us an Open Payments feature, as well as improvements for integrators.

Key highlights

Grant Spent Amounts

To simplify how Open Payments clients track their grant spending, the new Grant Spent Amounts feature allows for direct querying of grant usage. By calling GET /outgoing-payment-grant with a valid GNAP access token belonging to an approved outgoing payment grant, clients can instantly retrieve the spent totals:

GET /outgoing-payment-grant HTTP/1.1
Authorization: GNAP 80UPRY5NM33OMUKMKSKU

{
  "spentReceiveAmount": {
    "value": "2500",
    "assetCode": "USD",
    "assetScale": 2
  },
  "spentDebitAmount": {
    "value": "2600",
    "assetCode": "USD",
    "assetScale": 2
  }
}

Before, when an Open Payments client application wanted to show to their users how much balance a user has left within their approved grant request (or how many funds have already been debited from their account in the form of outgoing payments), they would need to do the accounting themselves. Now, they can do it through this reliable server-side request.

Support for configuring multiple routes per peer

Previously, whenever an integrator created or updated a peer in Rafiki, they could only provide a single static ILP address of the peer, effectively requiring the destination address of any routed packet to match the peer’s address prefix exactly. Now, integrators can also provide a routes field in the backend Admin API createPeer and updatePeer requests: a list of ILP addresses which determine how ILP packets are routed, even if the destination address does not match the peer's ILP addres prefix. This essentially allows fine-tuning ILP's multi-hop payment configuration.

`completeIncomingPayment` backend Admin API

This new backend Admin API mutation allows integrators to mark local incoming payments or remote incoming payments (hosted on other Open Payments resource servers) as completed through a single API request. Before, this functionality was only possible through the Open Payments API.

Multi-tenancy improvement

Another addition to the backend Admin API is the introduction of the tenant field resolver for tenanted resources. Instead of just being able to get the tenantId field when querying tenanted resources, you can also directly resolve the full tenant object within the same request.

Next up

Other than continuing with the encrypted data exchange feature, we have started the Rafiki implementation for the Open Payments directed identity feature. This feature will allow Open Payment clients to get non-interactive grants (e.g. creating incoming payments) by presenting a JWK instead of their wallet address. You can see how this behaviour will be supported by seeing the new v1.3.0 release of the Open Payments API specifications.

See you next month!

Rafiki Updates - January 2026

Max Kurapov — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:16:48 +0000

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year! The Rafiki team is looking forward to a productive year of building and innovation ahead.

Here is what we are currently working on at the beginning of 2026:

Open Payments SDKs

We are on the final phases of adding a few more languages into our Open Payments ecosystem. Most recently, we have added GoLang SDK code snippets to the guides in our documentation. In the next few weeks, you should expect to see more detailed overviews of the SDKs at our Engineering Blog.

Encrypted Data Exchange

We are continuing to refine the encrypted data exchange feature in Rafiki for enabling transmission of sensitive data during payments. This requires updates to Rafiki Admin API and webhook events: we are making sure that these changes are clear as possible for integrators to get up to speed and begin using this feature.

Security audit

As mentioned in the previous update, we are in the process of doing a penetration testing company to run an audit of the Rafiki software. This work is ongoing, as the penetration testers are making sure that the new features that we have added since the last audit do not have any vulnerabilities.

Open Payments features

As of this week, we have begun scoping out work for enabling support for directed identity for non-interactive grant requests. Our first step will be making additions to the Open Payments API specifications.

Updated Architecture

A primary focus for 2026 is the roll out of an updated Rafiki architecture. Designed for high performance and increased scalability, this initiative ensures that as our integrators experience growth, the underlying infrastructure can scale to meet increased demand. Currently, we are in the process of refining how some of our payment flows will look like within the new system.

See you in February!

Rafiki Updates - December 2025

Max Kurapov — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:03:26 +0000

Hello everyone!

We have been quite busy across the team since the last update, mostly preparing for and hosting the 2025 Interledger Summit and Hackathon in Mexico City. As always, the Summit was a great opportunity to meet community members, grantees and partners to discuss and see the work being done in digital payments & financial inclusion.

Summit Presentations

If you didn't get a chance to attend the Summit this year, we have videos from the main stage and the Demo Lab available on our YouTube channel.

In particular, we wanted to highlight the Rafiki & Open Payments presentation from our team to give you an overview of what we've build over the last year: from the release of multi-tenancy, to the addition of several Open Payments features (such as Log-in with Open Payments & Grant Spent Amounts) to the Rafiki integration for the Interledger card (which was also presented in the Demo Lab).

Releases

In preparation for the summit, we released Rafiki version v2.0.0-beta, which officially included multi-tenancy support (with corresponding updated, versioned documentation), as well as version v2.2.0-beta, which contains two additional services: card-service and point-of-sale for, as you might have guessed, enabling card functionality within Rafiki.

We are planning a final release before the end of the year as well.

2026

Looking forward to next year, we have several items for our road-map:

Security audit

Rafiki is currently undergoing a security audit, as a follow-up to last year's audit. Together with the security and penetration testing company we are working with, our goal is to confirm that we have addressed all of the changes correctly, as well as test the additional features we have released.

Encrypted data exchange

We are continuing our work to finalize the encrypted data exchange feature. This will enable Rafiki integrators/ILP peers to exchange data securely between one another during ILP payments. We describe how this will work under the hood in Rafiki in the Summit presentation, if you would like more details about this project.

Updated architecture

One of our biggest initiatives for 2026 will be to complete an updated Rafiki architecture for increased performance and scalability. Other than working with integrators to add support for additional features they require, this initiative will support them in making sure it is easy to scale Rafiki to match their own rapid pace of growth and user adoption.

Additional Open Payments features

Besides adding additional Open Payments SDKs to support more languages, we will also be developing new Open Payments features, such as directed identity for non-interactive grant requests.

Thank you everyone for another great year of collaboration, and progress toward our shared goals. The Rafiki team wishes you a great holiday season!

Rafiki Updates - June 2025

Max Kurapov — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 15:01:09 +0000

Hello everyone! Here's what we've been up to over the last month:

People's Clearinghouse Work Week

Last month, several team members traveled to Oaxaca to collaborate with the People's Clearinghouse (PCH) team on advancing the integration of Rafiki within the US–Mexico remittance corridor. As with previous work weeks, we focused on multiple tracks, one of which was the Rafiki integration. Our goal was to address key questions raised by the PCH team and determine what updates or features Rafiki needs to support their requirements.

At a high level, there were three questions we focused on:

KYC (Know Your Customer) information exchange:
Working in a regulated space, PCH needs to be able to receive KYC about the sending person from the US entity. We brainstormed and planned out several ways this can be done in a generalized way for future Rafiki deployments as well.
Block payments on KYC/AML Failure
Related to the above, as part of the payment processing, PCH's Rafiki integration server needs to run AML (Anti-Money Laundering) checks, and block any potentially fraudulent transactions. For their use case, a Rafiki to Rafiki payment should not complete unless approved directly by the receiver (PCH). We discussed a few ways this can be done, through some additional communication between Rafiki and the integration server.
Payment confirmation
When an outgoing payment completes on the sending Rafiki's side (see webhook handler documentation), the Account Servicing Entity (ASE) debits the senders account. This happens in asynchronously with the receiver being credited when the receiving ASE processes an incoming payment completed webhook. In practice, these processes happen without much time in between. However, the PCH team asked: is there a way in Rafiki where the receiving ASE can notify the sending ASE about when funds actually get to the recipient? This is another question & objective we had during the work week that we were brainstorming solutions for.

In general, we found an overarching solution that handles these three questions/objectives - and we will be working hard throughout the year to incorporate some of the great discussions and feedback we've received in our cooperation with the team in Oaxaca.

Releases

This week, we are planning a release (actually, you can make that release*s* 😉) incorporating all of the work that we have been up to since May's v1.1.2-beta. This will include quite a few shiny things - so stay tuned to the releases page.

Enjoy June, and see you in July!

Rafiki Updates - March 2025

Max Kurapov — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:45:04 +0000

Hello everyone! Here's what we've been up to in the last month:

Finalizing Multi-Tenancy

Most of February has been spent focused on completing the remaining multi-tenancy project features. We have a few tasks left to complete:

Making webhook events tenanted
Adding support for additional tenant settings, which will allow individual tenants to configure the behaviour of their tenancy within a Rafiki instance in real time.

We're looking forward to a release soon that will include all of the multi-tenancy features we've been building.

New Open Payments features

We’re also planning to add support for some new Open Payments features within Rafiki:

Grant Spent Amounts

This feature will allow Open Payments clients to query the total amount spent under an outgoing payment grant. It’s especially useful for clients that create multiple outgoing payments under a recurring grant, and want to show the end user how much has been spent, and how much remains in their approved budget. One such client is the Web Monetization extension: with this feature, the extension can provide an accurate "Budget Remaining" field without needing to do its own accounting.

Subject Information

There are cases where Open Payments clients need to verify that a user has access to a specific wallet address without initiating a payment. This feature would allow an Open Payments client to redirect the end-user to an interaction at their Account Servicing Entity just to confirm their identity, without requiring an approval for a payment. Think of it as “Log in with Open Payments” - a secure and simple way to confirm wallet address ownership.

We discuss these features (and more!) in our bi-weekly Open Payments calls, every other Wednesday at 13:00 GMT.

See you in April!

Rafiki Updates - February 2025

Max Kurapov — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 16:01:02 +0000

Welcome to the first installment of Rafiki updates for 2025! We look forward to a productive year with Rafiki, and will continue sharing monthly updates here.

Multi-Tenancy

Since the beta release of Rafiki in December, the team has been hard at work on implementing a new feature: multi-tenancy.

This feature will allow a single deployment of Rafiki to support multiple Account Servicing Entities (ASEs). This is very useful in environments like clearinghouses, where different members of these organizations can onboard onto an existing Rafiki instance without having to manage their own infrastructure. This helps different ASEs quickly join the Interledger network and seamlessly participate with other ASEs running Rafiki.

In our implementation, each deployment will have an "operator", which will oversee all of the different ASEs (tenants), and depending on the configuration, the operator will be able to help onboard new tenants, and in cases where it's necessary, do different actions on their behalf. At the same time, each tenant retains full control over their own setup: being able to configure peering relationships, managing assets, and creating wallet addresses, just like in a standalone Rafiki instance.

Finishing this feature is our main priority for the short term, and even though most of the changes are done in the backend, soon we'll be able to share a demo of what the Admin UI will look like for different tenants using this feature.

Content Updates

At the beginning of the month, our engineer Nathan Lie wrote a blog post about how we use ILP in Rafiki. The Lifecycle of an Interledger Packet describes the in-depth process of how Rafiki orchestrates payments with ILP, as well as how ILP works in tandem with Open Payments to move funds between accounts.

In case you missed it, another one of our engineers, Jason Bruwer, wrote a post about how Rafiki is integrated with the TigerBeetle accounting database, a crucial element of the software.

As always, if you have any questions/comments/feedback, please join our Rafiki community calls bi-weekly on Tuesdays at 1530 UTC.

Rafiki Updates - November 2024

Max Kurapov — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:05:32 +0000

Over this last month, we released version Alpha 20 of Rafiki, which included a few new features and contributions from community members participating in Hacktoberfest. Thank you to those who contributed over the last month!

Most of our time, however, was spent preparing for, and hosting the Interledger Summit in Cape Town, South Africa. The Summit is a great opportunity to meet community members, grantees, partners to discuss and see the work being done in digital payments & financial inclusion, and if you didn't get a chance to attend, we have all of the main stage & demos uploaded on our YouTube channel.

In this update, we want to highlight a few videos from the Summit that particularly relate to Rafiki:

Introductory plenary: Our CTO, Alex Lakatos gives a broad update across the tech team, including Rafiki.
Rafiki Ecosystem Updates: myself, along with one of our Engineering Managers, Timea Nagy, cover what has changed in Rafiki itself, demo the rebranded Test Wallet, and our Rafiki-powered, live Interledger Wallet with card support supported by GateHub.
People's Clearinghouse (PCH) presentation & demo: One of our Rafiki developers, Jason Bruwer, presents alongside the PCH team, where we see how Rafiki is integrated as part of a new remittance corridor between US and community banks in Mexico.

Of course, we had plenty more of great presentations and demos from the summit that I would encourage you to view. Also, we also have our community call today at 10.00 AM CDT / 4.00 PM UTC to give us a deeper look into the event.

Now that the summit is behind us, we are looking forward towards 2025 where we have many plans to grow and improve the software. Before the year is done, however, we are planning on a release that will take us from alpha into beta! Because of this milestone, we will be releasing an in-depth article about this change, what it includes, and what is next, so keep an eye out on our Engineering blog.

Rafiki Updates - October 2024

Max Kurapov — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 10:02:27 +0000

Even though we are fully in the the middle of the preparations for the summit & hackathon, there were a few Rafiki updates we wanted to highlight for October.

Hacktoberfest

Being an organization that publishes exclusively open-source software, we are, of course, participating in Hacktoberfest! This is a month-long opportunity to contribute to our repositories, with several rewards for merging PRs. For Rafiki specifically, we identified several issues that would be great for our contributors from the community to take on. You can view a list of them here. Please comment on the issue if you would like to work on it, and we can assign you to it. We look forward to all of your contributions!

Content updates

Our engineer, Nathan Lie, wrote a detailed blog post giving us an in-depth look into the lower-level packages (and actual code) that make Rafiki work. If you are thinking of contributing to some of those Hacktoberfest issues, this will be a great starting point. In addition, we also added two videos to our Introduction to Open Payments YouTube playlist, where I give a tutorial of the Open Payments client, including a code walkthrough of how to make a payment between two wallet addresses.

New documentation

Mentioned briefly in the last update - we have released a new set of documentation for Rafiki! It includes lots of content updates, and general restructuring. We are continuing to work hard on making the documentation clearer for everyone, whether you are an integrator, a developer or an administrator of a Rafiki instance. We appreciate any feedback you may have.

New releases

Over the last few weeks, we released a couple of updates (now up to Alpha 19), mostly containing small fixes and improvements. Thank you to our first time contributors: @oana-lolea, @dianaOneOut36, and @s100tist!

What we are working on

Currently, we are continuing to work on adding multi-tenancy in Rafiki. You can read more about it in the previous update. In addition, we have been adding additional OpenTelemetry metrics and traces in the repo to help us understand where we can make performance gains in Rafiki. Also, we have now also started to plan larger Rafiki changes for post-summit (and into the next year) - all in order to continue improving the system as a whole, especially since we are getting more and more feedback from integrators.

If you have any questions, the upcoming hackathon and summit will be a great opportunity to ask them in-person, and like always, the door is open in the community slack #rafiki channel.

Rafiki Updates - September 2024

Max Kurapov — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 15:03:48 +0000

Rafiki Work Week

From August 26th-30th was the third edition of the Rafiki Work Week - and it included by far the most participants! We were welcomed by the Breakpoint IT team in their offices in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and around 30 of us from different organizations (ILF, Breakpoint IT, GateHub, People's Clearinghouse (Mexico), and JoPACC (Jordan)) spent five days working on all things related to Rafiki.

We split into teams to focus on seven different tracks:

1. Multi-tenancy

This feature will allow a Rafiki instance to manage multiple tenants, each with their own peering relationships, supported currencies, and Open Payments resources - reflecting a use case where a Rafiki is deployed at a payments switch. This feature that arose from our partnership with JoPACC given their payments architecture, and together with a representative from the organization, we were able to finalize a design for multi-tenant Rafiki and begin its implementation after multiple discussions and requirement-setting.

2. JoPACC integration

Being able to work alongside a representative from JoPACC, we continued advancing the Rafiki/Open Payments integration into the JoPACC payment system.

3. People's Clearinghouse integration

Together with five members of the People's Clearinghouse (PCH), we discussed several outstanding requirements of the PCH x Rafiki integration, and what could be done in Rafiki to meet those needs. We now have a few new issues on the project board and merged PRs in the Rafiki repo, thanks to contributions from the PCH developers. Next steps for the PCH integration & production deployment in preparation for the summit (and beyond) were planned as well. Our tech writers spent time with the PCH team for a deep dive into some of the hurdles that the PCH developers faced deploying Rafiki as part of their stack to get a better idea into how we can improve and add clarity to our documentation for integrators.

4. Interledger Platforms

Outside of Rafiki source code, we have a lot of different documentation platforms, blogs, and sites to manage, especially nearing the summit. Other than making navigation between our different blogs much clearer, we began designing and developing the summit schedule - an integral part of the summit experience.

5. Rafiki Performance

Before a beta release, we want to understand the performance of Rafiki. During the work week, we added measurements in critical points of the software, trying to load the system, and analyzed where we can make performance improvements. A few caching opportunities and optimizations were achieved, and the team was able to increase the performance of the system on some specific areas. We came up with a plan to continue identifying quick performance wins, while also examining overall architecture of Rafiki with the objective to increase its long-term performance and scalability.

6. Test wallet backend integration changes

Currently, the test wallet, rafiki.money, is integrated with a payments & KYC API called Rapyd. Since the API is running in a sandbox environment, it has a rate limit, which is less than ideal for handling a lot of users at once, particularly for hackathons. During the week, work was started to replace Rapyd with GateHub's backend API services for key wallet functions instead. This will be a much better long term solution, as GateHub will be able to better handle increased load.

7. Documentation

Having writers, developers and integrators all in one room, it was a great opportunity to discuss and finalize the Rafiki documentation additions, restructuring and overall improvements. We now have published these redesigned docs on rafiki.dev. You should now have a better reading experience, whether you are a developer, an integrator, or an administrator. Of course, please let us know if you have suggestions on how we can continue improving our documentation.

Alpha 16 Release

At the beginning of the work week, we released Alpha 16 (and a minor follow-up, Alpha 17) which included a few main features:

New Admin APIs

We added "actionable" incoming payments, which allows ASEs to synchronously approve or cancel incoming payments if they would like to run particular checks when an incoming payment is created on their Rafiki instance. In addition, we added a resolver for paginating over outgoing payments, with an option to filter by receivers (incoming payments).

Optional Kratos

In Alpha 10, we added mandatory user authentication for the frontend Admin UI via an integration with open source Ory Kratos package. Understanding that some integrators already have their own systems for admin-user authentication, we now made Kratos (and the frontend package integration) optional. This can be toggled via AUTH_ENABLED in the frontend package.

Performance related changes

After adding additional traces and metrics in Rafiki, we now have a performance testing script to be able to stress test the local playground. Before, and during the work week, it helped us to quickly identify quick performance wins. One of these performance gains was part of this latest release, and should significantly speed up the speed of transaction processing if you are running accounting using Postgres.

Next steps

We are continuing to work hard on the tasks outlined from the work week, and gearing up for a final release before the Hackathon (October 19th - 20th) and ILF Summit (October 26th - 27th) in Cape Town (https://interledger.org/summit).

See you there!

The Interledger Community 🌱: Max Kurapov

Rafiki Updates - February 2026

Key highlights

Grant Spent Amounts

Support for configuring multiple routes per peer

completeIncomingPayment backend Admin API

Multi-tenancy improvement

Next up

Rafiki Updates - January 2026

Open Payments SDKs

Encrypted Data Exchange

Security audit

Open Payments features

Updated Architecture

Rafiki Updates - December 2025

Summit Presentations

Releases

2026

Security audit

Encrypted data exchange

Updated architecture

Additional Open Payments features

Rafiki Updates - June 2025

People's Clearinghouse Work Week

Releases

Rafiki Updates - March 2025

Finalizing Multi-Tenancy

New Open Payments features

Grant Spent Amounts

Subject Information

Rafiki Updates - February 2025

Multi-Tenancy

Content Updates

Rafiki Updates - November 2024

Rafiki Updates - October 2024

Hacktoberfest

Content updates

New documentation

New releases

What we are working on

Rafiki Updates - September 2024

Rafiki Work Week

1. Multi-tenancy

2. JoPACC integration

3. People's Clearinghouse integration

4. Interledger Platforms

5. Rafiki Performance

6. Test wallet backend integration changes

7. Documentation

Alpha 16 Release

New Admin APIs

Optional Kratos

Performance related changes

Next steps

`completeIncomingPayment` backend Admin API