Announcing a new call for proposals for ILP-based financial services

The Interledger Foundation (ILF) and its community are building pathways to financial access and opportunity across the world. We support people and ideas that use the Interledger Protocol (ILP) to contribute to an open payments network built on equitable access through the internet. 

In continued service of our mission, and learning from our Grant for the Web program, we are excited to announce the next open Call For Proposals (CFP) to target the creation of more financial nodes in the Interledger network. We will be looking for projects that want to plan and build financial services.

Examples of consumer-facing services we seek to activate as ILP nodes are digital wallets, mobile money providers, banks, neo-banks, and all include these characteristics: 

• Enables money to be transferred on the ILP network 

• Permits issuing and housing accounts for individuals and organizations

• Uses an Electronic Money Institution license for the region, community, or use case projects will serve

• Is designed for interoperability across systems and currencies

• Is dedicated to open-source knowledge sharing as a contribution to the emerging ecosystem

"In our two years of grantmaking, we have learned that promise and excitement are not enough for our technology to expand financial access across the globe or to solve local problems. We are at an inflection point in the development of the Interledger Protocol where expanding the network is the critical next step. With this opportunity, we want to help Interledger-driven business models flourish by building on an open standards protocol while solving real problems for real people"

Briana Marbury, Interledger Foundation Executive Director

This CFP will support up to 20 projects through a research, development, and planning phase. This grant opportunity covers phase one, and projects selected in this opening round will be eligible and competitive for round two.

Phases

Research & Planning

We will award up to twenty projects $75K USD for a six-month project timeline in this first grant phase. These awards are planning grants that allow successful applicants to produce a dynamic business plan for becoming a node in the Interledger Network. Awardees will potentially have an opportunity to apply to the Prototyping Phase. 

Prototyping

Projects will advance with additional award funding to implement their plan and produce a working prototype/beta version of their service. This phase will focus on practical application and regulatory compliance to stand up a working prototype of the node and the capability it creates for its users.

Launch

Building from the first two phases, we will identify a set of projects that are ready to be operational. With the third round of awards, ILF will fund, support, and help launch fully functioning financial nodes into the Interledger Network.

We will begin accepting applications for the Research and Planning phase on May 17, 2022. 

We need new voices and ideas in the Interledger Network

We want to ensure that these financial innovations are coming from and created outside the typical locales and demographics. We seek to support communities that have -- and continue to be -- systemically and deliberately excluded from financial access and empowerment opportunities. For this CFP, we will increase the scoring of the following criteria in our judging process:

• Projects located in and serving geographical locations outside North America and Western Europe.

• Projects where a lead applicant is a person of color, or the team, represents a diverse group of people.

• The output of the team benefits communities that have been historically underrepresented.

• Funds are explicitly budgeted to address the increasing participation of historically marginalized and underrepresented communities.

Key details

• All applicants must be a formal entity such as a company, NGO, educational institution, government agency, or other documented collective.

• The Call for Proposals will be open from May 17 to July 8, 2022.

• We will award up to 20 recipients at $75K USD in funds.

• The cohort will kick off in 2022.

• All details on requirements and processes will be shared when the application opens.

• We use Submittable for our application process.

• We will have two open office hours before the application form goes live, on May 12 at 12:00 pm UTC, and May 13 at 7:00 pm UTC

• We will be answering questions on our Interledger Slack