Rafiki Updates - May 2026

Hello everyone!

May brings us the latest Rafiki release, v2.4.0-beta:

Key Highlights

Directed Identity

This release adds support for Open Payments API version 1.3.0, which includes the directed identity feature. This feature allows Open Payment clients to create non-interactive grants (like creating incoming payments) by providing a JSON Web Key (JWK) directly instead of a wallet address. This offers flexibility for client authentication in scenarios where the client wishes to avoid passing in their wallet address. You can check out the updated grant request payload in the Open Payments documentation.

Encrypted Data Exchange

We’ve introduced a way for Account Servicing Entities (ASEs) to exchange generic data during ILP payments. To ensure privacy, this data is encrypted during transmission using a STREAM data frame.

• On the sending side: ASEs can use the new dataToTransmit field within the depositOutgoingPaymentLiquidity mutation to send data to the receiving ASE.

• On the receiving side: By enabling the ENABLE_PARTIAL_PAYMENT_DECISION backend environment flag, ASEs will receive a webhook (incoming_payment.partial_payment_received) containing the sender's data. They can then choose to approve or reject this "partial" incoming payment via the confirmPartialIncomingPayment and rejectPartialIncomingPayment backend Admin APIs.

• Security: Both sides have the option to use a DB_ENCRYPTION_SECRET to ensure this data remains encrypted at rest.

Node.js v24 Upgrade

In addition to the above, we have updated the Rafiki packages to Node.js version 24 to ensure long-term support and access to new Node features. Thank you to our first time contributor @Mwni for this improvement!

Updated release guide

On the documentation side of things, we have updated our Helm & Kubernetes deployment guide for the current version of Rafiki, which you can read here.

What's next

As we mentioned in our January community update, our major initiative this year is to release a version of Rafiki with an updated architecture aimed for high performance and increased scalability. This work is well underway across all areas of the Rafiki software, having completed the first milestone of being able to make payments between wallet addresses on the same Rafiki instance. We will continue updating the community as we build out this new system!

As always, we welcome you to join our monthly Rafiki community calls, with the next one coming up next week on Tuesday, May 19th at 14:30 UTC.

See you next time!