And we are back with another quarterly roundup of grant reports and updates from our Ambassadors, Grantees and Partners shared over the past few months. If you missed them, here you go!
Ambassadors
Ayden Ferdeline's has officially wrapped up his Ambassadorship and writes in his final report
I have now wrapped up my Interledger research ambassadorship. Since my last update in November 2024, I traveled to Riyadh for the 19th annual United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF). At the IGF, I socialized the working paper that the Dynamic Coalition on Digital Financial Inclusion has been working on throughout 2024. This document will continue to evolve, and my ambition post-ambassadorship is to continue this work and to launch the final version of these principles at a high-level event in 2025.
In new news, Ayden recently joined ILF as as Lead, Public Policy and Government Affairs.
In this role, I hope to continue building out initiatives which bring lawmakers, policymakers, and regulators into direct dialogue with the Interledger community to demonstrate how responsible, interoperable payment systems can and do drive digital financial inclusion. And I will continue to serve as rapporteur for the Dynamic Coalition on Digital Financial Inclusion. In 2025, the Dynamic Coalition’s focus will be on:
- Refining and finalizing the Statement of Principles for a high-level launch at the IGF in Oslo (June 2025).
- Engaging with other IGF Dynamic Coalitions to build synergies and expand our impact.
- Building out a broader coalition of like-minded organizations, collectives, and initiatives to sign on to this Statement of Principles and to begin operationalizing them.
- Contributing to the broader WSIS+20 discussions, ensuring that digital financial inclusion becomes a core element of global digital policy frameworks.
Welcome aboard Ayden! 🎉🎉
Digital Financial Services Grantees
Here To Support’s Pourya shares interesting key findings in their recent progress report about their project Trust Based Banking a research initiative focused on exploring the technical and legal pathways for granting undocumented residents access to essential banking services.
In the first part of our research projects, we have worked on the following activities:
Matrix identification system
- We worked on comparison studies of different matrices used in different cities for registration of (undocumented) citizens. We looked at Barcelona, Lisbon, Zurich, New York and Dublin and their registration systems.
- We translated the documents used in other cities to possible available documents in the Dutch context. From here we created a Dutch prototype. We made profiles of eight undocumented citizens in Amsterdam with a different background and checked the prototype matrix for their situation.
Wallet Guru Co-Founder Fernando Almiñana shares the new updates in the latest progress report
As of January 2025, we have successfully completed Sprint 10, marking the conclusion of major development tasks for this phase. Key system components, user interfaces, and core functionalities are now operational across both staging and production environments. The applications for Android and iOS have been fully developed, with separate versions tailored for testing in staging and live deployment in production.
We are excited to announce that Sabbatical Entertainment, a leading content provider, will launch their first streaming platform, sabby, in partnership with Wallet Guru. sabby is a groundbreaking streaming platform that will offer a pay-as-you-go payment option, powered by Wallet Guru’s innovative payment system and the Interledger Protocol. This partnership makes sabby our first client, showcasing the real-world applications and scalability of our platform. Integration with sabby has been successfully finalized, and the production environment is fully deployed, with ongoing architecture and software optimizations based on testing feedback.
This milestone represents a significant step forward in our mission to provide innovative, reliable, and transformative payment solutions for modern financial management.
University Partners
Bowie State University
Dr. Andrew Mangle new 15 part series on Open Payments Pathways Series wants you to progress to the next level.
For the first half of 2025, Bowie State University will lead an initiative to get students and community members the skills, knowledge, connections, and mindset to obtain jobs supporting open payments that aid digital financial inclusion by aggregating materials and offering mentorship. We are recruiting major and class-standing agnostic students across campus at Maryland's oldest HBCU. This effort continues to grow the scope of impact from classroom to college to campus-wide to globally inclusive participation. Using the community-interledger.org posts, we aim to share the pathways process beyond the campus to other HBCUs. We hope the community contributions will encourage ramping to open payments to different universities and lifelong learners.
The 15-week+ pathways series is meant to help progress anyone from interest to contributor. This big, audacious goal builds upon successful efforts at Bowie State and in the Interledger / ILF community. Reflecting upon past and current work, I could not be more proud of my efforts at and beyond BSU. I'm enthusiastically serving as an ambassador and mentor for students seeking to make a difference in FinTech and an open web.
You can also read Part 2: The Goal and Part 3: Opportunities here
University of Cape Town
Professor Allan Davids writes about all the recent activities and updates this progress report
At the Financial Innovation Hub our focus is on providing world-class education in financial technology to students through our Masters degree in FinTech at the University of Cape Town. Through our partnership with Interledger, we are developing and implementing an open payments curriculum for students in our degree. Each year, our students complete a capstone project, where they must build a fully operational payments app, leveraging open payments. Outside of UCT, we are also working on expanding the reach of Interledger among students in South Africa and other universities through workshops, bootcamps and hackathons.
Project Update
2024 was our first year as a grantee and what a whirlwind of a year it was. There were a lot of key learnings, but overall we're so happy with our progress this year. Two moments stand out as real highlights!Open Payments Workshop and Hackathon
In June we hosted a week-long workshop focused on digital financial inclusion and Open Payments, open to students from UCT and elsewhere (we even had Andrew and Cory, our friends from Bowie State fly in to attend). Each day, we had a two-hour lecture, hosted by me, followed by a three-hour tutorial, led by the ILF Team (thank you Sarah, Max, Sabine) and Takunda Chirema, the Hub’s own wonderful technical specialist. In these sessions, we introduced students to Open Payments, Open Payment APIs, and the Grant Negotiation Authorisation Protocol.The workshop concluded with a 24-hour hackathon, where teams were challenged to build an application leveraging Open Payments. While there were many great submissions, we could have only one winner: SecureLifeCover, which helps people track their funeral cover payments to ensure payments are made on time.
Class project
Each year, we provide our students with a capstone group project, in which they are required to build a FinTech app from scratch and come up with a business plan for the app, to mimic the process of founding a start-up. We challenged our 2024 cohort to develop a digital stokvel platform that utilized Open Payments.Stokvels are a (in many cases informal) community investment scheme in which a group of people agree to contribute a fixed amount of money to a shared pool weekly or monthly. Stokvels contribute over R3.2 billion annually to local economies but remain largely cash-based, limiting their scalability. To address this problem, our students developed DigiStokvel - a digital solution designed to make stokvels more secure, transparent, and accessible.
Community Updates
We bid farewell to gFam.live! Last week gFam shared blogpostannouncing it was shutting down.
For those that don't know, gFam.live was an attempt at social media designed to help creators earn from their content either through Web Monetization or Advertisement Revenue Share.
We've been on this journey since 2019, it's been super fun and we've each learnt a lot - but unfortunately we got to a size where our monthly costs increased dramatically but the advertising revenue only increased slightly.
We've had some technical database issues recently so I don't have exact numbers, but we've provided over $185,570 USD worth of Web Monetization and XRP tips to creators for their content which has been viewed over 282 thousand times by 86 thousand people in 149 different countries.
Posting was limited to one post per day, but one thing we really enjoyed was people posting a little story and photo about their day each day... the kinds of things that might not be special enough to post on traditional social media, but all those stories on hundreds of thousands of posts showed us both how different life was for many people all over the world and how similar our hopes and dreams really are. It was incredible to witness.
We want to say thank you to Adam and the gFam team for being a part of this community. We have indeed witnessed your hard work and were happy to be along of the ride. Cheers to you on your future endeavors!
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