Web Monetization mid-year Work Week

As a fully remote organization, we at the ILF occasionally plan in-person work weeks to accelerate our work, align, and plan the next steps in different projects and products. One of the things that make a work-week really sing has been the presence and participation of members from the wider open source community, our volunteers or partners, who care about how technology and advocacy work can contribute to a world where digital financial inclusion is an enabler for those previously left out.

The latest work week took place at the beginning of July in the beautiful capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana. We were welcomed by our partners, GateHub, and their office felt like home for a week. 


Our focus was Web Monetization, and our agenda ranged from tech topics to the broader ILF vision. Big thank you to all our colleagues who bravely embraced traveling during an unexpected heat wave in Europe.

The meeting started with an opening discussion on the current strategy for Web Monetization. Alex Lakatos, our CTO, shared how we envision payments with the Interledger Protocol (ILP) being recognized globally. We're looking ahead to a future where Web Monetization has revolutionized remuneration on the Web. How? We believe that Web Monetization’s tech implementation should live in the browser. Yes, this might imply that the extension maybe should not exist in an ideal future. Our team is currently working on an alpha version of the extension and once available, we invite you to test it out in the upcoming weeks. So keep an eye on this space as we develop exciting new features.

For our audience, we quickly identified three personas: developers, publishers (content creators, anyone with a website), and users who make payments and donations. Which group do you belong to? Are we missing any important groups?

We started the work week by tackling the big items on day one. We continued to check where we were on the roadmap and confirmed our path for the next few months, especially regarding the first official version of our web extension. Speaking of the extension, we will include features that allow you to connect a supported wallet, authorize and control payment amounts and frequencies, and see your remaining balance.

We are also considering tools for web developers, such as embeddable Web Monetization banners and payment buttons. If you are a web dev, let us know what you'd like us to have ready to make your adoption smoother.

Led by Hui Jing, we took a deep dive into user personas and our current pathways for someone who first lands on the Web Monetization website. One challenge we identified was how to communicate the availability of Web Monetization-compatible wallets. We considered users from areas that have an available wallet provider and spoke about how to address users outside of these areas. As far as web developers are concerned, the Web Monetization API is still fairly new and we think they will try it out even if they can't receive payments yet.

By now you can see we were on fire. Jokes aside, the temperatures were super high, and in our breaks, we enjoyed ice cream and stuffed-date snacks. You read that right. And to my surprise, there was plenty of ice cream left by the end of the week. Who says no to ice cream?


We went over the existing tools and the ecosystem from a publisher's point of view. This is one of the situations in which we would like input from you. If you are a publisher (content creator, web dev) do let us know how you feel about the current implementations, how they work for you, and what would you change or add.

As mentioned, one of the goals for the week was to be aligned. One step towards this was Sabine’s session on the ILP Stack. This was super helpful and Sabine did magic. So we will recreate the magic for you all too - Sabine is currently writing the blog post for it! Yay!

 On the second day, we took time to discuss some of the processes being used for our documentation.

Melissa - our tech writer lead - led discussions on how the docs could be made clearer, identified topics that we should explain better, and examined which responsibilities lie on our side vs the wallet provider. We also discussed ways to provide recommendations to web devs and publishers about user experience to give site visitors a sense of consistency. We also had a session about the terminology we used. Are we too abstract? Do we use the same terminology consistently, from user docs to conference talks to blog posts?

Our engineers present - Radu in person and Sid remotely (yes, unfortunately, some did not make it to Ljubljana but we did our best to include them in the recording and streaming session, actively seeking their input) walked us through the technical implementation of what happens under the hood and the challenges we face. We discussed a number of different solutions and will see some of them coming in the next release.

We also tackled Dev Advocacy, which is currently more of a team effort, as we do not yet have anyone fully dedicated to this. PPK shared his vision for the web’s future and how he would like to tackle our message of “Pay the web forward” in future conferences. Among the things mentioned were where we got our message to web devs, and the trends in terms of languages and tools used. We brainstormed for possible conferences we want to be part of, content that would fit our mission and reach all our types of users, platforms to be active on, and most importantly…. swag! What is trending these days that is also useful and would fit our vision? Share your ideas with us!

We ended the second-day session with a remote session about our WM libraries and plans to migrate them to the latest version of the specification, driven by Santosh. Stay tuned for more details about this in a future Community Call deep dive! Speaking of Community Calls, we all joined the monthly community call together from Ljubljana. If you want to participate in the next community call, here is all the information you need. Join us!

The last day was a bit more diverse as we covered alternative payment models and privacy, a possible header implementation, IBAN support in Open Payments, ILPv5 ideas, and a few more. We also organized a Testing and UX feedback session hosted by Bibi, based on a survey sent before the work week. We considered ideal paths for first impressions, onboarding, usage, and discoverability.

We closed the work week with a celvebration: Alex Lakatos marked his 3rd anniversary at ILF and we all shared and tested a few types of Struklji, one of Slovenia’s traditional desserts. 


We wrote about the work we did while meeting together. Some highlights though, rose from spending time offline. From daily runs in the morning to watching some football games in the evenings.

It was a week full of discussions, sharing, and time spent as a team. We are super grateful for it. Big big thank you to everyone, I was impressed by the creativity and knowledge of our team!

PS: Wanna meet our team and attend our Summit? Grab a ticket now!

To keep up with all open opportunities at Interledger Foundation, subscribe to our newsletter! ( Easilgo at the bottom of the page and join our mailing list. - we share only goodies, we promise!)