Hi, strangers, old friends, and new friends!
It is Xiaoji (she/they) again, I am mostly based in Berlin, and now sending you greetings from my hometown Wuhan. I am here to explore and show some glimpses of how Interledger Ecosystem can support the needs and wants of the informal communities: As I am honored to be part of the 2025 Ambassador cohort, I want to introduce you to my project Shifting Power in the Informal Economy, and to share some updates and thoughts.
Rethinking Informality
Informal economies are not marginal—they are central to how millions of people survive and build community. From street vendors and care workers to sex workers and undocumented migrants, informal workers sustain themselves and each other through everyday practices of resilience. Industrialized societies rely heavily on their labor, even as they continue to deny them recognition and legitimacy. Yet the people behind these economies are often pushed to the periphery—excluded from labor rights protections, shut out of financial systems, and rendered invisible in the very policymaking spaces that most deeply shape their lives.
Informal economy is not often discussed in the case of Europe. In a continent that boasts over 90% digital connectivity, the needs and struggles of informal workers in increasingly digitalized financial systems remain widely overlooked. This project begins from that contradiction and the belief that people navigating informal economies already hold essential knowledge and strategies for survival, care, and resistance. It aims to explore how digital financial inclusion efforts from the Interledger ecosystem can support the improvement of labor rights and more just economic frameworks for informal communities—while building networks to shift power toward those most often left out of relevant political processes. Through research, strategic outreach, capacity building, and co-created tools, the project seeks to understand how we might not only improve access but also reimagine the very systems that have excluded these communities in the first place: how is the informal economy influenced by the colonial and imperial continuities? how is the global division of labor shape the demographics and condiions of informal workers? what kind of system provides reparative economic justice and financial rights for those who were still impacted by these systems?
I know these are big questions, but I can only start step by step: The project begins with Berlin and Madrid as case studies, focusing on the lived realities of undocumented people, migrant workers, sex workers, and others who are often involuntarily excluded from financial infrastructures. Their economic lives are shaped not only by lack of access to formal work or banking, but by complex legal restrictions, regulatory invisibility, surveillance, and the deep social stigma that marks certain kinds of labor and bodies. Despite these conditions, informal workers organize, support each other, and resist. This project is about recognizing and amplifying that work—not prescribing solutions, but asking what kinds of infrastructure, knowledge-sharing, and alliances can support what’s already being built from the ground up.
Rather than approaching financial inclusion from the perspective of onboarding “the excluded” into existing systems, this initiative starts with a question in mind: What would digital financial ecosystems look like if they were shaped by the experiences and demands of informal communities themselves? Through partnerships with grassroots initiatives, civil society groups, and cultural practitioners, the project aims to address the conditions and systems that concern these communities through knowledge production, community-centered toolkits, and other peer-learning opportunities that create space of contact and address the specific conditions these communities face—while also building trans-local relationships that can support wider movements for economic justice.
My Past Practices
As the cover picture is from our final rehearsal of the theater performance Home Again co-created with refugees and migrant communities in the German-Dutch border almost 10 years ago, I am now a Berlin-based artist, activist, performance-maker, game-maker, and researcher. This project is building on top of much of my past practices and interests in the economic and financial imaginaries, as well as how they impact different communities that are historically impacted by interconnected systems of injustice. As someone who has been working with migrant(ized), diasporic, and/or exiled communities in the past 10 years in Europe, I noticed how often economic and financial struggles are left out of the immediate discussion. As these struggles directly affected the communities I was engaging with, the knowledge and regulatory barriers of the financial systems scared not only these community members away, but even those who wanted to support them away. After being introduced to Interledger's work and community by the 2024 ambassador and the current lead on public policy and government affairs Ayden FĂ©rdeline through the Interledger Summit, I am grateful that Interledger has supported some of my exploration of the "why" behind such a situation. Through my research for The Parallel Society, a research-based game prototype, and a video installation, I dived into how the imaginaries of these systems create invisible barriers for those accessing them. Through moderating the panel discussion Financial Inclusion for Undocumented Communities: From Strategies to Practices with Malou Lintmeijer, Savannah Koolen, and Eunice de Asis from Stichting Here to Support and FinTech Strategist Sarah Habib, we dived into what context-specific political conditions influence the identification of the undocumented communities in the Netherlands and the UK, and what kind of potential strategies and practices that support them; through the Interledger Salon, I get to chat with theater practitioner Anuja Golsalkar and Fintech strategist Sarah Habib on how our differing understandings of money and the financial system shape our access to and engagement with them, and to what extent money and other currency can be considered a public fiction through the episode Beyond Currency: Reimagining Money and Digital Futures.
Beyond my work supported by Interledger and materialized with Interledger Ecosystem, I also have been actively participating in the transnational labor organizing space in Berlin, and last year contributed to the booklet Reshaping Labour: Intersectional Insights About Work, Labour, and the Job Market with my essay titled Dreaming Feminist Economy, initiated by BIWOC*Rising Berlin.
In my practice, I often use text, games, social practices, and performance to construct critical fabulations around bordering practices, notions of security, and alternative economies. This also entails, that I often work with and discuss the parallel and connection between different oppressive systems and power structures. Hence, my practice is often about shifting power, through restoring the agency of many communities and the epistemologies that were repressed in such interconnected contemporary systems. Beyond such practice, in the past 10 years, I have also worked often with the migrant and refugee communities that are involved in informal economies to target their immediate need: to give them space to tell their stories, to accompany them when they face discrimination, to provide literacy workshop, and many more.
But I know these are not enough. Literacy is not enough, when the system is unjust. Learning how to navigate through a system that is not designed to be fair and just, will work towards inclusion in its immediate form and need, but cannot support these communities in the long term. I believe the work the interledger ecosystem is doing has the potential to go beyond this through building a global and interoperable payments network, not only significantly reducing the barriers of these communities but also providing new political possibilities of how global finance can be done. While I will keep doing my community work that supports inclusion as an active process, I am here to explore the potential of supporting financial inclusion through connecting movements for economic justice: to shift power, we need to recognize that the financial system does not stand alone, it is a continuity and result of many historic and current decision-making done through different hegemonic structures. Through my research on the case of Berlin and Madrid, I hope to shed light on this perspective and connect the Interledger Ecosystem with the communities and initiatives that are already on the ground, trying to shift power.
An Open Invitation
I hope I get to work with many of you! I have been always impressed by the diverse expertise that Interledger community members hold, and I am excited to know more about your work.
If you believe your work is of technical and infrastructural relevance to these communities' conditions and needs, I would love to be in conversation; if you have essential knowledge of the regulatory landscapes that shape these communities' survival, I would love to be in conversation, If you are someone working within or alongside informal economies in Europe—whether you’re organizing around migration/border, labor rights, digital rights, sex work, or economic justice—or part of a community that resonates with these concerns, I would love to be in conversation.
This is an open invitation, if in any way that I have mentioned, or not mentioned, you see a way that we can collaborate, or even if you just want to exchange about our work and give me some of your thoughts and feedback, please reach out to me via Email or Slack!
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