Subject: [dispatch] Introducing the Interledger Protocol

From: Adrian Hope-Bailie <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 May 2016 00:43:36 +0200

Hi,

I am Adrian Hope-Bailie, employed at Ripple (ripple.com) and co-chair of
the Web Payments Working Group at W3C. Some of you I know because we have
met through the W3C and many of you I hope to meet in Berlin in July. I'm
new to the IETF process and many RFCs later feel like I am getting to grips
with things...slowly.

I have been in discussion with the ART and SEC ADs over the last few weeks
regarding work being done in a W3C community group that I chair, the
Interledger Community Group.

On the advice of the ADs I am seeking feedback/questions/comments as I work
on a BoF proposal for this work, the Interledger Protocol.

Put simply, Interledger is an open, neutral, payment protocol that is
modeled on the Internet stack and runs on the open Internet. It is a
protocol to connect payment networks/ledgers/blockchains into a network of
payment networks (in much the same way that TCP/IP creates a network of
networks).

The idea for the work started at in 2015 Ripple and with the publishing of
the Interledger Whitepaper in October became an open community effort.
Since then the community group has grown to just shy of 200 participants.
We held a packed to capacity all-day workshop in February in San Francisco
and have another scheduled for 6 July in London (
https://interldger.org/workshop)

There is a website with a lot of resources about the project at
https://interledger.org as well as a reference implementation at
https://github.com/interledger. This audience will likely be most
interested in the architecture:
https://interledger.org/rfcs/0001-interledger-architecture/

One of the more mature aspects of the work is a primitive used in the
protocol called crypto-conditions. This has already been spec'd as an RFC:
https://interledger.org/five-bells-condition/spec.html

We hold a bi-weekly conference call on Wednesday at 3pm UTC which i invite
you attend this week (1 June) to ask any questions or just lurk and listen.
The details of the call are sent to the mailing list (
[email-masked]) in the agenda the day before. (To join the
mailing list go to: https://www.w3.org/community/interledger/join).

I will also post the details to this thread.

Adrian