Interledger, a protocol for the future of money

Good morning, Web Directions.

You're gonna have to forgive my energy levels.

I, technically am not from this world or time zone.

But I'm here to talk about the future of money Why money?

Because everybody gets paid you're like money is important to all of us whether we want to admit it or not But before we can talk about the future, think we need to set the stage and talk a little bit about the present I have a little exercise fun little exercise for you more fun for me because I get money out of this So can anyone in here pay me right here right now anyone gonna attempt?

Okay, yeah, you're gonna give me cash, right?

Okay, yeah, give me cash.

Give me cash.

Let's see how long it takes you.

One, Mississippi.

Two, Mississippi.

Three, Mississippi.

[Audience Member] Sorry, it's fake money.

It's NZ dollars.

[Alex] Ah, thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

So that was about six Mississippi in person, right?

And I got New Zealand dollars, which I can't even use in this country.

But hey, I got money, right?

Didn't matter.

I wasn't very specific about what I wanted.

Let's make this a bit easier for everyone else in the audience who didn't run to me.

These are three bank accounts on three continents that I own.

I happen to be homeless right now.

I've been homeless for about 18 months, I think, traveling the world.

So I have the luxury of having three bank accounts.

If anyone can try to pay me right now, that'd be good.

Phil Nash, you're not allowed to because you can cheat.

Phil, the one in the middle, is a UK bank account, and Phil used to live in the UK.

So Phil could probably pay me right now.

Maybe he has a minimum limit, maybe he doesn't.

But if you look at my accounts, right?

All of them look different.

So one of them is a European account that uses IBANs, a long string of numbers.

The other one is a UK bank account, which technically, same continent, different addressing scheme, which I have to give you two sets of numbers, not just a long one, my sort code and my account number.

And, if you're in the US and the US is shitty, I have to give you a lot of details and you have to get absolutely everything right.

Otherwise, ACH transfers or bank to bank transfers won't work out by the fact that nobody pulled up their phone to pay me means if you're not in the cash world, ah, somebody has a phone out.

I'm going to be interested to see how long it takes you to pay me.

If you manage to pay me by the end of this, by the end of this, let me know.

I'll buy you, I'll buy you beer two days, right?

So that's.

That's really the problem, right?

If I want to do a bank to bank transfer right now, unless we happen to be within the same bank, or in some lucky instances, within the same banking system, banking country or banking group of countries, it's going to be really complicated.

So if I wanted to put, what's a, popular Australian bank, Give me an example.

C CBA.

Okay.

Okay, we'll give that free publicity.

So if I'm bank with CBA and you bank with CBA, that's probably a way in the app and we know how the accounts work and maybe I'll get my money instantly.

The banking world defines instant payments, anything under 60 minutes, not exactly instant.

Some of them have managed to narrow down that down to 10 minutes.

Or maybe if you are, I know one of the most advanced financial countries in the world like Jordan, you'll manage to do it in like a minute and that's instant payments.

And it works out like I give you my account, you know how an account works and the money gets to me roughly in real time, I could use it.

The problem with that is the moment you are trying to do this, even in the same country with a different bank.

Depending on the country starts being problematic in this one because you have a system connecting all the banks.

It's not as problematic.

I Sadly hail from a country called Romania half a world away where the banks are not connected to each other So if I want to send money to somebody on a different bank, the easiest way is to go open a bank account with the other bank, go at the registers, deposit cash, and then move the money from my account.

In other parts of the world, that is not even a thing that can be done.

So I have to go to the bank, take out money from my account in cash, give the cash back.

So that can be, it can be deposited in the other account.

If in the meantime, I've changed my mind problem.

And this isn't some third world country out there.

This is one of the developed nations in the world, like Mexico.

If I'm trying to do this between two countries, the two days limit is a good scenario, or it's a best case scenario, because banks have to talk to each other.

Banks that run on banking software written 40 years ago in COBOL that was not designed to talk to other banking systems.

Most importantly, all of those banking systems represent money as one.

What does that one mean?

because you're in the bank.

So one might mean one Australian dollar, but one might mean one British pound.

And those systems don't know how to exchange those ones.

Usually banks have these things called correspondent relationships, where two humans at the bank agree that they're going to exchange money, they've exchanged money in advance in huge piles, they're called Nostro Vostro accounts, so that when I try to pay Phil, For example, my bank actually does not move money outside of the, bank.

No money actually physically moves, but the zero updates in one bank account and the zero updates in the other bank account.

And technically it's instant payments.

If the banks don't have a relationship, so Australia and the UK have a good relationship.

There's a lot of money flowing between.

There's a lot of banks that are connected.

If the banks aren't connected, then they have to go find this intermediary in the process.

And that is where most of the problems become serious.

If our banks are connected, I pay maybe 2%, maybe 6 percent if the bank is greedy, the money gets there, maybe in a day, maybe in two days.

If I am, for example, in the UK, before I became homeless, I have to live in the UK.

And, while I was homeless in the UK, I sent money to my mom back home.

I still do Romania, not the world apart, same continent.

Technically they both used to be in the European union, right?

But the UK and Romania, technically the UK and Romania do not exchange money often and do not trust each other because Romanians are generally shady individuals.

That's why you're never seeing your money again, mate.

Thank you yeah, so because there's no connections between the banks, they'll go through usually Germany.

It's a safer country.

So a UK bank has a relation with a German bank, the same German bank has a relationship with the Romanian bank But because they're in the middle The process now is two separate transfers, each of them taking two, three days, each of them having a 6 percent fee.

So the, me sending money.

So for example, today's the 27nd of November, right?

For the stream.

My mom's birthday is on the 22nd of November.

Me, being the shitty son that I am, I obviously forgot about her birthday.

Grandma called me up on the day and said, Hey, you haven't said happy birthday to your mom, but most importantly, you haven't gotten her anything.

I was like, I know I'll send a bank transfer.

Five days later, it still hasn't hit my mom's account, right?

So that's a real example of sending her a couple of hundred euros for her birthday.

It hasn't hit the account.

When she'll get it, she'll get about 18 percent reduction.

And if I'm lucky, it takes a couple extra more days.

If you're trying to do this in a part of the world where a few dollars matter, forget about it.

The fact that I sent 200 euros it means the banks actually make some money out of those 200 euros and they have a vested interest to accept my transaction if I was trying to do the same thing to I know for example Nigeria where 5 feed the family for a whole week no bank in this world will accept the 5 transaction.

Most of them have a 10 euro pound dollar minimum transaction because otherwise there's nothing in it for them And this is just banks like if I try to send money other way any other way western union.

Brick and mortars the fees balloon.

The transaction limit increases and that's not because Banks don't want money.

That's because the infrastructure was built 40 years ago, and it cannot support transactional load.

Visa, I think on the internet brags about being able to support 60,000 transactions per second, which is untrue to say the least, but let's assume it is true.

Let's assume it is true.

It's Black Friday week, Amazon and all the online shops have a promotion.

If you've noticed, if you try to pay with a card, your card doesn't get charged automatically because Visa and MasterCard can't process that many transactions, half of a planet trying to buy something in the same week is hitting that transaction per second limit.

So what they do is they save the card details in a giant file on an FTP bucket.

And then they process them in batches when people sleep, or two, three days later, depending on how popular Black Friday was.

This is today.

This happened 10 years ago.

This has been happening for a while, but nobody tries to fix it, because all of these transactions you're trying to pay me, it's about 5 percent of transaction volume.

If you're in the country, or if you're in a privileged country where you can actually exchange money, it's not the problem worth solving.

If you're trying to solve this problem for the 1.

4 billion people who don't have a bank account, then it starts becoming a pressing problem.

So a few years ago, I'd want to say eight, a bunch of people thought there has to be an easier way.

We're able to exchange messages at the speed of fiber or the speed of light.

Why can't we send money as easily as we send messages, as easily as we send an email?

So they tried to come up with a way to make this a reality.

That was 2016, I think.

So they sat down and they said, what systems in the world exists today that we can take inspiration from like this isn't a novel problem exchanging things around the world where money has become a one and a zero in a ledger the accounting ledger has to be easy, right?

So they looked at the internet because the internet is a network of computers, why can't we have a network?

And they took inspiration from TCPIP.

The TCPIP stack has technically four layers.

It's the application layer, which most of us interact with.

It's the transport layer that kind of takes data, wraps it in small little packages, and tries to send it across networks of computers.

Those networks are connected, and that's the inter network layer.

And that makes routing data packets around the world easy.

Technically, this live stream we're all on, hi, live stream, today is hitting the same computer via probably three or four routes at the same time.

One for redundancy and two because there's a lot of information flowing around in the world.

The pipes only have a certain size and they can't handle all the traffic.

So the information is split into multiple packets, goes on different routes and meets at the end.

And the end is basically the link layer, the thing that connects all computers together.

And they said, we can do this for money.

Makes sense.

So they created this thing called the interledger protocol now for Phil and everybody else in the audience interledger has nothing to do with crypto, even though there's ledger in the name.

Before crypto was a thing, ledgers were these giant physical books of accounts that recorded transactions and stored balances.

Every bank technically has a ledger, but a lot of other things used to have a ledger.

Your grocery store used to have a ledger.

Your favorite hotel used to have a ledger.

Some of them still do.

Actually today, 2024, one of your favorite coffee chains still has a digital ledger and that's Starbucks.

Starbucks is not technically a coffee shop.

It's practically a bank.

We'll talk about that later.

But they thought, okay, let's use this.

Let's use this.

Let's mirror this on TCP IP.

It's something that works.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Let's see how we can make money flow like the Internet.

Let's see how we can make value flow between systems of money, how information flows between systems of computers.

So they tried to mimic and mirror those four layers.

Obviously, not invented here syndrome, so they had to come up with their own names.

They couldn't call it the same.

So the first layer is called SPSP, and that's the, basically the IP layer, or the addressing layer.

The addresses, you have to think about how the internet works.

When you add a new computer to the internet, or a new network on the internet, the topology of the internet shifts a little bit.

And that's why you have public IP addresses that are expensive, because you have to be able to reference the same computer in a reliable way.

It's the same for money.

When you add a new bank or a new digital ledger on the system, the whole topology and architecture of the system changes, you can't really re memorize your address, your account information.

So they came up with a way that looks a bit like the web.

So technically it's dollar domain dot com slash user handle.

For me that's ilp dot dev slash triple zero.

And they realized that's an easy way for most people to remember their account information.

If you remember the account information on my second slide or whatever, much easier to remember.

The other one, I can't even remember.

And then they realized, it looks like a web address.

Let's make it to a web address.

So the dollar is a shorthand notation for HTTPS.

Because in today's world, not only humans interact with account information.

Computers or machines interact with account information.

I don't know if you've noticed CloudFlare a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, announced that if your content is used by AI, you're gonna be paid in real time or near real time for AI's usage of your data.

So in a world where people don't exchange money altogether and machines start to exchange money on behalf of people, we had to make a machine readable.

But then you hit another limit or limitation, which is today when you're trying to send money, usually it involves a human.

If I really did want to send money to anyone in this room, a human at my bank and a human at your bank will eventually have to talk to each other because you have all these pesky rules that govern when I'm allowed to send money and when I'm not, they're called KYC know your customer and AML anti money laundering.

So we had to figure out a way for all of this information to be negotiated in real time and sent with a payment so that the human was not involved at sending money at the speed of internet.

And that's our transport protocol is actually based on WebSockets.

It just opens a tunnel connection and start sending packets of money across.

Talking about packets of money that is Intel.

That is actually what the intelligence is.

It's a format for how you represent money in this world.

We try to keep it simple based on existing ledgers that have ones and zeros.

The only difference is we've added to that amount, currency so that we know what those ones and zeros is.

So it's.

1dollar.

And because we had to build this in programming languages and that kind of shit, I know I'm at the conference and I shouldn't say this, that kind of shit that floating point math, there's also a scale attached to it.

So all of the amounts are technically integers or big integers.

And then there's an asset scale from one to nine that tells you where the decimal point sits in that value.

So technically a hundred, with an asset scale of two is actually one because it's 1.00.

And to connect all of these together, we had to mimic the connection points on the Internet.

The connection points on the Internet is actually very democratic.

You plug in a cable, you connect to wifi and you have a connection to the internet.

If you try to do the same thing with banks, they get upset.

So we had to make it so that connection is actually bilateral and not unilateral.

And that's why BTP stands for bilateral transfer protocol so that when banks connect to each other, they connect from both directions and they meet in the middle and because all of this makes sense for the people in this room, we had to have it make sense for the banking people that were actually going to use it.

So banking has three phases messaging and clearing and settlement technically while we exchange money.

Messaging was my intent to receive money.

Clearing was the, somebody figured out they have money in that account and started running towards the sage.

And settlement was me putting money in my account over there.

So we had to mimic the way banks do this.

But the problem with that is you'll see settlement is actually outside of the protocol.

The problem with that is.

Physical money only works if we understand the same currency.

So while I got New Zealand dollars, I have no way, physically I got New Zealand dollars, I have no way to use it later on.

I will either have to go exchange it, or in this case, keep it in my wallet as memorabilia, right?

Banks do the same thing.

So if I'm sending money from the UK to Australia, for example, what currency am I using?

Australian dollar means absolutely nothing in the UK.

The british pound lost so much value because of stellar politicians.

Nobody wants the british pound anymore.

So when you settle between banks when you actually have to move money Usually go to the US.

Dollar.

Everybody goes to the U. S.

U. S. Dollar is so important.

And that is why countries like Russia and China and Brazil, India have started this organization called BRICS, which is trying to move away from exchanging money in the U. S. Dollar.

We realized money and value was so much more than the US dollar.

So we've decoupled the settlement layer from the protocol altogether because so Settlement can happen in armored cars or people running to the stage.

Settlement can happen in IOUs and carrier pigeons.

Settlement can happen in crypto at the end of the day.

So we've decoupled this layer outside of the protocol so people can talk about exchanging money, receive money and start using it.

But the underlying infrastructure doesn't have to speak the same language for money.

And this was a great idea.

The paper on the Interledger protocol came out in 2016.

You have to understand what the protocol means.

It means a bunch of words on a piece of paper.

It was a, there were some great words on that piece of paper.

There was a set of rules that governed how money systems talk to each other.

But here's the thing, then you have to implement the protocol.

And I think when I joined the Interledger Foundation, maybe four years ago, it used to take you, so you were a bank, you had a good IT department, a competent one, it used to take you about 18 months to implement those words from that piece of paper to be able to connect over that protocol with another bank.

The first thing I did, Me being me, I had to think about 18 months.

I don't know.

I've probably never stayed 18 months in more than a company in my life.

I wanted to see this out into the world.

And the problem was implementing those words on a piece of paper.

Everybody had to do that.

So why not implement once, distribute everywhere?

So we had to start building a bunch of these, a bunch of these things into reality.

It only took us about four years.

We're still in beta.

I'll talk about that later, but we created the reference implementation.

We took those words and we started building the underlying technology or the underlying software that spoke those words and made it easier for banks and digital wallets and whole countries to connect into interledger So we built a reference implementation.

We built a reference implementation, so that everybody had an easier time.

Today 2024 we took down the time to implement from 18 months to about seven days We've got the fastest adoption on the network in seven days.

We thought, like the internet there's always going to be individuals who don't like what decisions we made in the implementation and they're going to build their own implementation.

I am sad to say in four years, there's only been one other implementation of Interledger so far, people are lazy.

People end up using our implementation by default.

So we use this as a canary in a coal mine to figure out when we need to improve something.

We have an easy vehicle to update the whole network at the same time.

Today If you're trying to update TCP/IP Actually, they did try to update  TCP/IP they put QUIC and UDP in it on top of it I think I was looking at the internet today to figure out how much adoption HTTP/3 had.

97% of browsers implement HTTP/3, which is a win and 28 percent of the internet implements HTTP/3.

So for us, when we make an update, 100 percent of people get the update because we are able to distribute it through the reference implementation.

And that's one of the main things we had to build in order to solve for this.

But that wasn't enough, because when we built our reference implementation, we started hitting a bunch of the limitations of these systems built 40 years ago.

We tried to build modern technology.

And connect it into 40 year old technology written into COBOL.

One of the things we've realized, some of these accounting ledgers, some of these books of accounts, have about the same speed they had when a human wrote in it.

About five transactions per second.

We tried putting this on modern databases.

We said, surely Mongo's gonna get us out of a, pinch.

Mongo today tops out at about 60, 000 transactions per second.

If you go directly to Mongo, if you put it on their metal, and if you pay them about 70k a month, you can scale to 60, 000 transactions per second.

We, being proud, wanted to be better than Visa, so we wanted to go one order of magnitude higher, so we wanted 600, 000 transactions per second.

So we went to MIT and a bunch of researchers that looked into creating purposely built databases.

If you think about Mongo, it's a database for everything, right?

We needed to record credits and debits, ones and zeros.

So most of Mongo was useless.

We record the numbers.

So MIT and a bunch of other people, Apple, including a research team came up with this idea of an accounting database and there's a team building it today.

They are in release candidate and we're using it.

It's called tiger beetle because that's out of South Africa.

Tiger beetle is the most resilient beetle known to man.

They've managed to overshoot our estimate of 600, 000.

To a million.

So now it supports a million transactions per second.

The drawback of it is it only records numbers.

If you can't store it as a number, it's not a database for you, but we have to develop our own accounting ledger to make this technology work for banks, for accounting ledgers.

And then we had to figure out how do you actually give people access into your account?

So we have this programmable money network.

People started wanting to use it.

I wanted to connect into the network.

As an individual I can't because I do not have a banking license, but I do have a bank account.

How do I let applications or AI use my bank account?

If you're trying to do that today, not happening, just going to tell you right now, not happening.

Australia actually is one of the advanced countries out there that has an open banking API.

Has anybody used the Open Banking API?

Ah, five people, six people in the audience.

That's good.

That's good.

They have an Open Banking API, but in order to use that Open Banking API as a developer, you have to be accredited with a certain institution to get access to a bank to enable that account.

Every bank has to implement that API definition.

Spoiler alert, no bank implements that API definition in the same way.

That's why you have aggregators.

So we figured out there's got to be an easy way to give people access into accounts We tried using OAuth because that's how you get people to access accounts, right?

The problem with  OAuth is it lets you log into things.

It's one or nothing.

It's one or zero I either give you access to my entire account and trust you, or I give you access to no, nothing in my account.

We realized money actually is not an account or a bank account is not an account you want people to log into.

And you want to be able to impose limitations on it because you have resources on the account.

So the team that developed off OAuth started working about three, four years ago on a new protocol called GNAP: grand negotiation and authorization protocol that lets you define resources on the system and manage access to those resources.

Think web servers.

You can give people access to roots.

Think money.

You can give people access into accounts for things like, I will let you access a dollar out of my account for the next two minutes, which basically means I'll let you pay this transaction.

I'll let you access a dollar out of my account every month because it's a subscription.

Or if you think about Apple pay actually has access to all the money in your account.

We thought you should have some limits in there so I can give you access to, I don't know, 200 in my account for the whole month for as many transactions as you need.

So if you're Apple, you can still access my account and pay, but I'm going to put some limits into you.

The problem with using bleeding edge technology is you'll cut yourself.

We are currently the first implementer of GNAP.

We have had to contribute considerable resources into developing GNAP to the point where it's a release candidate.

But at least that is the technology that's multipurpose today that we've had to help build in order to make it work for everyone that's trying to send money.

And then we realized even with this delegated access, even with resourcing and stuff like that, most people will never write raw TCP IP.

Today you have something that implements TCP IP that's widely distributed and people use the application layer on top.

So we had to develop an application layer that lets you make payments out of accounts on top of it.

We looked at open banking and each initially we thought let's do open banking.

Everybody does open banking and then we looked at how everybody does open banking and the amount of access you have with open banking.

So for example, if I have two bank accounts with the same bank.

And I give you access to one of them through open banking.

That's technically not possible.

Open banking gives you access to all of my banking information.

So you can see me making transactions at 2am next to the strip club.

I don't go to the strip club.

You can see all of my history.

Why do you need to do all of this in order to initiate the payment, right?

I have to trust you a lot.

To give you access to my entire banking information.

So we tried to restrict this to only payments, and that's why we called it OpenPayments.

It's a very small subset of a banking API that allows you to do only one thing, initiate payment out of accounts and verify that it completed.

When we built this, and John was mentioning this on stage, when we built all of this, we built it on modern technology.

We made it so that it behaves like the Internet.

If you have a computer from 20 years ago and you plug it to the internet, it still works the same way because the information is exchanged in real time.

For us, currency gets exchanged in real time from one currency to the other.

They have, it has multi hop routing.

You have the ability to complete the transaction at the speed of the internet, probably 200 milliseconds.

What we didn't intend for was what amount were you going to transfer for us?

If you transfer a cent, a dollar or a million dollars, it takes the same amount of time.

And a bunch of smart people from Coil figured this one out before anyone else.

And they realized because we had no limitation that we can process a shit load more transactions than Visa or MasterCard, they could make smaller and smaller transactions.

So today, Card networks enforce a $1 limit, not because they don't want transactions below a dollar, but because they cannot support a massive number of transactions.

So they have to section off a pool of sizes to make less transactions happen and even so they want to discourage that one dollar use case.

The only people in the world who use the one dollar use case is Apple and Google for the play stores, right?

The 99 cents app was very popular.

So that's why visa and mastercard had to go at the dollar level, but even so For a transaction they take 30 cents plus 2.75 percent in fees.

So if I try to send anyone a dollar or if you pay an app a dollar about 30 percent of that goes to Visa and mastercard about 30 more percent of that goes to apple there's a reason apple enforces a 30 cut.

Not because that 30 percent cut is the is making them a lot of money.

That's because all of that 30 percent has to go visa mastercard that has somebody has to support the cost.

Because we could support a cent or in our case, the hundredth part of a cent people figured out you could literally stream money.

You can make a 200 milliseconds round trip.

You can fire about a million transactions a second and worry about them 200 milliseconds later.

So you could stream money.

And that's how Web Monetization became a thing.

That's how  Web Monetization became a thing out into the world.

Somebody realized if you go on a website and you watch the content today, the only way to make money is to take people off of the content.

To put ads on your website so that people click ads and you make money when they leave your website.

You're not, if you look at any news organization out there news site out there.

There's ads at the top on the sides.

At the bottom there's a pop up.

Because that's how people who create content make money when you go off the content.

Coil said what if you paid the websites while you watch the content in real time, so that people were incentivized to give you better and better content and that's how  Web Monetization became an idea.

Because it was on the web, it got incubated at W3C.

But if you haven't seen  Web Monetization, if you weren't around this world, maybe two years ago, maybe three years ago, you probably haven't seen it.

Coil sadly went downsized massively about two years ago.

So if you haven't seen it, it looks a little bit like this.

It's a new link tag on a website with a new relationship type.

So usually use links to import CSS, JavaScript, whatever.

You use a link to in to create a relationship to monetization with the URL being that payment point that I showed you earlier.

And that's it.

You put that anywhere on a page and your page becomes monetization enabled.

You can start making money automatically with your website.

Spoiler alert, you can't do this here today in Australia, sadly, but by the time the next Web Directions Conference is happening, you are going to be able to do this here in Australia as well.

Right now we can do this if you're in the US, in Canada, in Europe and in South Africa.

With more countries or more jurisdictions becoming available and online.

If you were in one of those countries, it's actually a really nifty experience where you install an extension, you put in your payment information, and it connects to your digital wallet in real time, asks for access to a certain amount of money in your account.

And you as a user can now pay the websites you're seeing.

Radu is the the number one developer at the Interledger, not because, of how good he is, but because of how much money he's gotten during this demo.

Yeah, so you can, be monetization enabled in five seconds.

You, choose if you want to pay on a subscription basis.

For example, I pay about $20 a month for monetize, for monetization.

Other people have a budget and that's it.

So they do a hundred dollars.

When we run out of money, we put more money into my account and it connects directly from your digital wallet and starts streaming money to websites.

As you can see, it's an extension, and that's because if you are not Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, or Samsung, and you try to develop a new web standard, it takes you about seven years.

So we actually work with the worldwide web consortium in all of these browsers, and we've developed a specification that's right now in draft stage being reviewed by the technical architecture group.

For the  Web Monetization API we've worked on it with coil.

We've worked on it with a bunch of the wallets.

We worked on it with the w3c.

We would love to work on it with you.

If you have feedback, you can go to webmonetization dot org.

I forgot to put up the link.

I'll send it out on blue sky later.

So you can go to  webmonetization dot org and you can give us feedback.

About the specification about usage about what you'd like to see in this world of monetization.

There is actually an active implementation happening in the browser right now.

We got the intent to ship approved by Chromium.

So I can't remember what timeline we're talking about.

Keep in mind this developer land so six months might not be six months.

But you will see this behind the flag in chromium or in a chromium near you within the next six months.

Hopefully.

We are in about year 3, year 4 of year 7 of developing this into a browser.

If you are in the room and happen to run a browser, work for a browser, find me around after the conference.

I would love to bend your ear about how we can make this a multi browser implementation.

We've learned so much by working with the, with the Chromium developers on the first implementation.

That I promise you the second one is going to be so much easier.

Everybody believed that, didn't you?

So we developed all of this technology on top of this concept.

We proved that it works.

There is real usage in the world.

So let's talk about usage.

In 2022, the whole country of India did 72 billion transactions.

In 200, in 2022, the whole web monetized web, about 5, 000 people did 70 billion transactions.

So in just a short time, we've been able to prove that it works on a country level.

We could go home, right?

Job's done.

Everything's good.

You have a way to send money across the internet, but sadly, that's not the case.

And that's because even here today, there are a few of you who could pay me over Interledger and it'd be easy and fast and we can get it done, but the majority of you can't.

And that's because no matter how much technology you build, before you can put that technology into the world or because before that technology can do any good, you've still got the major roadblock.

A human somewhere in, in there has to understand that.

And approve it.

Because this has to do with banks and banking.

We have to talk to the regulator, which is usually a central banker.

I don't want to, how do I put this in a way you will understand?

The average central banker was around before the internet was a thing.

And when you talk to them about the internet, you have to use analogies and allegories and explain it like I'm five, suddenly because it becomes a thing.

So we've been working for the past five years with central bankers to explain the concept to get them familiar to get them to understand that.

There is hope in the world We have two central banks that got it.

It took them a while.

Don't get me wrong, but they got it.

So we are now enabling whole countries to get access to this technology millions and millions of people at the time instead of ones and twos.

But there's about 190 other countries in the world we haven't talked to or that don't get it.

Even for the ones that do get it and they go, okay, let's make this happen.

There's another set of humans involved in this process and those are lawyers I if you thought dealing with central bank bankers was bad.

It's not actually that bad.

Once they get it, they have the power to do anything they want.

There's no bad thing that can happen to them if they sign this into existence, as evidenced by the fact that central bankers keep changing their mind on a daily basis.

But, lawyers on the other hand, their whole job is not only cover their asses, but cover everybody else's asses.

So once you convince the central banks, you then have to complete, convince a bunch of lawyers who works, work for a bunch of banks that this is safe.

Spoiler alert, it's technology.

It's safe by design.

We've put so much cryptography into it.

There is a team at Apple that tests FoundationDB, Apple's database.

They have this interesting thing called time travel, where they can compress time in the cloud by changing the speed of the processor.

The speed of the clock of the processor.

So they've been able to test about a hundred years inside of one, and they've been trying for the past year and a half to break into an Interledger packet.

They have a very good incentive to do so.

That is, there are bounties out there on the internet about breaking into the package.

They haven't managed to, so basically they've tried for about 150 years to break into it and they haven't managed to.

Lawyers do not trust this.

The biggest problem we have today at the Interledger is not convincing people about why this needs to happen, not convincing people to adopt this, not building the technology.

Technologically, in seven days, you can be on interledger.

Practically, there are two teams of lawyers from two of the banks we work with for the past six months.

That haven't managed to agree on a single one page document to sign that says it's okay to turn on Interledger.

So the banks, the bank teams implemented it.

It works in test mode or in their sandboxes.

They've managed to exchange money.

They use it internally for bank employees.

So about seven banks in this world, the bank employees exchange money and get paid over Interledger.

But the lawyers that work for the same banks and receive their salaries via Interledger cannot agree that it's safe to turn on.

No matter how much technology we've built and how much innovation we've been able to deliver, the human is truly the last frontier.

And, this was a lot of talk.

A lot of talk.

And if you walk away today, which is one thing, it's not that banking sucks, it's not that technology can solve problems, it's not build it and they will come.

Unless you build a lot of roads, signpost it, and do a lot of education and advocacy, so unless you build roads, they'll never come.

And with that, I would like all of you to consider becoming road builders.

We are about 50 people at the Intelligent Foundation today.

We have managed to project that organization around the world.

I think I need about 50, 000 more people in order to make this into reality.

It's a good idea on a piece of paper.

It's a great piece of technology, but it needs a lot more people to make it work.

If you're on GitHub, if you contribute in your spare time.

If you like open source, everything we do is open source.

Try going on github dot com slash interledger and see if you can, help.

And with that, I really do.

Thank you.

If you ever get on interledger, I've left my payment pointer there.

If you'd like to tip, if you'd like to tip me, beer isn't cheap or free, sadly, Unless you're Phil Nash, beer kind of hits you randomly.

You find beer.

Thank you so much.