5 Out of 12 Interledger Protocol (ILP) Foundation Grantees in 2022 are African

The Interledger Foundation has announced 12 grantees of the financial services research and development grants for 2022.

Out of the 12 grantees, 5 are in Africa.

The Interledger Protocol is an open protocol that permits frictionless payments and micropayments across currencies and ledgers, enabling opportunities for broader global financial inclusion.

The funded projects range from coalition of credit unions in rural Mexico to micro-credit solutions in Kenya for low-income women in Kenya.

According to the Interledger Foundation:

“To build on our mission and goals, we will need more people to experiment and innovate in the Interledger-enabled network, so we are thrilled to announce twelve recipients of our Financial Services awards. These twelve projects will receive funds to cover 6-months of research to explore compelling use cases for ILP-enabled digital wallets, neobanks and community platforms.

We were thrilled by the response we had to this award program and are excited to support these projects as they learn, grow and build. It is mission critical that we expand the ILP network and activate nodes throughout the globe who will open up new opportunities to expand financial inclusion. I am proud that these projects demonstrate the diversity in our ecosystem and support our core belief that we need the people experiencing the problems to be imagining solutions.”

Successful grantees came from 10 different countries and the proposals were reviewed by a global panel of judges made of ILP staff and Interledger Foundation partners.

The 12 projects include:

• Paystreme (USA) – A payment streaming platform enabling users to pay in real-time for services. Users can send payments per second as they consume services such as cell phone coverage, broadband internet, pay TV, and content streaming platforms
• BessPay (Jamaica) -An affordable subscription-based content monetization & hassle-free payment service for creators in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. It connects creators to Interledger Protocol-enabled platforms and services through Mobile Carrier Billing & other local digital payment solutions
• Eneza (Kenya) – A solution that provides the general public access to micro-credit facilities by exposing microfinance institutions and cooperative societies to global Web3 lending sources with off-chain collaterization and credit scores
• MUDA OTC Escrow (Uganda) – An FX liquidity marketplace infrastructure easing the pain points of cross-border payments by digitizing the process
• Snake Nation (South Africa) – A Tier 1 ILP-capable wallet in Africa that increases financial literacy of the M2 banked, underbanked, and unbanked communities of the global south
• The People’s Clearinghouse (Mexico) – A social innovation project to benefit the rural and indigenous people organized in cooperatives by connecting small rural cooperatives to the Mexican Central Bank via the Interledger Protocol
• ThitsaWorks (Myanmar) – A solution connecting Tier-2 and Tier-3 financial institutions, including microfinance institutions, non-banks, mobile money, and rural banks, to an interoperable real-time payment network
• Cheeri (USA) – An impact-funding solution that makes automated reimbursements based on impact metrics by exchanging social, environmental, and other common-good impacts for currencies, including fiat and crypto
• Kult (Brazil) – An open-source digital wallet integrating with the Kult social platform for curated movies, TV series, books, podcasts, and songs promoting diverse cultural exchange among communities. The wallet will integrate with the PIX structure – an instant and free electronic payment system by the Central Bank of Brazil – to monetize people online
• Universal Wallet (Uganda) – A single digital wallet that addresses problems of delays, inefficiency, and inadequacy of existing programs in loyalty and rewards programs
• Cool Lion Fi (Cote d’Ivoire) – A node on the Interledget Network with the goal of facilitating cross-border business equipment loans source foreign fiat and crypto lendgers to reach businesses in francophone Africa
• AgnostiPay (Netherlands) – An open-source solution enabling developers to develop self-sovereign payments for end users that can be used in e-commerce, mobile apps, and fintech infrastructures

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