The 2022 Interledger Protocol Summit was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from the 12th to the 13th of November at the New Orleans Marriott Warehouse Arts District. The summit brought together participants in the interledger ecosystem, including awardees of this year's financial services grants.

The interledger foundation is a non-profit organisation promoting open payment standards that remove payment barriers across ledgers, banks and borders. In line with this vision, the interledger protocol was the culmination of more than a decade of research in decentralised payment protocols. The protocol outlines a standard for routing payments across digital asset ledgers, thus connecting any sender with any receiver.

During the two days, presentations were mainly grouped into two categories; Tools and services for easier integration into the ILP ecosystem and the state of financial inclusion for those serviced by the platforms built on top of web monetisation and the interledger protocol. There were presentations from Rafiki, TigerBeetle, Arunjay from UNCDF and Michael Richards of ModusBox, among others.

Rafiki and TigerBeetle are tools and services for easier integration into the interledger ecosystem. Rafiki is an open-source package that wallet providers can use to offer interledger functionality to their users. The intermediary will communicate with other ILP nodes instead of the wallet building this infrastructure. Rafiki uses TigerBeetle, an accounting database capable of processing a million transactions per second. Arunjay and Michael presented the steps to achieve interoperability between individual payment services, including Mojaloop, which is a reference model to accomplish this.

"It is essential for a standard to be set and adopted to achieve open payments. The interledger protocol is that standard but more work still needs to be done to gain extensive adoption. Projects like Rafiki and Fynbos provide a foundation for platforms willing to integrate the interledger protocol into their payment systems. It is exciting to be at the beginning of such a revolutionary technology" - Takunda Chirema.