Forem: Sabine Schaller

Interledger 2022 - The Year of Rafiki

Sabine Schaller — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 18:13:36 +0000

Last week, Microsoft announced that it was planning to acquire Activision Blizzard, which “will provide building blocks for the metaverse" and last year, Facebook renamed its corporation to Meta to reflect its aspirations to build the virtual future where people meet, work, and play. All of these activities will need some sort of payment, whether it is for the virtual meeting outfit, for payroll, or for entering a game. Even if you argue that a virtual currency may be enough for a virtual world, I doubt that there will be one currency that fits all purposes. Hence, an interoperability protocol is needed and that is exactly what Interledger is, connecting all kinds of ledgers from existing financial institutions to cryptocurrencies on blockchains, virtual currencies, and even offline payments systems.

Why are we ready to fly now?

For the first half of 2021, I was on maternity leave and spent 24/7 with my baby boy. When I rejoined the community later during the year, I was completely amazed by how much it had evolved.

In early 2021, Uchi Uchibeke had joined Coil as Head of Developer Relations & Experience, and an Interledger and Web Monetization stream has been part of many hackathons ever since, introducing more and more people to the concept of streaming payments online. He also hosts a bi-weekly Twitter Space targeted towards newcomers to the Interledger Protocol. In contrast to the community call, where members are more likely to talk about protocol specifics, the Twitter Space introduces parts of the Interledger stack or Web Monetization to those that want to get started with the technology.

Speaking of the community call, it has been taken over by Alex, the Technology Lead at the Interledger Foundation. Starting this year, the format changes to monthly calls with dedicated slots for updates from the Interledger Foundation, Fynbos, Coil, and Rafiki. Additionally, they are finally tackling our documentation. We have always had a lot of it, but it is in desperate need of reorganization. They’re making it easier for everybody to find what they are looking for–may it be a broad introduction or a fine-grained specification.

One specification that is currently experiencing a massive update is the Web Monetization specification. The main change is that we are moving away from meta tags and will be using link tags in the future. If you keep in mind that a payment pointer, which is included in the meta tag right now, is resolved to an endpoint URL, you realize that link tags are actually more suitable for Web Monetization. The nice benefit from that change is that you are now able to monetize different parts of your webpage by adding different payment pointers to respective link tags.

We also welcomed a new Interledger related company to the table in 2021. Right when I first opened Slack again to check what’s new after my maternity leave from Coil, I was surprised to learn that most of my South African colleagues were not there anymore.

What happened, did they all quit? Well, in fact they did but it wasn’t to leave the community but to start their own company Fynbos. One reason why Interledger is still so nascent is because money is involved. As soon as that is the case, participants need to be licensed money transmitters. Fynbos has set out to become such a licensed entity that offers Interledger-enabled accounts.

You may now think, “aren’t Uphold and Gatehub offering these already? What is new about Fynbos?’” Currently, your Uphold and Gatehub wallets only enable you to receive payments via Interledger but don’t permit you to send payments. Furthermore, these accounts don’t currently offer Open Payments functionality, namely invoices and mandates (possibly for recurring pull payments). All of this functionality will be unlocked with a Fynbos Interledger-enabled account, which is based on the open source package Rafiki.

What is Rafiki, my friend?

The Rafiki package was introduced in May 2021 by Coil’s CEO Stefan Thomas as the All-in-One solution for Interledger wallets. It is a set of APIs that enables the entire suite of Interledger and Open Payments functionalities like streaming payments (Web Monetization), sending discreet payments (tips and invoices), receiving payments, setting up recurring payments (mandates), and app-based payments.

Thus far, most of these functionalities only existed on paper. Rafiki will be the reference implementation, bundling all of them and hence allowing not just digital wallets but any payment provider to easily enable Interledger functionalities on their accounts. And it is fully open source!

Where is development at?

We got quite far in 2021, implementing sending, receiving, and invoices. Mandates are currently under review. However, the authentication/authorization part is still missing and we are currently discussing which specification to use. Should we stick to OAuth2 or move to GNAP, a relatively new approach to authorization which concentrates on grants. Additionally, we are working on documentation on how to run Rafiki locally using docker, such that early birds can already take a peek.

If you want to check the current progress of the development on Rafiki, check out the Github Project!

What is the timeline for 2022?

Depending on the authorization decision – OAuth2 or GNAP – a Rafiki MVP will be available sooner or a bit later during the year. If we stick to OAuth2, we anticipate having it by the end of Q1 / early Q2 2022. If we decide to use GNAP, we will have to implement it ourselves and won’t be able to rely on already existing OAuth2 solutions like Ory Hydra. Consequently, a fully functional Rafiki will only be available early during the second half of the year.

What else do we have in store for 2022?

Of course there are going to be hackathons again, not just on Web Monetization but also on Interledger and Rafiki to help you familiarize yourself with the new stack. Furthermore, we are planning to hold an ILP Summit again this year. I can’t wait for it to happen!

Please join the Interledger forum to keep updated about the latest news from the Interledger community and to hear about upcoming events.

Thank you, @Uchi, @Tiffany, @Alex, and @Adrian for your valuable feedback and support when writing this post.

Cover picture from Wikifur, modified, CC-BY-SA.

GFTW Hackathon: Need some inspiration? - Web Monetized Video Calls

Sabine Schaller — Tue, 26 May 2020 13:30:58 +0000

The latest addition to my demo portfolio is a page to host monetized video calls using the Jitsi Meet API.

Jitsi is an open source community that has built an end-to-end encrypted videoconferencing tool called Jitsi Meet which is compatible with WebRTC. You can use Jitsi's hosted instance or you can decide to host your own. Jitsi Meet also exposes an API that allows you to embed calls into a webpage. This is precisely what I used for this demo.

A video call host specifies a call name and a payment pointer that will receive the streamed mircopayments from the call participants. The host then shares the link to the video call, which is generated for him/her, with the participants, who can only join the call if they have Web Monetization enabled. If Web Monetization is not enabled, participants will see an error message. If participants switch to another tab and Web Monetization is stopped, they are automatically removed from the call. A more detailed walk through including a video can be found in my blog post. Here is the demo:

I would say that this demo is the furthest from being a product and here is why: First, by using the Jitsi API, the actual call is hosted on meet.jit.si, so any participant who receives the URL to the video call can just copy the room name and attend the meeting on meet.jit.si without streaming payments.

Second, even if we hosted our own instance of Jitsi and made the UI inaccessible or added a payment pointer form to the UI, participants could still swap that payment pointer in the meta tag. The demo only checks that payments are streamed, not to whom. This can only be fixed by integrating with the new STREAM receipts verifier.

Finally, the amounts that are being streamed are usually too low for the use cases is was thinking of, like online tutoring or counseling. For that, we would have to introduce adjustable streaming rates or at least tipping functionality. If the price to attend a video call becomes very high, however, it may make sense to use the Open Payments standard instead of Web Monetization. I can imagine a flow where the host creates a mandate against the participants wallet that allows him to charge every minute the participant is on the call.

Do you have other ideas about how to elevate this idea from a demo to a useful solution? Please share them with us in the comments below!

GFTW Hackathon: Need some inspiration? - A Web Monetized Image Gallery

Sabine Schaller — Mon, 25 May 2020 19:45:58 +0000

Welcome to part two of my mini-series! This little app demonstrates how one can change the payment pointer based on what is in focus on a webpage, making use of the Intersection Observer. But let's take a step back first.

What is Web Monetization really about? What fascinates me about it is that it allows for an alternative business model for the web. Instead of platforms being the only players benefiting from content, consumers stream micropayments to content creators, for example with the help of a Coil membership and extension. Social media platforms could offer their services without selling advertisement space by introducing a revenue sharing scheme, for example probabilistic revenue sharing.

For this demo, created on Glitch, I didn't go as far as probabilistic revenue sharing, I didn't even create a platform. I created a static page that shows images, just like Instagram but not as pretty. While you scroll through the gallery, different images come into focus. As soon as 75% of an image are in focus, the Intersection Observer picks up the payment pointer that is included in the HTML wrapping the image and changes the content of the monetization meta-tag. Since the demo images are taken from unsplash, the micropayments are streamed to charity.

A longer article about this demo, including a video, can be found on Coil's blog.

This demo could easily be converted into a platform, where users can post images together with their payment pointers. If an image is exclusive, it could be blurred out for users who don't have Web Monetization enabled. That way, there is no censorship. The platform creator can decide whether they ask for a payment to host the image or they implement probabilistic revenue sharing, which is a fun project on its own.

I'm curious to hear about and see implementations of other ideas using the Intersection Observer together with Web Monetization.

GFTW Hackathon: Need some inspiration? - Hugo + Web Monetization

Sabine Schaller — Thu, 21 May 2020 12:42:47 +0000

Hi, I'm Sabine, a software engineer at Coil. Lately, I have been working on some Web Monetization demos and I also participated in the DeFi Hackathon at San Francisco Blockchain Week last year, where my team's project won one of Xpring's prizes:

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1191175741116862464-222'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1191175741116862464&theme=dark" }

I thought I should share these little hacks with you to serve as inspiration for this epic hackathon. This will be a mini-series, so stay tuned for more!

Hugo + Web Monetization: The hackathon

Hugo is a static webpage generator that allows people with some coding skills to set up a beautiful webpage in just a few minutes by writing all of its content in markdown. If you want to do any changes apart from adding pages and post, though, it becomes complicated and you have to dig into the theme's code.

For the hackathon project, we tweaked an existing Hugo theme called Newsroom to allow for simple Web Monetization via the Hugo config.toml file and exclusive content using a div tag. Here is the devpost submission.

I must admit, it wasn't the greatest hack but it made me want to continue to work on it.

Hugo + Web Monetization: The Hugo theme component

A tweaked Hugo theme does not help anybody who wants to use a different theme, so I looked into avenues to get Web Monetization and exclusive content included into every webpage more easily. The fact that Web Monetization is proposed for incubation in the Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG) was not enough for the Hugo community to add it to their core - understandable. They pointed me towards theme components, which ended up being my solution:

sabineschaller / hugo-webmonetization-component

Hugo theme component that enables web monetization and exclusive content

Hugo Web Monetization Component

Note: This is not a standalone theme but a theme component that enables web monetization on your entire hugo website.

Web monetization is a standard. It is a JavaScript browser API which allows the creation of a payment stream from the reader to the content creator using the Interledger Protocol. The user needs a browser extension like Coil or Minute, or they are ahead of their time and use the Puma Browser. These will check the website for the existence of a meta tag called "monetization" which includes the payment pointer. You, the content and website creator, need such a a payment pointer.

This component adds a partial including the "monetization" meta tag and the payment pointer of the creator.

How to add the component to your site

Add the component as second theme to your hugo site:

git submodule add git@github.com:sabinebertram/hugo-webmonetization-component.git

…

View on GitHub

A Hugo theme component is installed together with the actual theme, adding extra functionality but has no styling capabilities. It is not a stand-alone theme.

The Hugo - Web Monetization theme component allows for multiple payment pointers, one per page, such that collaborators do not have to worry about splitting payments later. Exclusive content is wrapped in {{% exclusive %}} and {{% /exclusive %}}. Additionally, the lock and unlock messages are freely customizable.

Let me know in the comments if you have ideas of what else I could add to it!