Deep dive into Interledger: Understanding the Interledger ecosystem

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview and practical guidance on the Interledger ecosystem, including creating test-beds and understanding interoperability between various value transfer systems and blockchains.

Contribution

It offers a detailed tutorial with examples and hands-on activities to help community members understand and implement the Interledger protocol suite.

Findings

Developed a test-bed for Interledger protocols

Clarified aspects of Interledger technology and interoperability

Provided practical guidance for community engagement

Abstract

At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability between any value transfer systems. The Interledger protocol is a protocol for inter-blockchain payments which can also accommodate FIAT currencies. To understand how it is possible to achieve this goal, several aspects of the technology require a deeper analysis. For this reason, in our journey to become knowledgeable and active contributors we decided to create our own test-bed on our premises. By doing so, we noticed that some aspects are well documented but we found that others might need more attention and clarification. Despite a large community effort, the task to keep information on a fast evolving software ecosystem up-to-date is tedious and not always the main priority for such a project. The purpose of this tutorial is to guide, through several examples and hands-on activities, community members who want to engage at different levels. The tutorial consolidates all the relevant information from generating a simple payment to ultimately creating a test-bed with the Interledger protocol suite between Ripple and other distributed ledger technologies.