Our Grantmaking

Financial systems are often designed by centralized institutions without meaningful input from those who use them, build on them, or depend on them. As a result, they don’t work in practice and miss real needs, leaving over 1.3 billion people excluded from traditional banking services.  

The people best placed to solve the challenges of digital financial access are usually the ones closest to them. The Interledger Foundation supports their work. From financial service providers integrating open payment standards, to researchers, educators, policy advocates, and community builders working to expand what open financial infrastructure can do and who it reaches, we back the full range of that work.

Your Role in this Change

Systems change when people build, test, challenge and carry out new ways of making them work. We fund work across technology, education, research, and policy. If this reflects what you’re doing, we may have a grant for you.

How Change Happens

Our grants are not isolated projects. We fund projects across technology, research, education, and policy as part of a broader effort toward a shared outcome. Progress depends on how these different areas interact. Developers build the tech, researchers identify the barriers, educators skill the next generation, and advocates shape the conditions they all operate in. These efforts compound over time: open infrastructure drives innovation, which creates the evidence needed to shift policy. This is how financial systems change in practice. As an independent organisation, our mandate is to support what works in the public interest. Because we have no commercial stake or platform to advance, we can fund across the entire ecosystem — from the protocol layer to the policy table.