Apple has announced that Safari 11.1 on macOS and Safari on iOS 11.3 will support the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Payment Request API for conducting Apple pay transactions on the web. Notably, the payment request API uses W3C Interledger, a global standard for interoperability. Ripple is the co-chair of W3C.
More importantly, the cheapest source for liquidity using interledger is Ripple (XRP) token. So, it seems Ripple has already secured a big deal. It should be remembered that Apple Pay is perceived as a competitor to Visa.
Almost all the big players and browsers have offered their support to W3C interledger. The editors of the W3C payment request API are big names in the tech field. They are:
• Adrian Bateman (Microsoft Corp.)
• Zach Koch (Google)
• Roy McElmurry (Facebook)
• Domenic Denicola (Google)
• Marcos Caceres (Mozilla)
Any digital asset can be transferred or exchanged to another digital asset across any ledger that supports the open inter ledger protocol.
What is Interledger?
Interledger is an open protocol suite for sending payments across different ledgers. Like routers on the Internet, connectors route packets of money across independent payment networks. The open architecture and minimal protocol enable interoperability for any value transfer system. Interledger is not tied to any one company, blockchain, or currency.
Interledger is developed by an open group of companies and individual contributors, loosely organized as part of a Community Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
How Interledger Works?
Interledger uses connectors to route payments across different ledgers. Conditional transfers — using Hash-Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs), as they are known in the blockchain space — are used to secure multi-hop payments so funds cannot be lost or stolen in flight. On top of this security primitive, Interledger provides a packet and address format, heavily inspired by the Internet Protocol (IP), to instruct connectors where to forward payments.
Two years before, Ripple chief technical officer Stefan Thomas told ibtimes
“From a sort of business strategic perspective, the big tech companies absolutely hate the card issuers, because they are another powerful player and something the big tech companies don’t like is sharing market power.”
Thomas also explained why Visa will hate it
“The tech companies would much rather be able to move themselves. I think what they are lacking, what they need is some way to interoperate with each other. That’s the thing the Visa has that they don’t have, the interoperability. That’s why we think having a protocol that gives them that interoperability is going to unleash complete hell on Visa.”