Ripple/XRP (a cryptocurrency company) just granted 200k USD to Social Web Foundation, "...to research sustainable revenue and operating models for digital publishers and community-run platforms":
https://interledger.org/news/interledger-foundation-awards-200000-social-web-foundation-support-decentralized-social-media (
archived)
This means they will be able to influence the development of the ActivityPub specification at W3C.
For those who don't know: Interledger, WebMonetization and OpenPayments are basically the same thing, these projects were created by Ripple ~10 years ago in order to insert their cryptocurrency and related payment services into web standards. These projects are sometimes presented as independent, but this is a lie, they are not (not in
2019, not in
2025).
Needless to say, Ripple itself is a borderline scam:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2019/03/01/is-ripple-a-scam/. It's not even a cryptocurrency really, their infrastructure is completely centralized and no one in cryptocurrency space takes them seriously. But they have
a lot of money to bribe people, so I am sure that we will hear more about their adventures soon.
Thanks to the
Interledger Foundation for their generous Grant for the Web to the Social Web Foundation. With the help of ILF, we are launching a new program area focused on economic issues on the Social Web. In particular, we’ll be producing three reports: one on sustainability for social web instances; one for the Fediverse and the creator economy; and one for cooperatives on the Social Web. In addition, we’ll be engaging multimedia Fediverse apps for using the Web Monetization standard. You can read more about grant on our shared announcement:
Interledger Foundation awards 0,000 to Social Web Foundation to support decentralized social media.
