Announcing the IFEX Project

[Walter Stanish]

The Internet Financial EXchange (IFEX) Project is an open body for the discussion and development of financial standards for the internet community.  The project seeks to focus on enhancing interoperability between financial settlement systems of all types, including conventional financial systems, emerging digital currencies, alternative financial communities, and financial service providers.

Interested parties are invited to review the proposals on the website at http://www.ifex-project.org/ and join the mailing list at http://group.ifex-project.org/

Two items on the site that may be of particular interest:

(1) The latest version of the IIBAN Proposal (v1) for financial endpoint identification at http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/iiban.  This latest version includes initial IANA registry contents and a reference mechanism for financial endpoint transcription error correction. (Relevance: In contrast to settlement system-specific financial endpoint identifiers, IIBAN provides a democratically allocated, 13 character identifier that is already familiar in format to users in Europe and other countries and is theoretically compatible with conventional banking infrastructure in those regions.  In addition, IIBAN is not tied to any specific financial commodity or settlement system, and provides strong protection against identifier transcription errors.)

(2) The IFEX Protocol is a *work in progress* that hopes to bridge the gap between conventional financial systems, emerging digital currencies, alternative financial communities, and financial service providers by providing a standard protocol for transaction and settlement path negotiation with arbitrary financial instruments, currencies or assets.  (Relevance: better connectivity, lower settlement fees, real time redundant financial routing, arbitrary instrument/currency/asset handling)

How IFEX's proposed infrastructure differs from existing projects:

 - Not a currency, not a settlement-network, but a mechanism for bridging them.

 - Broader and more inclusive scope than existing vendor-specific APIs and conventional finance industry networking protocols. Global focus. No legacy 'features'. No artificial barriers to innovators.

The hope is to move towards an open source implementation of the (work in progress) IFEX protocol that interoperates with major and emerging settlement networks for the benefit of all parts of the community. We have already had expressions of interest from representatives in a range of communities (Bitcoin, CES, Ripple, W3C Web Payments, digital currency exchange developers, etc.), and look forward your input on the mailing list.

Happy Friday the 13th!

Regards,

Walter Stanish

The IFEX Project

http://www.ifex-project.org/