{"document_id":"BLC-PAPER-0005","slug":"interledger","title":"A Protocol for Interledger Payments","authors":"Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz","year":2015,"date_label":"2015, as the Interledger Foundation dates the protocol's creation. The PDF's first page, as checked for this record, does not print a full citation date.","publisher":"Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Interoperability","topics":["Cross-ledger payments","Escrow","Connectors"],"source_url":"https://interledger.org/documents/interledger.pdf","source_label":"interledger.org PDF","legacy_pdf_path":"/pdf/interledger.pdf","sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"The white paper. ILPv4 and later RFCs are other documents.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Rights uncertain","source_status":"Official PDF, and a historic library path","use_status":"Download from the publisher. The legacy path remains. Full text is not republished here.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"The paper proposes payments that cross ledgers by escrow, through connectors, without one blockchain ordering every transfer.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/interledger","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/interledger","study_url":null,"last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Proposes","label":"Settlement across ledgers","href":"/learn/concepts/settlement"},{"rel":"Different architecture from","label":"A single global chain","href":"/research/corpus/papers/bitcoin"},{"rel":"Different payment design","label":"Lightning, which still sits on Bitcoin","href":"/whitepaper/lightning"},{"rel":"Concept","label":"Bridge","href":"/learn/concepts/bridge"}]}