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Research corpusInteroperabilityBLC-PAPER-0005

A Protocol for Interledger Payments

The paper proposes payments that cross ledgers by escrow, through connectors, without one blockchain ordering every transfer.

  • Rights uncertain
  • Design paper
  • Official PDF, and a historic library path
Compare

Record

Authors
Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz
Date
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
Version
The white paper. ILPv4 and later RFCs are other documents.
Document ID
BLC-PAPER-0005
DOI
None recorded
Last reviewed
1 October 2026
Licence
No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

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.

Direct answer

The paper proposes payments that cross ledgers by escrow, through connectors, without one blockchain ordering every transfer.

It names an atomic mode that uses notaries and a universal mode that does not. A later Interledger protocol version is not this PDF.

Why it is in the corpus

  • It is the citeable argument that a payment can hop ledgers if each hop can lock funds until a condition clears.
  • The connector is not asked to be a global consensus network. That is the point, and the risk, of the design.

Where to read

Download from the publisher. The legacy path remains. Full text is not republished here.

Full text

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.

Claims and assumptions

Blockchain Lab's reading of what the document is doing. Not a quotation and not the source text.

  • Two ledgers can be joined by someone who has an account on both.
  • Escrow is what makes the connector replaceable. Trust in the connector not to steal is the problem the paper says it is removing.
  • The paper says it does not require a global blockchain.

Assumptions

  • The ledgers can actually escrow under a condition the protocol can use.
  • A path of connectors exists. The paper does not create liquidity by naming it.

What changed

The Interledger Foundation describes later protocol versions, including ILPv4. Those RFCs are not this white paper. The historic library file is a separate copy and was not byte-compared with the publisher PDF.

Relationships

Construct with this

A pattern link for people designing a system. It is not a claim that this paper is a product specification, and it is not permission to copy anyone’s code.

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Thomas, S., & Schwartz, E. (2015). A Protocol for Interledger Payments. Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz. https://interledger.org/documents/interledger.pdf

BibTeX

@techreport{interledger2015,
  title = {A Protocol for Interledger Payments},
  author = {Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz},
  year = {2015},
  institution = {Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz},
  url = {https://interledger.org/documents/interledger.pdf},
  note = {Rights status: Rights uncertain. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/interledger}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - A Protocol for Interledger Payments
AU  - Stefan Thomas
AU  - Evan Schwartz
PY  - 2015
PB  - Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz
UR  - https://interledger.org/documents/interledger.pdf
N1  - Rights status: Rights uncertain
ER  -

CSL-JSON

[
  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-PAPER-0005",
    "title": "A Protocol for Interledger Payments",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Stefan Thomas"
      },
      {
        "literal": "Evan Schwartz"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2015
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz",
    "URL": "https://interledger.org/documents/interledger.pdf",
    "note": "Rights status: Rights uncertain. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

JSONBibTeX fileRIS fileCSL-JSON

Rights record

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.
Rights
Rights uncertain
Training and retrieval
Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensingCorrections

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