Interledger RFCs, ILP Packet, and Ledger Plugin Interface

I want call your attention to the Interledger RFCs repo
<https://github.com/interledger/rfcs>, and to three of the documents in
particular. These reflect the latest ideas, which includes some new
developments that clarify the structure of Interledger and make the analogy
between Interledger and the internet protocols even stronger.

   - IL-RFC-1: Interledger Architecture
   <https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/master/0001-interledger-architecture/0001-interledger-architecture.md>
   This provides an overview of how the protocols in the Interledger suite
   fit together and may be useful for answering the question "so what
*is* interledger?"
   (the whitepaper is more a theoretical defense of the concepts underpinning
   interledger, rather than a description of the components and how they work)
   - IL-RFC-3: Interledger Protocol
   <https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/master/0003-interledger-protocol/0003-interledger-protocol.md>
   This spec describes the ILP Packet format (a new and important concept),
   which is heavily inspired by IP packets. Notably, it only includes the
   destination address, destination amount and a nextHeader field for adding
   additional headers (inspired by IPv6's extension format). It does not
   include conditions, because we realized those actually fit into "transport
   layer" protocols such as Universal and Atomic.
   - IL-RFC-4: Ledger Plugin Interface
   <https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/master/0004-ledger-plugin-interface/0004-ledger-plugin-interface.md>
   This is the Interledger protocol, right? So it's time for us to be able
   to support other types of ledgers. This spec defines the abstraction layer
   we will use to enable Interledger payments over new ledger types (Bitcoin,
   Ethereum, BigchainDB, etc). We'll be refactoring the five-bells-sender and
   -connector to use this interface. The goal is to make supporting new
   ledgers as easy as writing a library that defines these functions and
   plugging it in to the existing client and connector code bases.

As the name suggests, these are requests for comments, so comment away!

These are all still drafts (and the other specs in the repo are just
placeholders for now) but we're excited about these developments and
realizations so we wanted to make sure you saw them.

-- 
Evan Schwartz | Software Architect | Ripple
[image: ripple.com] <http://ripple.com>