Financial data is everywhere and increasing everyday, yet outside the enterprise domain sharing that data has almost never been more difficult than it is today. There is a real need for a common standard reporting transaction data between all the different applications small businesses and individuals use today.

OAuth has recently been developed as a standard which solves the trust and authentication aspects of sharing private confidential data. HTTP solves moving and subscribing to data so near realtime information can become widely available. XMPP could be harnessed to create real time data streams. The only thing missing is a simple easy data format. This is what WideLedger aims to define.

"The worlds simplest spec for financial transactions"

Payments and finance are today governed by lots of different incompatible complex legacy standards developed over the last 40 years. These standards make it hard to interoperate and innovate in the financial space.

OpenTransact aims to create the equivalent of the HTTP standard for financial transactions. It is based on established well known HTTP, REST and OAUTH standards. You can use the same standard and implementation code to handle everything from currency payments to loan issuance and stock trades.

RelPayment is a microformat for making exchanges of support (be it financial or otherwise) possible. By adding rel="payment" to a hyperlink a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink provides a way to show or give support for the current page. For example to give financial support to the owner of the current page.

One of the goals with this microformat is to give content aggregators such as RSS readers a way to extract these support links and give them special attention (such as displaying a standard button along with the content).

RelPayment is meant as a general way to facilitate acts of support, and thus this specification makes no assumptions on the type of support.

Ripple was inspired by the LETS concept and the writings of Michael Linton, and was conceived originally as a way to bring more accountability into the spending of credits in a LETS system. Unlike LETS, which only tracks obligations to and from a single central intermediary, Ripple tracks obligations between individuals in a social network. In practice, many LETS users and administrators have complained that LETS provides little incentive to make good on one's obligations other than the desire to have the system work. In Ripple, obligations are never to "the system", or to some other collective entity, but in specific amounts to specific individuals who have agreed to trust you, and the loss of whose trust would have a tangible effect on a participant's life should they decide to renege on their obligations.

Put another way, Ripple is like an interconnected network of LETS systems, each operated by an individual participant. The subscribers to each individual's LETS are his or her neighbours. Each participant acts as a broker to exchange between the LETS currencies they subscribe to.