Building Together: The Next Steps for the Foundation

We recently announced plans to usher in a new era of global payments and commerce enabled by decentralized technologies—a world reshaped to empower individuals and organizations with open protocols that can move value anywhere around the world in more efficient and cost-effective ways than what’s possible in traditional financial systems. The announcement of our foundation elicited a wave of support. We've received over 50 inquiries from leaders and visionaries eager to join this journey.

Our Mission

The mission of our foundation is bold and necessary: serve as a vendor neutral home for open source standards and decentralized technologies that unlock frictionless commerce, payments, and global financial access.

That means erasing the borders that demarcate traditional financial systems. It means enabling legal and regulatory compliance without sacrificing privacy. And unlocking faster and more affordable global transactions, and enabling anyone to participate in the economy – particularly the billion people worldwide that still lack access to a bank account. Money and payments have simply not kept pace to serve everyone under the old paradigm.

There’s exciting work to be done to enable our ambitions – and we believe this work should be done collaboratively and in the open. Decentralized identity, verifiable credentials, and protocol agnostic address resolution are foundational technologies required to bring our vision to life. 

We don’t seek to reinvent the wheel where good work is already being done. We will be working with existing open source and technical standards groups, including the Open Identity Foundation (OIDF), the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), W3C, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and others – while adding our own contributions and innovation to deliver on our mission.

Together, we can build a more open, accessible, and inclusive financial system, reinvented around new primitives.

Building Together 

Today, we extend an invitation to plug into our community and contribute to laying the foundation for what comes next. 

We'll begin with an initial set of founding members, welcoming a diversity of industry leaders and larger organizations committed to our open source philosophy, while also ensuring that smaller companies and individual contributors have a voice. 

Stay tuned. Stay connected. And most importantly, let's build this together.

To learn more, get involved, or if you missed the initial wave and want to join our mission, visit the registration site or reach out to formation@linuxfoundation.org.