# What happened with the Web Monetization API?

Source: https://chriscoyier.net/2024/01/24/what-happened-with-the-web-monetization-api
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/What-happened-with-the-Web-Monetization-API?index=0x65c274bd7abf952cd49e4380c7ab54d6321371783add6229a3c058d51aff3d7b0c3eb1a7
Submitted by tomwaite.eth on 2024-02-06 UTC, 1 upvote, 1 comment

## Summary

The Web Monetization API, which would let users send small payments to websites with a click, has an uncertain future after Coil, the main startup promoting it, failed. Coil handed Interledger's future development to the Interledger Foundation, and PPK is now DevRel for the foundation. According to an update, the API will connect to an online wallet powered by fynbos, which links to banks and credit cards rather than crypto. Removing ads is named as the most basic use case, and sites would need to know quickly whether a user is paying at the required level.

## Article

I was pretty hot on it for a minute. I wanted it to succeed and thought it had the bones to make it. Coil was the main startup trying to push it. They did the right thing by just making it work first, showing there is interest, then pushing to get it standardized. But Coil failed.

When we started Coil in 2018, Interledger was only an idea. Over the last five years we breathed life into the technology and sparked a vibrant ecosystem around it. Now it’s time to pass the torch to a neutral body in the form of the Interledger Foundation to steward the future development of Interledger.

I don’t know much about Interledger. It seems alive-ish? They had a “Summit” recently and I watched some of it but it didn’t do much for my understanding.

Then recently I saw a good thread from Sara including this:

Sara started it by saying that she just wants to “click a little button and send money from me to the person/org/persons operating a website”. Totally! I’m obsessed with that use case. It needs to be built into the browsers and web standards such that it’s incredibly smooth and fast. I wanna send $1 to a website, it happens instantly and anonymously, and the developer can do things around this. Like unlock features! For instance, stop showing ads, offer more complete downloads, unlock tutorial courses, etc. Make it easier and faster than using a credit card.

It appears that the Web Monetization API is up to the task. I friggin’ love the example of how to use it as a developer:

<!doctype html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>My Blog</title> <link rel="monetization" href="https://example.com/pay" onmonetization="sayThanks(this)" /> <script> function sayThanks(monetizedLink) { // Do something here } </script> </head> <body></body> </html>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

And of course there are more APIs, like for checking how much a user contributed, if they have already contributed, etc.

Does it have legs anymore? I just have no idea. Sorry if the title of the post led you to believe I might have an answer. I’m just looking for the answer.

Again though, poking a button to send a website bucks through web standards is a great idea.

I’ll leave it with my favorite use case (removing ads) and what I’ve written before, in hopes that this part can be done right:

Removing ads is the most basic and obvious use case, and I hope some people give that a healthy try. […] I’d want to clearly be able to control the dollar-level of when you get that perk, but more importantly, in order to really make good on the promise of not delivering ads, you need to know very quickly if any given user is supporting you at the required level or not. For example, you can’t wait 2600 milliseconds to decide whether ads need to be requested. Well, you can, but you’ll wreck your ad revenue. And you can’t simply request the ads and hide them when you find out, lest you are not really making good on a promise, as trackers’n’stuff will have already done their thing.

Update: The Answer

PPK is now DevRel for the Interledger Foundation, so apparently it’s heating up again. The news is that the API will hook up to an online “wallet” powered by fynbos. I’ve never heard of it, but it looks like it connects to banks and credit cards, not crypto. It’s not that I’m some big stan for Big Banks, but crypto was (is) just so absolutely riddled with scams and crime that I just can’t anymore. Decoupling the Web Payments API and crypto is certainly the right move right now.

## Comments

**tim**: > The Interledger Protocol and Web Monetization “standards” became entirely too captured by the cryptocurrency world to ever truly grow into this, which is sad/unsurprising. I wish someone would resurrect the effort without the Web3 scam tech, and give us a pathway of indie support on par with festivals and art halls. This is such a roadblock to so many small operations; from illustration to journalism to games to comics—owning our own sites isn’t enough if still under current monetary pathways. [1]

This is actual bullshit. I have personally been involved in the Interlegder Protocol w3c group as my colleague at BigchainDB had co-chaired it (Dimitri de Jonghe) and to suggest "it became captured" is just plain false. Stefan Thomas, THE first maintainer of bitcoin.js and later CTO of Ripple, led that entire community. Interledger was specifically an abstracted version of a coin swap that Ripple pledged to implement. We at BigchainDB had an interest in that because it furthered our value prop for B2B customers. They (Interledger/Ripple) organized events all around the world to champion this, so it seems to be really misleading that this was "captured by web3 scam." It was actually founded by those people and would otherwise not exist.

- 1: https://xoxo.zone/@sara/111774573812373512