University of Cape Town Hosts Hackathon to Tackle Local Payment Challenges with Interledger Protocol

Following a week-long bootcamp of lectures delivered by global representatives of the Interledger Foundation, the University of Cape Town (UCT) recently hosted the Financial Innovation Hub and Interledger Foundation Hackathon.

The event took place at the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking Afrika at UCT, where 12 teams of students from UCT, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), University of the Western Cape (UWC) and Eduvos participated.

The aim was not only to win a prize but also to explore the use of the Interledger Protocol (ILP) in developing open-payment solutions tailored to local South African challenges.

“Hackathons give students the opportunity to create solutions for challenges that they identify in their lived realities,”

said Dr Allan Davids, Director of the Financial Innovation Hub.

“The teams are made up of students from the Financial Innovation Hub alongside students from UCT and other higher education institutions studying disciplines such as computer science, computer and electrical engineering and statistics. They all work together as a team to develop technological solutions for real problems, each contributing their own learned skillsets into product-based technology. One of the solutions at the 2024 hackathon was so innovative it has been contributed back into the Open Payments Standard.”

According to Davids, the event helps students extend themselves while also offering practical contributions to a global ecosystem aiming to make digital payments as simple as sending an email.

Judging responsibilities were taken on by Takunda Chirema and Si-Jia Wu, both alumni of the UCT MPhil in FinTech, along with Raul Ranete and Timea Nagy of the Interledger Foundation.

The winning team, Direla, developed a solution using the Interledger Protocol to enable low-income users and small retailers to transact without the use of point of sale devices.

Their system relies on self-generated QR codes to complete transactions.

The runner-up was Team Fin Illuminaries, who used USSD technology to design a digital financial service platform for rural communities, making services accessible through local spaza shops.

Their concept also incorporated the Interledger Wallet to facilitate payments to informal businesses.

Team FlowFi placed third with a student crowdfunding platform.

Their solution combines personal storytelling with financial contributions, enabling donors to follow individual journeys.

The Interledger Wallet supports the system by generating unique incoming payment URLs to monitor donations until targets are met.

Looking ahead, Davids expressed plans to expand the initiative:

“Next year we want to make this even bigger, including more higher education organisations and more students from diverse educational backgrounds such as the humanities. We are a fortunate beneficiary of the Interledger Foundation’s Higher Education Grant programme which enables us to hold events such as this and I want to encourage all universities to apply for this grant.”

Six students involved in the event, two from the winning team and four from the third-placed team, currently hold bursaries from the Interledger Foundation.