The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with blockchain startup Coil as part of its mission to provide payment services for the unbanked.
The news comes via a tweet from Miller Abel, the foundation's deputy director and principal technologist, on Oct. 17. Abel indicated that the organization and Coil will work together to implement the Interledger Protocol and explore ways to support "pro-poor payment systems."
Interledger is an interoperability protocol that allows payments across different crypto networks. The technology was initially co-developed by former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas while he was still with the distributed ledger payments firm. The same tech now being used as the basis of Coil, which Thomas founded earlier this year, as CoinDesk reported.