LedgerLoops
Find a loop
Discover a cycle through a network of bilateral obligations. Explore how far neighbor-to-neighbor messages can take us without a central map.
Peer-to-peer obligation clearing / an open experiment
Keep your ledger.
Find your peers.
Close the loop.
What if we could clear what we owe each other by passing messages between our own ledgers?
LedgerLoops explores that question with code, cryptography, and a network of local trust. A protocol for people who want to build their own tools for exchange.
Research in the open. Prototypes, working notes, and unresolved questions.
01 / The smallest useful loop
Three people.
Less debt.
Ada owes Bo 12 units. Bo owes Cy 9. Cy owes Ada 6. With everyone’s agreement, they can subtract 6 from every obligation around the loop.
The total outstanding debt falls from 27 to 9 units. Each person’s net position stays the same. No cash needs to travel around the circle.
Now ask the interesting questions: how do peers find that loop? What do they agree to? How do they coordinate the updates?
loop_0013 peers / 1 unit of account
- Ada → Bo
- 12
- Bo → Cy
- 9
- Cy → Ada
- 6
27 units outstanding. 6 can clear on each edge.
An illustration of netting, not a live protocol implementation.
02 / The building blocks
Local relationships.
Network-wide possibilities.
Agree on the terms
Each participant decides which changes they will accept. Units, amounts, and the terms of credit belong in that conversation.
Coordinate the change
The original design uses hashlocked promises: a shared cryptographic condition links local agreements around the loop.
03 / From the workbench
Read it.
Run it.
Question it.
This project grew out of OpenTabs, the Unhosted community, and years of experimenting with IOUs and cryptographic coordination. More recent work connects it to Collaborative Finance.
The trail includes a whitepaper, a browser demo, loop-search benchmarks, and the Jerboa prototype. There is plenty here to inspect—and plenty left to figure out.
An invitation
Bring a curious mind.
And your own questions.
Try an algorithm. Challenge an assumption. Explain a failure case. Help make the next experiment better.
Find a place to start →