A typical online transaction today isn’t very different from how it was done 25 years ago at the dawn of the Internet. In fact, online payments haven’t changed much at all. When we want to pay for something online, we copy very sensitive credit card information into a form on a website and trust that website to capture it securely and make proper use of it. If this seems like an old and antiquated way to pay, that’s because it is, and it costs billions of dollars per year in security and fraud prevention. The World Wide Web Consortium wants to standardize the way we pay online, making it more secure, and hopefully a better experience for users.

is a computer scientists and Standards Lead at the W3C. We talk about some of the core problems with dealing with credentials on the web and making online payments. Specifically, we discuss the Web Payments Working Group (WPWG), and their efforts to bring banks, payments providers and browser manufacturers together to converge around a standard set APIs to make for a better and more secure payment experience for all users.

Topics covered in this episode:

Manu’s interest in Bitcoin and blockchains
His role in building the JSON-LD standard
What is the W3C, what are it’s roles and how does it operate
The level of interaction between the Bitcoin community and the W3C
The fundamental problems of dematerialised payments online
What it means to standardize payments online
The Interledger Payments Community Group
Manu’s company Digital Bazaar

Episode links:

This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/118

Manu Sporney: W3C – Making Payments a Web Standard