What is Minka Cloud?
an open infrastructure for money.
Abstract
Minka is a financial services cloud on a mission to improve the way people interact with money.
We are building an open infrastructure for money that enables organizations to build fast, modern and low-cost financial solutions in days instead of years.
A basic financial services infrastructure needs to manage: - balances in the cloud, - rules on how to affect those balances, - and connecting to other systems.
Minka Cloud provides those componentes as a pre-made building blocks (legos) that allow building a mobile wallet, a digital bank, a clearinghouse, loyalty program or a local currency without focusing on the infrastructure.
Today's payment infrastructure is obsolete, insecure and not designed for the Web based world we live in. Most of the payments types have not changed in decades, even centuries: cash, checks, ACH, debit cards and credit cards are the base of the current infrastructure.
Money and related transaction information needs to move as a unit instantly, securely and at low-cost. Payments should be seamless, end- to-end secure, easy-to-use, and accepted worldwide
Since most of the solutions are based on the traditional architecture and the new technology solutions have issues with scaling, fintechs and financial entities end up wasting most of their resources on modernizing and updating their infrastructure instead of focusing on the product.
The World Wide Web changed how we access and manage information and Minka wants to do the same for value.
Minka building blocks allow managing rules on how money moves, connecting to the legacy financial institutions and managing balances in the cloud.
Building blocks provide:
Simple developer interface for programmable money (rules) - Wallet
A real-time, publicly auditable transactional clearing - Ledger
Adapters for the real-world, legacy financial systems - Bridge
Each building block consists of several micro services (legos) exposed via HTTPS in a REST architectural style.
Minka Ledger is a ledger-as-a-service for currency-agnostic transaction processing using digital signatures.
At its core, Minka Ledger uses IOUs to represent transaction requests, authorize new transaction records and drive all state transitions using digital signatures.
IOUs ("I owe you") are digitally signed messages that contain instructions for moving existing balances between accounts, getting new currency units into circulation or configuring parameters in order to implement different currency systems.
The purpose of the Minka Ledger API is to verify and keep track of all incoming IOUs in real time in order to compute and serve three basic response types: - account balances, - transaction history and - clearing confirmations.
It is the agnostic, publicly auditable and highly scalable.
At the moment Minka Cloud is hosted in Google Cloud. However, our goal is to be database and cloud provider agnostic.
Wallet simplifies the process of building financial solutions by providing developer friendly interface to build programmable money.
The main purpose of the Wallet is to add an abstraction layer on top of the Ledger that addresses the problem of poor usability and long time to market for modern transactional systems (Blockchain).
The Ledger uses cryptographically signed messages (Actions) between addresses (Signers), while Wallet serves as an alias directory that enables using handles to represent address with a phone number, email or a nickname.
All interactions between Wallets are represented as Transfers and are managed by configurable Rules for programming money. A Transfer acts as a state machine that applies the transactional rules - asynchronous operations that usually require several actions to complete. A Transfer can be used to represent a P2P, P2B, B2P, a bill payment or any interaction between one or many wallets.
An example would be a P2P wallet where the actions would be cash-in (upload), send, calculate fees and cash-out (download).
Minka Bridge represents a protocol to connect any entity that people trust to hold their deposits to the Minka Cloud. It serves as an adapter that solves the pain that banks and third parties are experiencing trying to connect to a fragmented financial ecosystem or implementing open banking standards.
The role of the Bridge is to simplify the interaction between a legacy system and the Cloud and enable integration in days instead of months. En integration enables an IOU swap between deposit being hold in fiat, cryptocurrency or loyalty points and the balance in the cloud.
We are using a standard that includes the data necessary for traditional financial system messaging (such as ISO20022), but is more simple and build for Web using API REST principles and cryptographically signed JSON messages.
Bridge allows:
upload (cash-in) - exchange real world IOU for an cloud IOU (debit)
download (cash-out) - convert cloud IOUs to real world IOUs (credit)
or get status (balance or history) of an external system
A status bridge could be used to represent a third party system such as a utility services provider. The Status bridge would integrate the utility service API or ERP to notify that, for example a water bill has been paid.
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