Picture two small manufacturers that invoice each other every month. One owes the other 8,000 euros for components. The other owes the first 7,200 euros for finished assemblies. Today, both wire the full amounts, eat the bank fees, and wait for the float. LedgerLoops thinks only the 800-euro difference should ever move.
That is the wedge Michiel de Jong has been sharpening, in public, since 2011. The project was originally proposed on the Unhosted mailing list as a simple IOU-centric e-invoicing protocol, then renamed from OpenTabs to LedgerLoops in the fall of 2016 after a loop-resolution algorithm called Whispering Merchants was added [LedgerLoops]. The pitch on the homepage is plain: a decentralized peer-to-peer obligation clearing network that clears invoices and receipts between ledgers [LedgerLoops].
The bet
The core idea is older than most fintech in market today. Most B2B payments rails assume cash has to move from payer to payee in full, every time. LedgerLoops assumes the opposite: that in any sufficiently dense network of trading partners, most obligations cancel out if you can just find the loops. Settle only the residuals, and you cut working capital tied up in float, plus the fees that ride on every gross transaction.
Why it could be big
Obligation netting is not a new concept in finance. Central bankers run multilateral net settlement every day. Trade-finance desks have spent decades trying to push the same logic down to corporate accounts payable. What has changed is the plumbing. Cheap compute, programmable ledgers, and a generation of accounting software with open APIs make it conceivable that two mid-market firms in different countries could discover a clearable loop without a bank sitting in the middle.
The team and the timeline
LedgerLoops is, by all public indications, de Jong's project. His LinkedIn lists LedgerLoops as his current affiliation [LinkedIn], and the GitHub commit history under the ledgerloops organization reflects sustained protocol work across multiple repositories [GitHub].
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Years since original protocol proposal | 14 years |
| Years under the LedgerLoops name | 9 years |
| Confirmed external funding rounds | 0 rounds |
The honest counterfactual
There is no confirmed revenue, no disclosed customer list, and no named institutional investor in the public record. Obligation-clearing networks also face the classic two-sided problem: a loop only exists if enough counterparties are on the same protocol, which means the value of joining is near zero until it suddenly is not.
What to watch
Three things would change the conversation in the next twelve months. First, a named pilot: a trade association, a buyer-supplier consortium, or a regional chamber willing to run loop detection across a real book of invoices. Second, an integration with a mainstream accounting package. Third, any sign of outside capital. The project has operated without confirmed external funding to date, and a seed round with a credible payments investor would signal that someone with a distribution thesis is willing to underwrite the next phase.