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, and arguably more ambitious. Most B2B payments rails, from SWIFT to the card networks to the new instant-payments schemes, 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.
The whitepaper frames it as letting businesses settle transactions without cash, with the goal of improving cash flow and efficiency in peer-to-peer networks [LedgerLoops whitepaper]. The website's own framing is more colloquial: it is for businesses that frequently do business with each other, like a secret handshake that lets you settle your accounts automatically [LedgerLoops]. The technical work is open-source, hosted under the LedgerLoops organization on GitHub, and includes the snap-checker repo for network ledger experiments built on the project's own Hubbie messaging layer [GitHub].
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.
If even a sliver of intra-industry B2B invoicing migrated to a netting protocol, the working-capital implications would be material. That is the prize de Jong has been chasing patiently. He laid out the long arc himself in an essay titled "Network Ledger Technology: The First 15 Years," tracing the project from mailing-list post to current protocol [LinkedIn]. Fifteen years is a long runway, and it tells you something about the founder's conviction that the category is real, even if the commercial moment has not arrived.
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, including the nlt-kit toolkit for experimenting with Network Ledger Technology and the ledgerloops-whitepaper repo, which has since been folded into the main site [GitHub].
The project's documented arc, from a 2011 protocol sketch to a 2016 rename to a 2024-era retrospective, suggests something closer to a research initiative than a venture-backed startup race. That distinction matters for how readers should size it up.
Years since original protocol proposal | 14 | years
Years under the LedgerLoops name | 9 | years
Confirmed external funding rounds | 0 | rounds
The honest counterfactual
What bears would say is straightforward. There is no confirmed revenue, no disclosed customer list, and no named institutional investor in the public record. A GetLatka entry for an entity called LedgerLoop AI, which appears to be a different company, lists $0 in revenue over the past year on a bootstrapped basis [GetLatka]. 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 bulls would answer is that protocols of this kind tend to look dormant for years and then compound quickly once a single dense industry cluster adopts them. De Jong has spent more than a decade on the spec, the algorithm, and the open-source reference code, which is exactly the kind of pre-work that lets a protocol move fast when a serious commercial sponsor shows up. The fact that the project has stayed lean and bootstrapped means there is no investor clock forcing a premature pivot away from the original thesis.
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, since adoption almost certainly runs through the ledger software that SMEs already use, not through a standalone client. 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.
The protocol question is genuinely interesting. The commercial question is open. Which industry, with which dense web of recurring counterparties, is going to be the one that finally proves obligation clearing at the network edge: trucking, textiles, electronics components, or something less obvious?