This is an in-person event, join by following this meeting link. No registration required.
Date: Wednesday, 22nd March 2023
Start time: 13:00 PM SAST
Duration: 1 hour
Practitioner: Sabine Schaller
Location: Economics Lecture Theatre, Middle campus, University of Cape Town
Company: Coil
This seminar is part of a series on "Payments".
Truth be told, I’m actually a Statistician. But ever since I discovered coding, I can’t keep my hands off of the keyboard.
In 2017, Sabine attained her Masters degree in Statistics from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She then joined Empolis GmbH, a Berlin-based IT services and consulting firm, as a software engineer. She co-founded a start up called Registree, a privacy-preserving recruitment platform, while doing a PhD on the topic of the Data Ownership at the University of Cape Town. After realizing academia was not her calling, she joined Coil as a Technology Consultant and has been the R&D lead at the company since 2022. Her work primarily focuses on data ownership and the internet of value building on open standards such as the Interledger Protocol and Web Monetization to allow for a Web where content can be paid for with hard currency instead of data.
-- This profile has been adapted from information on Sabine Schaller's personal website.
Coil is a startup based in San Francisco specializing in providing web content monetization solutions. It was founded in 2018 by ex-Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas. Coil's monetization model offers an alternative to the status quo of paid advertisements and selling the public’s attention to the highest bidders. What makes it unique is that the platform is built on the Interledger Protocol which is a currency-agnostic protocol for transferring money.
According to a news release in 2019 regarding their first product offering.
Creators post public and exclusive content via a customizable creator page on Coil which is automatically enabled for streaming payments. Creators who have their own website can monetize it with a simple tag.
Those who want to support creators and the new Coil ecosystem can now join the community with a $5 monthly subscription. There are no subscription or membership fees to be a creator.
The overarching goal of Coil for the last 5 years has been to develop the ecosystem around the Interledger Protocol and move towards proposing Web Monetization as a web standard to the W3C. Web Monetization is a JavaScript browser API that allows the creation of a payment stream from the user agent to the website. For context, W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web and this proposal is currently underway.
However, in 2022, Coil announced that it would sunset it's products and development efforts by February 2023 passing it's mandate to the Interledger Foundation.
This seminar is part of a series which has been created to expose our students to exceptional individuals in the African Fintech space working on innovative solutions to address the large unbanked population on our continent. Fintech in Africa has received the largest share of funding in recent years, and this trend is expected to increase. As the only dedicated Fintech Master's program on the African continent, one of our goals is to connect our students with leading fintech companies across the continent. In the past, we have had speakers from Nala, Stitch Money, Visa, Spoon Money, Consensys, Authentium, Investec and more. Because seminars have attracted interest from students across campus, we have decided to open up attendance to all students interested in fintech and related topics.