Kiva announces the sunset of Kiva Protocol

Kiva is ending operations of Kiva Protocol, our initiative to develop digital public infrastructure to advance financial inclusion.

While we believe in the power of open-source technology and are proud of the milestones achieved through Kiva Protocol, several factors have led us to this decision. Launched in 2018, Kiva Protocol was an ambitious undertaking aimed at addressing systemic barriers to financial inclusion at national scale. These are hard problems to solve. After four years dedicated to addressing these challenges, the extended implementation timelines coupled with delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed Kiva Protocol past our organizational scale and capacity.

We will be working to wind-down Kiva Protocol by June 30, 2022.

While this marks the end of Kiva Protocol’s operations, we are proud of the progress we have made and what we hope are useful contributions to the broader mission of digital infrastructure for financial inclusion.

On the technical front, Kiva Protocol was committed to not only running a fully open-source software stack, but also taking on prominent roles in the open-source communities that are collectively working toward a shared vision of privacy-preserving, open-source, interoperable identity ecosystems. We made great strides in validating the market demand for new forms of verifiable financial histories in order to access credit and other services. In Honduras, we were able to work with our partners to build a clear business case and operating model for digitizing remittances transactions, a crucial source of income for underserved households in the region.

The Kiva Protocol team had the good fortune to work alongside and learn from a wide range of individuals and organizations working toward shared goals around digital public infrastructure, open identification systems, and financial inclusion. We hope our contributions in these communities of practice will help advance the next wave of innovative service delivery for underserved communities everywhere. For this reason, the Kiva Protocol team will continue to document, catalog, and assess our learnings and will share these resources through the Kiva.org blog in the coming weeks. We are also working directly with our partners to minimize the impact of ceasing Kiva Protocol’s operations.

We extend gratitude to our Kiva Protocol team, our institutional funders and partners, local project stakeholders, and the entire Kiva community for their energy, support, and collaboration throughout this project. It is our sincerest hope that others will take up the mantle of Kiva Protocol’s mission and build off the work now available through the open source community.

Looking ahead, we are excited and optimistic about Kiva’s growing impact. 2021 was a record-breaking year for Kiva; our lenders and investors funded over $223 million in loans, impacting the lives of over 550,000 individuals and proving that after 16 years, our vision of drawing in larger communities to support microloans as a method to build global financial inclusion is as relevant and effective as ever. We are investing to expand Kiva to annually reach 2 million borrowers with over $500 million in lending by 2025. With these investments, we remain committed to working alongside our global community of innovative and inspiring peers to expand access to life-changing capital for all people. We look forward to working together to continue to realize our mission of expanding financial access.