Anyone can launch a new webshop; barriers to entry are low, but barriers to success are enormous. Frameworks - like Django or Drupal - exist. You can integrate Stripe or PayPal quite quickly. But, once you’re done, such a site offers little advantage over listing your products on Amazon or eBay, with the huge downside of being functionally invisible to the larger world. If you’re already famous, moving to your own infrastructure may have advantages, but if you’re less known, or just starting out?
And, what happens if you live in a part of the world not supported by these platforms, or are just tired of the ethical and business practices of the platforms?
Whythawk’s Hop Sauna project is intended to improve access to online commercial opportunities, with a focus on creators in the global South.
Our solution
Gavin Chait was selected as one of The Interledger Foundation Ambassadors for 2025, permitting him the opportunity to develop infrastructure to reimagine how creators and their supporters exchange money.
Hop Sauna is intended to support two key behaviours:
- Discovery is the opportunity to find the beings and doings of others.
- Delivery is the opportunity to express our being through our doings, or to enjoy the beings and doings of others. To be creative or legitimately acquire the creativity of others.
Discovery happens not through search, but through integration with existing social media tools. Building a website based on intrinsic interoperability means that one is never building in isolation. Federation requires a set of standardised methods for services sharing the same protocol to query and interpret data from each other. ActivityPub and ActivityStreams provide the protocols we need, but these exist side-by-side with the ordinary protocols of the site itself.
Delivery happens through a low-cost, generally accessible method for Open Payments using the Interledger-supported open API standard that can be implemented by account servicing entities to facilitate interoperability in the setup and completion of payments for different use cases.
In November 2025, Gavin presented on the work completed for the first Hop Sauna software release at the Interledger Summit in Mexico City:
Outcomes
Whythawk will continue development of Hop Sauna in 2026 with the objective of promoting application development using the new stack. Our first progress report is available.
