Introducing eIOU, an open source p2p payment protocol

eIOU is a peer-to-peer credit network where payments route through people who already trust each other.

Instead of sending money through banks that charge fees, eIOU finds a path through your existing relationships. You trust your friend, your friend trusts their colleague, value moves through that chain. Each person sets their own credit limits and fees (as low as 0%).

HOW IT WORKS

You open a trust line with someone you know and set a credit limit. They do the same with people they know. When you need to pay someone you've never met, eIOU finds a chain of trust that connects you. A friend of a friend of a friend.

Research on the strength of weak ties and six degrees of separation shows this works with surprisingly few people. A few hundred active nodes can create viable payment paths across continents.

GETTING STARTED

One person on the network trusts you? You're in. No bank account needed, no credit check, no KYC. That's the entire onramp.

To run your own node:

docker run eiou/eiou

or

git clone https://github.com/eiou-org/eiou-docker.git
cd eiou-docker
docker compose up -d

The container auto generates a wallet, starts Tor, and initializes everything. Ready in about 2 minutes.

WHY CREDIT IS EASIER

Traditional lending means convincing a stranger at a bank to give you a loan. On eIOU, credit comes from people who already know you. Your friend trusts you for $200? That's your credit line with their connections. No applications, no scoring, no waiting.

WHAT HAPPENS AUTOMATICALLY
P2P transfers: Alice wants to pay Daniel but doesn't know him. Alice is trusted by Bob, Bob is trusted by Carol, Carol is trusted by Daniel. Alice sends $50 and it routes through the chain. Bob and Carol can each earn a small fee for routing. Daniel gets paid. No bank involved.
Tor privacy: all traffic routes through onion routing by default. We cannot see who pays whom. The tradeoff is 3 to 8 seconds of latency.

Debt can be denominated in anything: dollars, euros, stablecoins, hours, or custom units. eIOU is not a cryptocurrency. No tokens, no coins, no mining.

LINKS

GitHub: https://github.com/eiou-org/eiou-docker 
Website: https://eiou.org  

This is open source alpha. The network is small and we're actively developing. We want to hear what works, what breaks, and what you'd build on top of it.

Full disclosure: We’re the founders.