The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launched new Web Payments Working Group to examine ways for easier adoption of payment instrument improvements or new payment instruments, including bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Working group will raise better payment standards, boost digital wallet market and improve online check-out process.

Recommendations from this Working Group should also increase some areas of interoperability between payer and payee systems. They will help to specify the checkout experience for users both safer and easier, particularly on mobile devices, and streamline payment flow.

Working Group will also work on standardized APIs to allow users to select the right payment type through the browser and make it easier for Web developers to integrate existing and new payment flows into their applications.

"We believe that one reason for this is that the digital wallet market is fragmented and providers use incompatible programming interfaces,” stated W3C CEO Dr. Jeff Jaffe. “The proposed standards from W3C will help ensure interoperability of different solutions by standardizing the programming interfaces. So when you buy something, you should have a standard way to match the payment instruments you have with the ones accepted by the merchant, in a way that integrates smoothly with the merchant's checkout flow."

According to the press release from W3C:

“The proposed standards will support a wide array of existing and future payment methods, including debit, credit, mobile payment systems, escrow, and bitcoin and other distributed ledger technologies.”

Chris Larsen, Ripple Labs co-founder and CEO stated in the testimonials from W3C Members:

“The world needs an Internet of Value to move value as easily as information moves today. We firmly believe the Internet of Value will be built on open, neutral web standards that make the world's many ledgers and payments systems interoperable. The W3C's Web Payments Working Group plays a critical role in developing these standards, and we are thrilled to participate among key industry players to help shape the future of web payments.”

The charter for this new Web Payments Working Group were drafted by the W3C Web Payments Interest Group that operates under the leadership of Erik Anderson, Visualization Developer at Bloomberg, and David Ezell, software architect at VeriFone and representative of NACS.