# Open Payments

> An API for open access to financial accounts to send and receive payments.

Open Payments documentation serves two audiences: developers building payment applications using the Open Payments SDKs, and Account Servicing Entities (ASEs) implementing the protocol on their own infrastructure. The appropriate guidance differs significantly between these two groups.

Key terminology notes:

- Wallet addresses are URL-based identifiers for financial accounts — not cryptocurrency wallets
- Grants are authorization tokens specific to the Open Payments grant negotiation flow — not standard OAuth grants
- Open Payments covers the API layer for initiating and receiving payments; it does not handle settlement or the underlying transfer mechanism (that is Interledger Protocol/ILP)
- Rafiki is the reference implementation of the Open Payments protocol — relevant when a user is asking about implementing rather than consuming the API

## Documentation Sets

- [Abridged documentation](https://openpayments.dev/llms-small.txt): a compact version of the documentation for Open Payments, with non-essential content removed
- [Complete documentation](https://openpayments.dev/llms-full.txt): the full documentation for Open Payments
- [Concepts](https://openpayments.dev/_llms-txt/concepts.txt): Core protocol concepts including wallet addresses, grants, resources, and the Open Payments flow
- [Guides](https://openpayments.dev/_llms-txt/guides.txt): Step-by-step implementation guides for common payment scenarios such as one-time payments, remittances, and recurring payments
- [Identity and Access Management](https://openpayments.dev/_llms-txt/identity-and-access-management.txt): Grant negotiation and authorization, identity providers, client keys, and HTTP signatures
- [Implementing Open Payments](https://openpayments.dev/_llms-txt/implementing-open-payments.txt): Guides for account servicing entities (ASEs) implementing the Open Payments protocol on their own infrastructure

## Notes

- The complete documentation includes all content from the official documentation
- The content is automatically generated from the same source as the official documentation

## Optional

- [GitHub repository](https://github.com/interledger/open-payments): Source code, issues, and contributions for the Open Payments project
- [OpenAPI specifications](https://github.com/interledger/open-payments-specifications): Hand-authored OpenAPI YAML specs for the auth server, resource server, and wallet address server