@seanrowan the “settlement system” or ledger is the possibly global or at least multi-party thing that tracks a lot of different participants’ balances (think XRP, Bitcoin, etc). Each of those works in a completely different way, which makes integrating with many of them difficult.
We need some abstraction for those different settlement systems and the key questions are:
- Does the settlement abstraction live in the same process as the connector (plugins), on its own (@adrianhopebailie called this the “ledger adapter”, though @kincaid disagrees with that term), or in the same process with the logic that dictates when to settle based on the ILP credit balance
- What is the API for that abstraction?
We would like to be able to reuse the same abstraction component for the different implementations of Interledger, which means we need to agree on how it works and what the interface is.
To be clear though, the “settlement engine” / “ledger adapter” is a component that would be run by a single party and would manage their money on the underlying settlement system. Byzantine fault tolerance may be a feature of the underlying settlement system, but not the engine/adapter/abstraction on top of it.