2026 - 2028 (in four phases)
Global, with a focus on India and Brazil
Gates Foundation
Open Transaction Networks (OTNs) are a new form of digital market infrastructure that allow multiple independent providers and competing applications to transact through shared, protocol-based rules rather than a single centralised platform. Built on core layers of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), such as digital identity, digital payments, and consent-based data sharing, OTNs enable participant verification, payment authorisation, and information exchange. Together, these systems can reduce verification, contracting, and settlement costs while supporting interoperable market participation.
By lowering barriers to entry for small businesses and reducing reliance on dominant intermediaries, OTNs may enable more open and contestable markets. At the same time, they raise questions around governance, incentives, consumer protection, and whether market power shifts across layers. As OTNs remain at an early stage globally, robust empirical evidence on their long-run effects is still limited.
Early deployments using the Beckn Protocol, including India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce and Namma Yatri, indicate that OTNs can increase competition by unbundling the supply chain. However, it remains unclear how durable these effects are, how they vary across sectors, and what risks emerge as networks scale.
With support from the Gates Foundation, GDN’s programme seeks to build the economic foundations needed to evaluate OTNs across sectors, including health, agriculture, mobility, commerce, and energy, focusing on what works, for whom, under which design choices, and at what cost.
GDN will lead and manage multiple streams of work across the programme.
In the initial phase, a group of economists will develop a theoretical model of Open Transaction Networks (OTNs) to clarify key mechanisms affecting adoption on both sides of the market, network effects, search and matching quality, pricing and fees, market structure, and overall welfare. This phase will establish an economic framework for understanding OTNs.
In parallel, the programme will engage with OTN implementations across the Global South to support contextually grounded empirical research. Implementations will be selected based on relevance, evaluability, and potential to inform network design. Partner research organisations will be competitively selected through a call for proposals, with each team paired with subject-matter experts to ensure local relevance and institutional understanding.
Working with GDN, the Global Scientific Advisory Committee, and partner organisations, the programme will produce outputs to inform both academic debate and real-world decision-making. These will include working papers, an OTN evaluation toolkit, and practical reports for governments, regulators, implementers, and other DPI ecosystem actors. GDN will also convene workshops and conferences to share findings, compare approaches, and surface design lessons.
The programme has two aims: to build research capacity in the Global South on emerging innovations such as OTNs, and to inform decisions on whether, when, and how to adopt, design, and scale interoperable market systems that improve lives and livelihoods.
If you have questions, please contact the OTN team at OTN@gdn.int.
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