The project is very young. Open Transactions was posted to Cryptome (http://cryptome.org/0002/open-transactions.htm) on the 4th September, which is when I first heard of it, and I've only been working on the client for approx. two weeks during the time when I am not in class.
However, the hope is that once there are some working clients it should be trivial to issue assets and to run a transaction server, so anyone can create and start issuing currency backed with whatever they want. Hopefully some pre-existing currency providers will run servers and issue certificates, but I also hope that with the availability of easy to use clients and simple to deploy servers that the private currency ecosystem will really start to flourish.
N.B., this has not received any real peer review yet, but is based on OpenPGP, OpenSSL and uses Lucre for blind signatures.
Here's the wiki: https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki