Telegram AMA with Jake Goh, CEO and Co-Founder of Rate3 Network
We conducted an AMA session on Telegram from 14:00–15:00 on 10 March 2018 (GMT +8). The following is an edited transcript of the AMA session.
Q1: "This project have any relation with STORIQA (STQ)? Are you guys negotiating with HUOBI for exchange?”
We have no relations with STORIQA (STQ) team at this moment. I cannot comment on exchanges right now but we are currently speaking to a few.
Q2: “ I like your Rate3 concept of Consumer’s trust rating. It reminds me of eBay’s positive feedback percentage which is a very useful feature and reliable way to trust a buyer or seller.
So in which Exchange do you plan to be listed ?”
Consumer’s trust rating is indeed an important factor in any buyer/seller relationship. We want to point out that in an e-commerce ecosystem, the participants are more than just shoppers and merchants. It extends to other participants like suppliers, logistics partners, freight forwarders, lenders as well within the ecosystem. We believe that trustless network and the power of immutability helps all participants, and improves both cashback verification and credit score for lending.
Unfortunately, no comments can be made on exchanges right now.
Q3: “ Please tell me what I need to mine a token, what I must do to get a token and how to buy a token?”
We assume that you’re asking about our pre-sale and post-sale details, and how to purchase $RTE tokens during our sale!
We are opening our whitelist soon on 15th March 2018, 00:00 GMT+8. Once you pass our KYC/AML verifications, you will be able to buy our tokens when we launch our sale. Stay tuned for more updates regarding launch dates on Twitter and our official announcement channel!
Q4: “What do you need most than money to implement your plans?”
A world without payment borders require major adoption from all participants. While we have affiliate partnerships with merchants right now, we want to enable all participants in the network to transact for FREE, on paying/accepting currency settlements. This requires building up diff products (desktop, mobile version, merchant dapps, API/SDK and encouraging global adoption) for suppliers, merchants & lenders to transact.. Fortunately the advisors on our board are well-connected and we are able to knock down walls to quickly scale Rate3 network globally.
Q5: “What’s the roadmap?”
Our roadmap can be found here: https://www.rate3.network/#roadmap
Q6: “Is there a Ratex roadmap to show how it’ll be implemented?
RateX is the user interface on desktop that is plugged into the Rate3 network. For the product roadmap on RateX, it will be adding on new merchant partnerships and more. We would focus on sharing Rate3’s vision, purpose and road map planned in this AMA.
Q7: “ You have RateX extension which is impressive. How do you do to achieve zero convertion rate using RateX? Even Paypal cannot give such a good rate.
What technology you use? Does this advantage come from Xfers which is the payment gateway you integrate with, or this advantage come from RateX itself?”
We were able to leverage on liquidity preference theory and came up with our own FX algo with an in-house team. Our product does have an advantage over every other providers in the space in terms of transaction fees and FX. Now we want to bring this advantage to not only shoppers, but eventually every single participant in the ecosystem.
90% of users uses Adyen/Stripe to check out with us, so the advantage does not come from payment providers. With Rate3, there will be even crazier features such as instant cashback verification, immediate lending without our user interfaces on mobile/desktop, so do stay tuned closely for product updates!
Q8: “If RATE3 is an integrated payment platform that can simplify and reduce efficiency in the trading process, will RATE3 synergize with companies worldwide?
My problem now is postage in a high spend when the seller is away from where I live, thanks.”
This is another inefficiency we do see in the ecosystem. Rate3 focuses on cross border settlements among the participants. Moving forward, more benefits from the network are looking to resolve other inefficiencies beyond settlements, such as logistical intermediaries. We are partnering up with $OCN, another sharing economy protcol to fix these issues. Currently, I serve as an advisor on Odyssey Foundation on this as well. There is a huge opportunity for payment and logistic blockchains to work together in this area.
Q9: “How is Rate3 different from its competitors: other coins that focus on payments and fast transactions?
How can Rate3 encourage adoption from ecommerce players and users without diluting the stake of the initial investors in the token?”
Rate3 is primarily different due to its focus on e-commerce. We are targeting the global ecommerce ecosystem, and in particular the problems faced by other participants, not limited to shoppers. Other participants include logistic partners, vendors, distributors, wholesalers etc.
The key to adoption is that its entirely FREE to use RTE to buy/sell or transact. For participants beyond consumers, other values such as sales digitisation — how RTE is turned into a store-of-value, instant cashback verification, a score for working capital loan are valuable. In terms of the last value, we rely on our end-to-end protocol that focuses on credit scoring, and are actively partnering with Funding Societies for this.
Adoption from e-commerce players and other participants would only serve to make the token even more valuable.
Q10: “How do you keep the token price fixed if you need to shop with it?”
The key question is how a volatile token can be used to pay for online transactions. $RTE is meant for immediate use for users, given our existing products. The entire flow from fiat currency till merchant receive payment takes 2–5s. More importantly the accepting party gets the settlement for free. In the future, we are looking to accept BTC-RTE, ETH-RTE and others by working with exchanges on top of our applications. This goes hand in hand with both crypto and fiat payment on e-commerce platforms and a much cheaper, faster and efficient way to deal with settlements.
To add on, for shoppers, they pay us with fiat or RTE tokens. If they pay with fiat, our products will help them to find the best currency/asset pairs to transact at the best exchange rate. If shoppers pay with RTE tokens straight and this is where merchants accept RTE tokens too, it will be tied to the fiat/RTE exchange rate, similar to how you see it in exchanges right now.
Q11: “How do you expect your coin to scale as more users adopt it?”
We believe that it boils down to 3 key factors:
1. Volume: We are keeping a reserve portion to monitor the velocity and supply of coins.
2. Speed: Stellar network standard capability stands at 1000 TPS (transactions-per-second) now and easily scale to more than 2000 TPS in the future.
3. Cost: There will be no transaction fees for participants to transact with RTE tokens.
Q12: “ How would you intend to deal with the fluctuation of the price of RTE if the intention is to be used for payment? I think this is a question which alot of other payment coins out that (eg. Litecoin) are facing as well.
I mean, as a merchant, why will I want to accept payment with uncertainty? Thanks!”
Merchants accepting $RTE will have the option to exchange it for other assets on Stellar exchange, which acts as a distributed exchanges for any type of assets. Simply put, merchants will face the risk of price fluctuation for a few seconds, and the risk of price fluctuation will be much much lower than the current fees that they they pay to intermediaries today. Stellar specializes in offering more stable assets like fiat-backed tokens when it comes to remittance.
Q13: “ Why not lower the hardcap? Won’t this generate more unfulfilled demand and leave more food on the table for investors? For the team members, having less resource to start with isn’t it better to remain on the edge? Serving as motivation to drive the team to increase the utility value of the system? Rather than having excess resource at the start, and eventually losing it for success? (Since in a way, you have already achieved success with 50m)”
Very good point. We are in the midst of raising private sale and very fortunate to count the list of cornerstones investors on our site along with strategic investments from lending companies, e-commerce funds and governmental bodies. This really helps us navigate through the ecosystem, which would have cost us alot more. As such, we need much lesser to achieve our intended roadmap. More updates on hard cap will be announced shortly.
Q14: “ We see the rise of payment wallet extension with Metam,NEO,ICX, and more will come soon. If in the case this is really a big opportunity, what is stopping others from building what rate3 network can?”
The 2 products we built for the space have various advantages. Namely we currently work with very notable merchants, have acquired a sizable user base and are currently in 3 countries. Compared to blockchain companies that build and figure out adoption in parallel, we are bringing the power of Rate3 into existing products.
Second, we are specifically targeting e-commerce which the mentioned wallets not. Indeed, any big opportunities in payment space will bound to overlap. We personally believe the key to victory is execution and speed to market, which Rate3 has a huge huge advantage over other providers given our existing merchants, users and partnerships that can immediately utilize $RTE.
Q15: “ The team has intention to build on Stellar platform, are there any advisory/supports coming from the Stellar team?”
We are in the midst of discussion to be one of Stellar anchors. Announcements and updates will be published shortly! The development team on Stellar platform will work closely with Rate3 development team — it will be open and available for viewing moving forward.
Q16: “ Also, how do i buy from merchants in the future? Do i use my credit or debt card?”
Yes, you can pay with fiat through us. The Rate3 network will power the transactions on the back end.
Q17: “ Can I also check, are you all already in any partnership with any merchant?”
Do check out https://www.ratex.co for the merchants that we are live on. RateX is the user interface leveraging on $RTE network. In the future, participants will be able to use on the merchants that we have partnered with, for both fiat + crypto payments! Exciting times.
Since Rate3 is build on stellar network and it’ll rely on its exchange, are you guys able to share when will FairX be ready?
I am not able to disclose any information about FairX as we are not involved in their development team! However, I do acknowledge that FairX is indeed revolutionary.
Q18: “Does that mean RTE’s ultimate purpose is to become a currency?
The RTE purpose is to cut away all intermediaries, unify the e-commerce ecosystem using a single payment token. The token is essentially free to use for transactions, and provides other value propositions in terms of verifying transactions, trust between the various parties to tackle chargeback risks and eventually an end to end protocol for lending.
We hope that this Telegram AMA session had been helpful! We will be conducting more AMA sessions regularly — through both Telegram, Reddit and YouTube in time to come.
What’s next?
Meanwhile, do look out for our whitelisting details to be announced soon! Our whitelisting will start on 15 March 2018, 00:00 (GMT +8).
Learn more at:
- Official Website
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- Read more on Medium
- Check us out on Bitcointalk
