Request Network project update (December 22nd, 2017)-First feedback Colossus, introducing Request Hub
What we were up to in the last two weeks:
- Launching Colossus main demo feature.
- Releasing the first version of the smart contracts on Rinkeby.
- Developing the JS Library.
- Defining the ecosystem around Request with the Request Hub.
First feedback on Colossus
This week we launched Request Colossus. You were many to test our MVP and give feedback, whether on Reddit, Slack, Twitter, email, or even Youtube!
At the time of writing, 815 tests were done on Request. Overall, most of you have been quite happy — thank you for all the positive feedback. Some of you have reported minor bugs that we could quickly correct. Others went one step further and even proposed new features.
We have read all of your feedback and will take them into account while continuing to develop Request Core. They are very important to us, so do not hesitate to continue testing and share your thoughts! As we already said, the first version is an MVP so we’ll continue to improve it and add many features in the following weeks and months. Stay tuned!
Introducing Request Hub
We believe that the Request ecosystem is the key to success, and we very much would like to nurture it. In order to drive this decentralization forward and help Request to scale, we’re excited to introduce the Request Hub today.
Request Hub consists of community members who want to help strengthen the Request ecosystem. It is independent of the foundation and managed by members of the ecosystem with the support of the foundation.
Take a look at our Request Hub mind map.
Why Request Hub?
- To scale in a decentralized way, including the community.
- To create a healthy and growing ecosystem together for the long term with no point of failure.
Who is part of Request Hub?
Request Hub is composed by those who want to help the Request ecosystem grow and succeed.
What we call Request Hub is the community outside the Request foundation that is willing to work on top of Request, create teams and projects around Request, and help with its decentralization. Community members who decide to be part of the Request Hub can receive funding from the foundation.
How will it work?
Members of the Request Hub can join one of several hubs (Tech, Marketing…) to help and find other people with whom to create joint projects.
They work together on common tools, such as Slack or GitHub. For example, if someone creates a design, everyone has access to this design as it is stored and shared with the others. We will invite future builders to join the Request Hub Slack here.
How is Request Hub organized?
The Hub community is made of several hubs:
- Community: Members on a mission to grow the community, increase the engagement, attract more developers, and keep enriching discussions going.
- Business development: Members on a mission to increase adoption through onboarding and partnerships.
- Tech: Members on a mission to develop faster.
- Marketing & design: Members on a mission to convey the right messages of Request and create visibility in the ecosystem.
To these hubs, we can add transversal hubs which are teams and projects working on top of Request. For example, a product team working on the ‘online payment’ option or on the ‘factoring’ extension would be part of such a transversal hub. The Request foundation will support these teams and their projects. In the long-term, the community itself could decide which project to fund.
We invite the potential and future builders to join the Slack here. While everything still has to be defined and built from the bottom up, we can’t wait to see how it evolves!
First of all, we would like to thank our community and those who help Request on a daily basis, of which (this list is NOT exhaustive):
- Robbin for the Slack and Reddit moderation, and for his huge support from the very beginning.
- Nadja for polishing our articles.
- Zaltais, Matt, and IcoBeast for their Reddit moderation.
- Alistair, Johnnie, and Nicky for their Telegram moderation.
- Spec-Rationality for the qualitative analysis and consistent updates.
- Noam Levenson for his article.
- Drew Osherow for his prototypes.
And of course @adm for all the help provided to the team since the very beginning, for the community organization, and for answering all the questions to new people discovering Request.
Announcing a partnership with FundRequest
Last month, we presented our Tech mind map and our vision to grow externally thanks to an ecosystem built around Request, as well as our incentivization program. Now that Request Core is built, innovative projects and teams will work on top of Request. To support this development, the Request foundation needs to find a way to fund these open source projects. Welcome to FundRequest.
FundRequest is a decentralized marketplace for open source collaboration providing an easy and secure way to reward bugfixes and features built on any project. By funding future development tasks, Request will use FundRequest to reward developers for their contributions. At the same time, FundRequest will use Request to provide an easy, secure, and transparent payment method and invoice to its users.
We believe that the two projects, a decentralized payment platform and a decentralized platform for open source collaboration, are a good match to speed up their development and attract more users.
Request will collaborate with FundRequest on two subjects:
- Create an invoice on-chain from their smart contract using an escrow and detecting when it has been paid.
- Fund decentralized open source development of Request in a secure way.
FundRequest will work with Request on three subjects:
- “Pay with Request” an online option offering an alternative to the traditional “Pay with Paypal”.
- Create and share invoices on an immutable ledger.
- Provide budget transparency for businesses to fund their projects.
More information on FundRequest: https://fundrequest.io/
Announcing a collaboration with The Beetoken
We’re pleased to announce a collaboration with the Beetoken, a decentralized home sharing network.
This is an important collaboration as the Request Network protocol is a crucial component to the Bee token business model for customers to request payments from possible renters on the Beenest platform.
Bee Token is taking the decentralization of an existing industry to the next level and we are happy to be part of their ecosystem. It is a fantastic use case to see a smart contract using another smart contract to manage its invoices.
More information on The Bee Token: https://www.beetoken.com/
Explaining fiat integration
We received many questions about Request Network and fiat payments.
As a reminder, Request Network is currency agnostic. It means that any currency can be added as long as someone can provide an oracle proving the transaction happened.
Such an oracle is relatively easy to build for a crypto currency such as Bitcoin since everything is public. This has two advantages:
- Easy to access the data
- Easy to verify that the oracle said the truth and is secure
Such an oracle is more complicated in the fiat world as it is hard to have access to a proof of transfer that is irrefutable and irrevocable.
We have several ideas we will be working on, but are still unsure about which one will be the best. However, we are confident that one of these solutions will turn out as the best one in the future.
Solution 1:
A dev finds the solution and deploys it on Chainlink. We plug the oracle into Request. See this article.
Solution 2:
Companies and people start to use the tokenized version of fiat currencies without even knowing. OmiseGo is already starting its version of tokenizing the settlement between ewallet providers (let’s say you are using Venmo and Google wallet and want to send money between them — OmiseGo would make this work with a tokenized token that is backed and can be redeemed)
In the near future, countries such as Singapore might also explore tokenizing a part of their currency. Does that sounds crazy? Singapore’s central bank already launched the project as you can see here.
Solution 3:
Banks see value by detecting the invoices of their clients and letting them pay the requests. We build the oracle with them and they tell the oracle every time a request is paid. To ensure true information, the oracle could require them to always have a reserve of REQ in escrow and if they lie, they get punished by the network.
Solution 4:
We build this oracle with third party applications instead such as Bankin, Mint, or Sofort. Plenty will be created in Europe following the PSD2 adoption in 2018. These applications connect to your account and could let you pay your requests.
Solution 5:
We build a partnership with credit card providers (such as Mastercard) or credit card businesses (such as Stripe).
The first one is quite complex since you need a third party verifying the KYC (Know-Your-Customer) and AML (Anti-Money-Laundering) of the one who will receive a payment.
The second one solves the first problem, but we will have to manage the expensive part of the payment, and have to deal with chargebacks.
Most people wouldn’t say that credit cards are the future of payments (especially in Europe where instant SEPA payments are coming, or in Africa where Mobile Money is more and more widely used).
In the short term, we will focus on payments in cryptocurrencies, salaries, or loans. This is a fast growing, untapped market where we bring the most value. In the mid-term, once the benefits of Request have become more evident, we will move to fiat and turn Request into a mainstream solution.
Whitepaper translations
Here’s an update regarding the translations of the whitepaper: Vietnamese is done, Chinese almost there, and for Korean, we still need a talented translator. Might that be you? Please reach out at translations@request.network
Community
Impressive! With more than 13,000 readers on Reddit and Twitter, our social media community grew by 65% in the last two weeks. Here are some interesting metrics from Speculative Rationality.
This growth shows a great commitment and interest around Request — our goal is to continue attracting more people seeing the potential of the project.
It also shows a strong community with whom we’ll be able to grow and build the ecosystem with Request Hub.
A big thanks from the entire team for your interest in the project and especially to the moderators for your daily amazing job of keeping qualitative discussions running. It is essential for those who discover Request Network to understand the project, and you’re helping a lot to create an informative and friendly Reddit.
Conclusion
We have delivered a full quarter’s roadmap on time. As a reminder, Colossus demo on the testnet is live at: https://app.request.network. Once the JS library is released, we’re heading to Request Great Wall, which is the mainnet release of Request. While the roadmap for Q1 2018 is pretty challenging, we’re looking forward to getting heads down on it!
That’s it for our last update of the year. We wish you a healthy start into the New Year — see you on January 5th, 2018 with a new update!
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