Request Network Project Update (October 27th, 2017) — ahead of roadmap, scaling, continuous invoices

Over the last 2 weeks, we went heads down and focused on designing the Core layer of the product, planning the long term growth of Request, and building out relationships with potential partners.

The Request Network team is committed to create a financial platform with the potential to become the standard for invoices, accounting, auditing, and payments in crypto-currencies and fiat assets. You can learn more on our website and on our blog.

Projects: We are ahead of the roadmap

Since we’re ahead of the roadmap, we decided to move the “website to interact with Requests” that was initially planned for Q1 2018 to Q4 2017. The website will also support the first of our use cases: business invoices. We’re looking forward to sharing a sneak peek of its UI/UX in a few weeks.

We also developed a vesting smart contract to transparently manage the team’s and advisors’ vestings. We will review and audit it before deploying to the main net.

You can have a look at the code here: https://github.com/RequestNetwork/RequestVesting

We even went a little further and built this contract in a way that it allows any ICOs and companies to vest their own shares in their tokens.

It’s our hope that this contract will help many companies to manage their vestings in the future. Anyone will be able to monitor their tokens transparently on a single ethereum address.

Scaling — The decentralized way

The startup founders amongst you know that hiring after raising money may be the most important and critical part of the project. We couldn’t agree more with Sam Altman who gives some great advice about hiring here: https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire

In our case, hiring becomes especially important considering our ambitious roadmap and the investment amount we’ve received. We need to grow significantly while hiring the right people.

To take on this challenge, we opt for 2 strategies:

• On the one hand, we’d like to grow in a very rational way: really taking the time to thoroughly assess and find the best people to form a strong and efficient team.
• On the other hand, we are going to create a platform to fund innovative projects based on Request. This will allow us to grow externally with dedicated and independent teams working on their innovative ideas.

We’ll provide more details about the platform later as we’d like to make the Core of our system and the libraries available first.

This choice reflects the way we picture Request: A decentralized ecosystem centered around the protocol. The role of the foundation is to develop, promote, and encourage the creation of the Request ecosystem. The more projects we can attract in the ecosystem, the faster we will grow.

Visibility: New exchange listing

We know how important gateways are to the Request ecosystem and we will keep paying attention to those for the long term vision of the project.

We are happy to announce that the REQ token is now tradable on Binance. Thank you to the community who made this possible.

Use case: Continuous invoices

Continuous invoices are a use case which we didn’t talk about until now. We will elaborate on it more in a separate blog post.

What is it?

A continuous invoice is an invoice which is neither paid at once nor through a down payment but in a continuous flow.

What will it be used for?

An example application are salaries. With a continuous invoice, you will be paid every second instead of being paid at a set date and time.

It also applies to many other cases such as paying rent and B2B invoices.

How does it work?

Continuous invoices will be incorporated into Request as an extension. The extension layer has been designed to handle any type of advanced payment conditions.

To bypass an infinity of transaction costs, a continuous invoice will work in a similar way as a vesting contract — your balance on the invoice increases continuously and you can withdraw the invoice funds to your account at any time.

Other questions you asked

Are the people from the waiting list who passed the KYC going to be invited to Slack?

Yes, all of them have been invited in the past 2 days.

What happens to the 1 000 000 000 tokens? Some disappeared on Etherscan (https://etherscan.io/token/0x8f8221afbb33998d8584a2b05749ba73c37a938a)

The ERC20 token has a Burning function which allows anyone to destroy tokens. This function will be used as a fee when you create a Request and decreases the number of tokens available. Someone used this function for a test. It works.

What are your primary channels for communication?

Slack, Telegram, and this blog.

Last but not least

A lot happened during the past week and we appreciate the responsibility and commitment some of you showed to the community. Answering questions of other community members, publishing research, or suggesting ideas is a great way to help us at the moment. Thank you so much for your support.

We will keep communicating as much as possible and developing the project in order to release an MVP soon — this is our first priority. Our first milestone, Request Colossus, will be the first brick of what we envision as a powerful financial system built on top of Ethereum.

Lastly, we are now also planning for protocol adoption. Please contact chris@request.network to discuss partnership opportunities if your company:

• would like to send invoices, accept payments, or pay its employees in Ethereum/ERC20 through Request Network
• Is an accounting/invoicing firm
• Is an audit firm
• Is working with IoT

Learn more about the Request Network on our website or in this introduction.

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