Welcome to a special Thanksgiving edition of the WeTrust community update! Here in the WeTrust office in Mountain View, CA, we have been feeling thankful for the chance to work together on such a great team, the excellent progress we have made on development of our dApp, and of course our wonderful community of supporters. Speaking of our dApp, we are now targeting a release of our beta to select supporters on November 30th, followed by a public release of our beta sometime in mid-December. The dev team has been very hard at work doing lots of testing and resolving high priority bugs in anticipation of the beta release.

Along with our work on the dApp, we are ramping up our marketing efforts. Expect to see more ads announcing the launch of our beta dApp throughout the cryptosphere, as well as more press among the crypto-news media. In addition, WeTrust is participating in the upcoming East West Blockchain Conference, the first blockchain conference focused on bringing together blockchain companies from both sides of the Pacific. We will be promoting our vision of financially inclusive blockchain technology at the conference, providing a demo of our Trusted Lending Circle dApp, meeting with leading blockchain companies based in China, as well as learning from other blockchain leaders.

Finally, we recently had the chance to interview Eli, also known as cowmooflage to those on our Slack, who lives in Belgium and helps Damo run our channel. Check out our interview with Eli below!

Hi Eli, tell us a bit about yourself.

My name’s Eli, I’m 26 years old and I’m from Antwerp, Belgium. I guess most people will know me from your Slack channel where I help Damo in moderating this awesome community.

What do you do for work / school?

I’m currently finishing my professional bachelor’s degree in Logistics Management at the Karel de Grote University College in Antwerp. I’ve done 2 years of Political Sciences at the University of Antwerp before that but I didn’t like how I initially shared many classes with other fields of study. I had a hard time motivating myself at the time and looking back on it, I should have just taken a gap year at that point.

However I found new motivation after working for a few years and that made me enjoy life so much more. I felt inspired to go back to school and get a degree after that period, and Logistics Management felt like a good fit. Belgium’s a transit country and the second biggest European port, the Port of Antwerp, is only a few km away from where I live. The proximity and the high demand of jobs are obviously nice prospects. Despite all that I don’t really know what I want to do after I graduate in June next year. I’m open to pretty much anything as long as I enjoy it.

How long have you been interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology? What interests you about it?

Since childhood I’ve always taken an interest in new technologies and anything computer related. I think I first read about Bitcoin in 2013 although it could have been earlier, I don’t really remember exactly when it was. At the time I couldn’t really wrap my head around the concept because it took me forever to understand why any normal person would want to use it. Obviously, because I didn’t understand it back then, I forgot all about it and moved on.

Blockchain only caught back my attention with the ETH/ETC debacle when a friend from the UK told me he was thinking about investing. The whole split didn’t really inspire much confidence in me and so I held off again… In hindsight that wasn’t the smartest thing to do at the time. Less than half a year ago was when I finally stepped in with the help of that same friend.

It took me forever to see how tokens can have real-world uses and that really made me see how big the potential for the technology is. Blockchain technology help could rapidly reform many existing industries. If I had to couple it back to my studies I can see Blockchain being groundbreaking for shipping, supply chain and warehousing industries. Some European ports including the Port of Antwerp are already working on a pilot project that will streamline container handling.

How did you hear about WeTrust? What first caught your interest about the WeTrust project?

I first heard about WeTrust through a YouTube video in which the creator explained the basic goals of the project. That same video was my first introduction to the ROSCA concept as well. I was completely unfamiliar with it up until then as it’s not really used in most Western countries. When I read the whitepaper and did some digging myself, it all clicked for me. The potential market reach is enormous and a lot of people could really benefit from a more secure blockchain based ROSCA app. Since a lot of people worldwide are at risk of financial exclusion I feel like WeTrust offers a unique angle that can benefit many.

What do you like about our Slack community?

This slack channel has an amazing variety of people from all around the world. They all come from different backgrounds: some have firsthand experiences in working with the unbanked while some others are mostly interested in investing. However I’m always blown away by their honesty and willingness to talk about a wide variety of topics. The community members are also not afraid to ask the hard hitting questions but they also joke around a lot. The warm sense of community is what sets this channel apart from other related ones. I’m very happy to be a part of it!

Anything you don’t like? Where can we improve in terms of our community?

I think you’ve made a lot of improvements on that front already! By now you’ve done four AMA’s on Slack and you’re also doing a lot more blog posts and updates which I can only praise! I know the team likes to lurk the channel but it’d be nice if sometimes they can come in and confirm or deny things that people have been asking for a while. It can be nice for the community to see that their voices have been heard.

It would also be nice to step up the Reddit activity a bit as well because a lot of people simply don’t find their way into the chat channels. That’s also the main reason why I post the transcripts of the AMA’s on there.

But if possible I’d love to hear from people and organisations that have firsthand experience with ROSCAs or your future products. A lot of people can learn from this.

What’s one thing you feel would most empower the project and our mission of financial inclusion?

The best thing to happen to WeTrust is finding the right partnerships in key areas around the world. This will obviously mean full localization using local languages and customs and that might take a while. When the platform has been fully tested and approved for use, the right local partners would help push for adoption among their communities. When these local communities get a good feeling of it I’m fairly confident they’ll prefer to use it over face to face solutions. Besides a good first introduction, I feel like word-of-mouth will do its part in helping spread the word about WeTrust’s mission of financial empowerment.

Thanks for chatting with us, Eli!

And a Happy Thanksgiving to our wonderful community!

Yours in Financial Inclusion,

The WeTrust Team