Arrival on Saturday. First day in office on Monday.

Arriving Saturday at Singapore we’re greeted with a garden city, perfect flowers and leaves maintained by an army of invisible gardeners. This city state positions itself as a global hub for finance, commerce, and transport, attracting talent from all over the world, which clearly shows. It’s not surprising that blockchain startups have been attracted to Singapore to group up, with teams like Kyber, Digix and Zilliqa to call Singapore home. The architecture of the city is incredible, including the impressive Marina Bay Sands hotel seen in the picture, attracting visitors to watch the city skyline from the 57th floor (which we did too!).

We had some time to settle in before meeting some of the team Sunday evening to watch the World Cup final at a food court in the middle of Singapore. Who would have thought there would be so many French fans in Singapore!

Meeting with part of the team at Giardino

The French team was very popular in Singapore

Getting to know team and the vision

We had our first day in the Request office on Monday morning. The foundation has a private office in a co-working space, based just 10 minutes away from the hotel we were staying. This made for a great morning walk, enjoying the serene Clarke Quay waters before life starts in Singapore.

Upon arrival (which took some time due to the overly automated elevator system), we had some time to socialize, getting to know everyone a little bit better while enjoying a morning coffee. Etienne presented the overall vision of Request, explained potential scaling solutions in-depth, where Request want to position themselves long term, and the positive relationship Request has with a number of different governments.

We also had a great in-depth talk about possible solutions to ensure privacy when using Request, which is something the team consider to be a very important problem to solve. Storing data on a blockchain is permanent, though it can be obscured, so data encrypted today will eventually be open for all to see.

View from the office.

Branding & Community on Tuesday

Our general community management meeting took place on Tuesday, where we worked on our workflows to improve communication with the team and the community.

Request Network Branding

The main focus for Tuesday was to deeply understand Request branding and to understand the scope, reasons and benefits of the rebrand. There are three layers to this project; (re)branding, digital platform creation and content creation. Each of these layers are aimed to be completed by the end of the year. The team are working with a global industry leading full-service agency on the full project. It is a significant project which will provide an essential number of long-term benefits for the team, partners, community and builders/developers. Visually updating the roadmap will be part of this project, following the same timeline.

During today’s session we learned the difference between branding and marketing. While branding is more about communication and actions throughout all departments of an organisation defining a brand, marketing specifically is using tools to gain market adoption of a product or service. We’ve gained an understanding of how marketing is planned when it comes to the protocol and the applications. The marketing of the protocol is aimed towards attracting developers and builders. This is the main focus once the brand overhaul has been completed. Applications built on top of the protocol will have different marketing strategies based on the target market.

ELI5 Request

As a lot has changed within Request during the last year, it’s hard for businesses and developers to understand what Request is, how it functions and how it could benefit them. The team have decided that alongside the new brand they are creating easily digestible content to educate visitors. Another goal of this content is to attract developers by making it easy to understand why they should build on Request. A brand guide will be created for external developers.

Community

We feel that right now there is a slight gap in the community communication platforms. We have the Subreddit which has been serving as a great place for in-depth discussion, the Telegram channel as a good area for active discussions and private the ICO slack which houses quite a few ICO investors.

After discussion we believe that the best solution to tackle these issues is to open a Discord community channel, bringing together the Telegram and Slack communities. We have seen quite a few teams transition from Slack & Telegram into Discord as it helps significantly with structured discussions. We are going to test this as the main community channel to bring community managers, moderators and the foundation team closer and more engaged with the community.

Relationship Team and Community

We have noticed that there has been increased feedback about the personal relationship between the foundation team and the community. We’re looking to find ways for the team to interact with the community, without distracting them too much from project progression. The move to Discord is the first step to make this easier.

We are keen to allow open discussion and are opposed to censorship, as such, community discussions will always be open — with both positive and constructive comments being appreciated. As has always been the case, insulting others and spamming will be moderated.

FAQ

We are improving the FAQ and will host it in a more appropriate place to serve as a source for any information for existing and potential community members. We welcome suggestions from the community for FAQs and are working on this as soon as possible.

Team dinner

After the intensive day of doing community workshops, we joined the team for dinner at a great Mozzarella bar where we’ve reviewed the day and talked about the days to come.

Protocol Wednesday

Community Management workflow

The following day we started with a follow-up on the community management meeting. After the discussions and ideas we had on Tuesday, we worked on creating an efficient system to act as a channel between the community and the Request team. As community managers, we want all meaningful feedback, suggestions and potential leads coming from the community to be clearly visible for the foundation team. We now have a system in place to ensure this. Be sure to make use of the Feedback channel in the Discord or DM one of us. You can easily look us up in the sidebar on Discord!

Protocol Development team presentation

After this follow-up session, Vincent and Romaric were kind enough to speak with us about the Request Protocol and their work refactoring the Request libraries.

For scalability, the team has developed a Tendermint PoC and have been researching Plasma, as you might have already read in the AMA of June 8th, 2018. Other than that, they’re following progress on Sharding and other upcoming solutions, such as Polkadot.

Interesting to know for developers is that documentation on how to add new currencies and ERC20 tokens are planned for the near future. This will create opportunities for external developers using Request to add their preferred currencies to the financial solutions they are working on.

Got dev skills?

Request is always on the lookout for skilled developers who would love to work on the Request protocol. They are aware of the potential of the community, which is why we would like to reach out to you. Do you have skills as a developer or do you know anyone else who might be interested in developing for Request? Don’t hesitate to contact the team by sending your resume & motivational letter to join@request.network.

You’re not experienced in blockchain development yet, but still interested? No need to worry.

We asked Romaric about his experience on what it takes as a developer to becoming specialized in blockchain development. In his experience, you can make it as long as you are truly interested in blockchain technology. He made it clear it won’t be easy, as it will take a lot of time and courage. But if you keep trying and keep going on, you’ll get there!

MacRitchie Reservoir

After finishing the agenda for Wednesday, we spent our afternoon visiting MacRitchie Reservoir, where we were reliably told we would find some monkeys.

MacRitchie Reservoir

Monkey friends

Thursday Learnday

A deepdive into Partnerships

We had a very Brice partnership presentation on Thursday, where Brice talked about his strategies for finding and growing partnerships, taking a long term view to grow the partnership alongside the ecosystem. We discussed the strategy for community involvement when it comes to securing partnerships. For all of us this was a really exciting discussion with Brice and a real breath of fresh air when it comes to how cryptocurrency teams should handle partnerships. The goal for the partnerships team is to firstly educate the businesses and individuals they are talking with, discuss what blockchain is and how the technology can be beneficial to their business.

After the relationship has been made and the company is more educated on the benefits of blockchain technology, the team can then discuss potential solutions for streamlining their processes and how Request can help.

The goal for the partnerships team is to really focus on producing long term results and producing a quality product that will really benefit both parties. There are too many companies in the blockchain space which chase partnerships purely for recognition / hype purposes and it’s very refreshing to see Request take such a serious and professional approach to building partnerships.

The Payments dashboard

Julien gave us a sneak peak of the new payments dashboard, a Stripe-like application which will help merchants integrate the Request Payments solution, and then manage everything from within the dashboard. We did a user test with Julien, and talked about how the community would feel about using a hybrid decentralised/centralised solution for identity verification while waiting for fully decentralised options to reach an acceptable standard.

Crowdfunding progress

Later that day Benjamin presented his crowdfunding dApp progress, where we went through the current version after integrating closed beta feedback. We spoke about the challenges of ensuring fundraisers are appropriately vetted without having to rely too much on a centralised entity. We also spoke about the experience from the perspective of users unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies and the possibility of instructions on how to turn the raised funds into their local currency.

Out with a view

The community managers’ final group meal was in the evening at the Gordon Ramsay restaurant Bread Street before finally visiting the Marina Bay Sands to look out over the bay.