We founded WeTrust to demonstrate how innovative blockchain technology could be combined with time-tested economic traditions to improve financial inclusion. In pursuit of our mission, our first year of product development efforts culminated in the release of Trusted Lending Circles (“TLC”), one of the first decentralized applications that allows users to collaboratively save money with their peers, on Ethereum Mainnet. As a team, we believe that releasing this dApp is only the first step in our mission to promote financial inclusion.

What We’ve Learned About dApp Development

While we were building our TLC dApp, we noticed a lack of tools and infrastructure available to help support the development of dApps. Given what we’ve learned, we saw opportunities to help the industry accelerate while improving the dApp development ecosystem. Many individual developers and startups moving into financial dApp development will face the same challenges we encountered when building the TLC dApp, such as the need for rapid node deployment and specialized testing tools, or the inefficiencies of slow speed, high cost transactions.

So as we’re working on building product enhancements and fixing bug reports on the TLC, we’re also starting the development of a platform that will enable financial dApps to be more rapidly developed, tested, and deployed, while taking advantage of faster speed, lower cost transactions. We want to make it easier for ourselves, and eventually others, to create industry-changing financial dApps, ensure proper functionality, and test in a wide range of scenarios. In addition, we recognize the need any financial dApp developer has for timely and cost efficient transactions which will be possible on the TRST powered sidechain currently being designed. Ultimately, we hope to drastically reduce the friction in financial dApp development and drive innovation that supports our mission of promoting financial inclusion.

In parallel, we are continuing our targeted user testing and acquisition efforts for Trusted Lending Circles, our flagship dApp, which will eventually operate on the future TRST sidechain and benefit from faster, cheaper transaction processing. The feedback we’re gaining from our user testing will be used to prioritize our next set of TLC feature releases scheduled for Q3. If you know an organization that would be interested in using TLCs, please get in touch and let us know!

The Road Ahead

The future is yet uncertain, and the best laid plans made by startups often change — even more so in our rapidly evolving blockchain ecosystem. Despite the unknowns ahead of us, we have charted out a tentative roadmap. We share this with some hesitation, so I must caution that one must view this with the understanding that the probability of changes increases for those milestones further on the horizon. However, as Julian from Golem points out in one of his blog posts, despite the challenges and unknowns that we will face and solve, we do need a roadmap and timeline. This is our guide as a company, but a guide that must evolve with business needs, not a prescription set in stone. As technologists and startup entrepreneurs, we must launch, iterate, and adjust as needed, based on the latest information, without holding too tightly to even the best designed plans.

With that as context, we believe the road ahead for WeTrust has many exciting developments:

In Q2, you can look forward to our TLC dApp rebranding that will happen alongside our targeted user testing and acquisition campaigns — more on that in the coming weeks. You’ll be able to start a TLC with your friends via mobile dApp browsers, and we’ll start testing various versions of the TLC using our new internal testing tools. We will also be conducting pilots for node creation/ deletion tools soon, and if you’d like to test out these features, please sign up here. Although these were intended initially for internal use, we may make them available for the public depending on interest.

In Q3, our data-driven analysis of user feedback will have helped determine the new set of features to be built and released for the TLC, and we plan to incorporate the use of TRST tokens as access to some of these new features. In addition, a key outcome of the inception event we held as a team in February 2018, was that we need to build our own sidechain to improve usability of our own TLC and financial dApps like it. As a result, we have embarked on the design of what we’re calling internally “TRST Chain.” This will be a TRST token powered sidechain which we believe will benefit our users in terms of capabilities, cost, and speed for financial dApps. We are in the early phases of design and will have more to share in the coming months regarding the it’s capabilities and the product vision.

In Q4, after significant testing, we expect the TLC to be migrated to the TRST sidechain testnet, in order to optimize transaction speed and cost. Interchain nodes should be in place to connect the TRST sidechain with the Ethereum Mainnet, and we’ll also be building various end user tools such as native TRST wallets and node clients.

By Q1 2019, we envision the TRST sidechain will be live on Mainnet along with various financial dApp modules and plugins to make dApp development more developer friendly, and ultimately enable the proliferation of consumer facing financial dApps.