The WeTrust team is happy to announce the new version of Trusted Lending Circles MVP (on Ropsten revival testnet) now supports ERC20 tokens.

Why is this important?

When serving customers outside the crypto-fan community, it is crucial to make the product as accessible as possible to everyone. One important hurdle to overcome is that ROSCA (aka Trusted Lending Circle) participants should be able to work with the currency they use on a day to day basis. Just like a Russian user probably wouldn’t want to run a ROSCA using USD and a Canadian user wouldn’t want to run a ROSCA using the British Pounds, in a similar way both of them would prefer not to use ETH as the currency of the ROSCA. Doing so will let them keep clear of any currency fluctuation risks associated with using any currency other than the one they deal with on a daily basis.

Supporting ERC20 opens the door to using stablecoins with WeTrust ROSCAs. What are stablecoins? These are cryptocoins that are guaranteed to track the value of real world goods and currencies, e.g., Digix’s DGD (tracking real-world gold), Tether’s USDT (tracking USD), Consensys’s StabL and Maker’s Dai (both tracking several coins in their own way).

As time goes on, we expect more of these projects to mature and be available to people that are less tech-savvy, so that they too can leverage the blockchain’s potential and use it for day-to-day business dealings. WeTrust’s new ERC20 support will help build yet another important use case for these stablecoins and further the reach of its potential market.

How do I check out this new feature?

When you go to the MVP’s ropsten website and create a ROSCA, you’ll be able to choose which currency you want to use. Right now, as this is running on Ropsten testnet, you’ll be able to choose between ETH and KWC, our homemade ERC20 KiwiCoin.

KiwiCoin is just like any other regular ERC20 coin. However, it lives on Ropsten and “can play but cannot fly”; that is, it’s going to be used only for playing around with ERC20 tokens on ROSCAs. It is also so friendly that it provides you with however many tokens you want to play with. Another thing to note about it is that it’s pretty tiny, so every time you hit the “Inject Kiwis” button, you’ll get additional 1 million tokens. Not too bad, right?

The rest of the ROSCA process remains the same as ETH with one exception: when you contribute, you’ll be requested to issue two transactions instead of one.

[For the more tech-savvy readers: one transaction is to the ERC20’s approve method, the other is to the ROSCA’s contribute method, which, in its turn, calls the ERC20’s transferFrom method. Yep, this is how business is done in ERC20-land.

Also, if you want to check out the KiwiCoin contract you can find it here (albeit with a more boring name)].

You’re very welcome to give it a test drive today and please — let us know what you think on our slack channel or at support@wetrust.io !