Aloha WeTrust Community, it’s time for another update! As our product readies to launch and we ramp up our marketing efforts, expect to start seeing regular weekly updates from us. Speaking of our product launch, the TLC codebase is looking good for a public testnet launch on December 14 (code freeze on December 11). We’ve been doing lots of testing, and have even opened up beta testing to select individuals on our whitelist. We’re receiving lots of good feedback from our beta testers, and really appreciate all the responses.

Our ramped up marketing efforts include attending the East West Blockchain Conference on December 10 and online banner ads that we will debut on social media and cryptocurrency news platforms after our public testnet launch. We’ve also hired many talented new employees in both our Bay Area and Vietnam offices, and in the coming updates, we want to introduce you to some of them. To kick things off, here’s an interview with Jean-André Santoni, a new Software Engineer in our Vietnam office.

An Interview with Jean-André Santoni, WeTrust Software Engineer

Hi Jean-André Santoni, thanks for chatting with the WeTrust blog. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background?

Sure thing. I’m a self taught programmer. I started learning programming as a teenager, my goal was to create video games. I got a degree in programming, because it is expected in French culture to have a degree to find your first job in IT. I started working in IT eight years ago in a small company, a software publisher of an open source alternative for integrated library systems. From there, I found a position in a service unit of the CNRS (National Scientific Research Center in France), working on web frameworks, a web app, and as a system administrator, with a little bit of automated language learning. I spent the last four years working as an independent contractor for interesting projects, whether they be mobile development, embedded Linux, research and development, or UI.

What’s a particularly interesting project you’ve worked on?

When I worked as a freelancer, my first customer wanted me to create a Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi and other ARM development boards. The goal was to create TV boxes for hotels, where the movies would synchronize over all the boxes using the bittorrent protocol on a privately secured wifi mesh network. I asked a friend, good developer, to join me on this project. I had never done embedded development before. I enjoyed it a lot, we were free to make our own choices and mistakes in the process, with total freedom over the hardware and technology stack choices.

How did you first learn about blockchain? What excited you most about it?

I heard about bitcoin in 2009 or 2010, when it first became public. I started mining with some friends on a GPU. I’m mainly excited by the idea of challenging the current bank system, which I find outdated and not really secure. I’ve always been fascinated by distributed systems, distributed hash tables, IPFS, anti censure systems, and peer to peer messaging. I am interested in the technical aspects of the blockchain, and by the political consequences.

How did you first learn about WeTrust? What made you want to join the company?

This year, me and my wife moved to Vietnam. I registered on the Blockchain for Vietnamese Developers group, and started talking with active members of the community. I met a dev named Nguyen Sy Thanh Son who is a blockchain enthusiast and a talented developer. He introduced me to Khanh, who gave me the first job interview for WeTrust.

What uses do you foresee for the Trusted Lending Circle?

In Vietnam, people distrust the banks. Less than 20% of the population uses their bank account. They have many other ways to keep their money in a secure place. One of them is by lending this money to relatives. Here, we know the concept of ROSCA under the name Hui. People forms some circles in their company, for example. But family is still the central place to manage, save, and lend money. Using the blockchain to secure all this is going to change the rules. By making the system more secure, it could expand Trusted Lending Circles to larger circles.

Which aspects of TLC product development have you been focusing on?

I’ve been actively working on a feature for auto refreshing parts of the UI with information coming from the blockchain. We are now using the subscription feature of graphql. It’s a bleeding edge technology that originates from facebook, which facilitates setting up the transport for live data (in our case WebSockets) and a publication/subscription system on the server side (in our case Redis). I also do a lot of testing and bug reports. The project is progressing at a really high speed. When I wake up in the morning, I read the contributions of the team members on the other side of the planet, and when they wake up, they see our contributions.

Have you or anyone you know used a ROSCA?

I think my sister in law did. I didn’t know about ROSCA before. In France, banks were organized as nation wide services very early on. At one point, the farmers did create something that looks like a ROSCA, called Crédit Agricole, which became very popular and is now difficult to distinguish from a traditional bank.

Aside from WeTrust, what have you been doing for fun?

I’m maintaining a Linux distribution to create an open source video game console. It’s called Lakka, and it’s been around for 4 years now, with a nice community of developers and users around it. It is mainly emulation based and retro gaming oriented. Now that my mind is absorbed in dApp related problems, I have no time to take care of it anymore, so most of the work is done by the other contributors.

Thanks for chatting with us, Jean-André!

WeTrust Book Review: “Dead Aid”

With our public testnet launch forthcoming, we wanted to revisit the benefits that a ROSCA can bring. Recently, some folks in our office read and discussed the book “Dead Aid” by Dambisay Moyo, in which she describes how financial aid to Africa can have negative consequences, and how even microfinance is a limited solution. Below, we summarize the conversation we’ve been having.

For decades, developed nations have been sending aid, whether in the form of loans or in the form of grants, to Africa. Unfortunately, many African nations, such as Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the DRC, remain mired in poverty. Why, in spite of the billions of dollars in aid that have been sent to Africa, have these nations not seen significant economic progress?

In her book Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working and How there is a Better way for Africa, former World Bank consultant and Goldman Sachs employee Dambisa Moyo argues that aid is not beneficial, and has in fact compounded the problems faced by Africa, for a number of reasons. Aid is often redirected to dictators’ personal accounts, rarely reaching the people it is intended to help. In addition, the aid could wipe out nascent industries developing on the continent; for example, aid in the form of mosquito nets could destroy the market for a fledgling local mosquito net corporation and eliminate an engine of economic growth. Aid can also inflate the value of these nations’ local currencies, choking off their export sectors.

Instead of aid, Moyo argues for increased trade and the creation of a banking infrastructure as a way forward for Africa. In a chapter titled “Banking on the Unbankable”, she describes Mohammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank as a model for developing nations to follow. Countless examples of the effectiveness of this microfinance model are presented, including in Moyo’s native Zambia. At the same time, she laments the punitive and exorbitant rates charged by microfinance banks, describes the potential for microfinance to devolve into Ponzi schemes, and may support reckless consumption. She ends by mentioning that only 5% of the world’s poor have access to microfinance, and advocates for an increase in the microfinance model.

Moyo’s cautious misgivings about microfinance can be summarized as:

1. Excessively high interest rates

2. Dearth of access (only 5% of the world’s poor can access microfinance)

3. Lack of transparency (potential to devolve into Ponzi schemes)

4. Lack of accountability (people will spend the funds recklessly)

In many ways, WeTrust’s Trusted Lending Circle products reduces these issues facing microfinance. By leveraging the blockchain, WeTrust is creating a framework that allows users to define the cost of credit in the Trusted Lending Circles where the participate. In addition, the blockchain means Trusted Lending Circles can be deployed in any country, allowing people to form their own savings and loan organizations without needing a major microfinance bank to set up shop. With transparency and accountability as a foundation, our product design allows creation of future credit identity if desired by users who want to link their identity information with their TLC activity.

In her well-researched book, Dambisa Moyo clearly outlined the limitations of aid in helping Africa. We believe tools such as Trusted Lending Circles powered by WeTrust can help communities harness their own capabilities and resources to overcome limitations and spur economic growth and development.

Thanks for reading our latest update! We hope you’re as excited for our product launch as we are!