1. Recent Updates and Reserve App Status

Community

A few weeks ago you mentioned that you felt like it was time to start introducing Reserve Protocol to the world, do you still feel like it’s soon time to come out of stealth mode?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

We’re still operating on the same policy as last time we checked in: keep a low profile while we are in the “0-to-1” phase, and then amp up the marketing when we begin scaling up.

We are still in that 0-to-1 phase, where we are emphasizing becoming experts in understanding our user-base, and honing the product to serve their needs really well.

Community

Regarding the beta launch: not asking which KPI’s you have used and which information is more valuable to you for obvious reasons, but I would like to know your expectations from the Beta and if you have matched those or outperformed them. Could you please elaborate on the final balance?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

So far progress has moderately exceeded my expectations. We are tracking this by looking at numbers like the portion of people who download the app that actually choose to transact, the ratings users give us when we ask them about their experience, and the frequency with which people are telling their friends and family about it. When we reach the scaling phase, we will brag about our numbers and growth rates, but for now I’ll leave it at that.

Also while we are on the subject of 0-to-1 vs. scaling: please remember that the nature of being in the 0-to-1 phase is that you are starting at 0 and making something out of nothing, and so there is uncertainty involved. We could potentially encounter a barrier that leads us to decide not to scale up in Venezuela first, and instead focus on another country. So far this has not happened and I am feeling optimistic, but this is the nature of startups and I want community members to understand that.

Right now our energy is high. We’ve brought on four more people to handle serving customers in Venezuela.

Community

What are the main problems that you are experiencing when convincing merchants to accept RSV? Besides that not all of them are willing to be beta-testers and some of the owners may be old-fashioned, are they scared of the possible consequences of the Venezuelan government if they accept RSV in their business?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

Large grocery stores tend to be more worried about accepting dollars as a payment mechanism, because they are under closer watch of the government.

The reason for this monitoring is bizarre — they are required to sell their food items for state-mandated prices. Stores have been caught hoarding all of their food in warehouses to sell elsewhere for higher free-market prices. So they have the government checking in on them a lot more. If you have never lived in a truly socialist nation this may be hard to believe, but this kind of thing happens a lot in Venezuela. Gas is essentially given away for free, and so in some cities you always have to wait 8 hours in line for gas, as it’s in short supply.

Why the short supply? In part because people load up tanks and tanks of free gas to drive it across the border into Colombia and sell it for its fair market price.

Anyway, coming back to your question: most merchants are not concerned about the government when accepting alternate payment forms. The needs we are encountering are things like “How do I get the transaction data into a form where I can keep track of my internal books for tracking sales, who has been paid, etc.?” — so we are keeping a list of merchant-centric features we may incorporate into the next version of the app.

Community

How do people like actually transacting in the app?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

We ask them to rate their experience and frequently they give us a 10 out of 10.

Sometimes transactions take too long and the user experience is bad. But this is a good problem to have — it’s because we have more users than we can handle at that moment, and that’s why we have been hiring more people to help with the app operation.



Community

Have you observed any interesting emergent behaviors among the userbase of the Reserve app?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

Yes! Some Venezuelans are working primarily online in order to get by in a broken economy. They often earn dollars in PayPal. So we’ve seen a trend of users moving dollars from PayPal into Reserve in order to have more liquidity with the Bolivar.

Community

Can you elaborate on using PayPal? Is this something we can use now?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

Yep, we process many transactions coming in from PayPal to Reserve every day now. People send in their PayPal dollars and get Reserve dollars in the app.

Community

Have the people of Venezuela been exposed to any apps like this before? Why don’t they have access to Venmo etc if they have USD in their bank accounts?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

They don’t have dollars in their bank accounts — you can’t do that there or if you can it’s unlikely you’ll be able to withdraw the dollars when you want to.

Some have American accounts in order to store dollars, but many don’t. There are several services that have some level of similarity, but aren’t quite what we are offering — e.g. PayPal (accounts can be shut down), BofA+Zelle (have to travel to the US to open account).

Community

Who keeps the Bolivars when traded on the Reserve platform for USD/RSV, the protocol or an actual bank?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

A Bs <> RSV transaction isn’t related to the protocol, just like buying BTC with USD is an off-chain transaction. So it’s a question of the trading operations that are set up to provide this liquidity.

We have ways of doing this that minimize risk for us (and have even been a little bit profitable), and we have plans for how to expand that liquidity a lot over time.

Community

When will the referral fee option to get more and more new users for the Android Reserve App in Venezuela 🇻🇪 be switched on?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

We don’t have a set date for this — it will depend on when we feel ready to scale.

That will come down to (a) being confident we have the initial feature set needed, and (b) being pretty sure our technical and organizational infrastructure is ready for scaling.

Community

Are you using real tokens already? How big is the current supply of RSV? How is the current custody system working?

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

We are using “cloud custody” (I hate this buzzword but here we are.) So we hold the tokens. You can’t see the transactions on chain yet, but you will be able to in the future.

Community

How do people like that transfers in the Reserve app might not be as fast as PayPal. If I go to a pizza place and pay for the pizza via RSV I am curious on how long I would have to wait for his transaction to complete.

Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)

As I said, the current app is “cloud custody,” which means we don’t have to worry about gas and block times yet.

However, if you study the lengths people go through to make payments in Venezuela, an ETH transaction time is often going to be relatively less of a headache than is typical. That said, we are connected to many of the folks at the leading edge of L2 solutions in the ETH community, and expect to make use of one of them.

The interface is still not as good as we would like though, as you have to type in a phone number to pay. We’ll improve this pretty quickly, but for now we have been focused on people using it for savings.