Hello WeTrust Community! We hope you’re enjoying your summer and have been staying cool. Here in Northern California where WeTrust is based, there’s been a scorching heat wave sweeping through the region. We’ve hit the ground running making improvements to our flagship Trusted Lending Circles product, partnering with blockchain industry leaders, and researching new products that will allow us to continue to lead in blockchain-enabled financial inclusion. Read on to learn more about what we’re working on.

Trusted Lending Circles

Most of our technical team has been focused on improving our Trusted Lending Circles product. We have brought on an additional contractor to help us build advanced TLC features, such as variable payout sizes and new methods for determining the recipient of funds. Other ways to determine the recipient of funds include lottery (where the recipient of funds is random each round), and pre-determined (where each person knows when they are receiving the payout). These types of payout methods are popular in different cultures, and we want to allow our product to reflect the needs of our users.

We also met with Shaun Djie in person, Director of Business Development at Digix to see how soon we can use their DigixGold tokens in our Trusted Lending Circles product. Gold has been used as currency in ROSCAs throughout history and across cultures. Gold is particularly important in chit funds in India and Cundinas in Mexico due to its scarcity, price stability, and usefulness. At WeTrust we are committed to making our TLC’s accessible to everyone, regardless of geographic, and economic barriers. As a means towards achieving maximum accessibility, WeTrust will enable seamless onboarding of new users irrespective of local FIAT currencies. Integrating support for Digix’s ERC20 compliant token that is fully redeemable and reflects the value of gold, is one of many important steps we will take in this direction.

New Project Research

As useful as our Trusted Lending Circles are for people throughout the world, WeTrust is on a continuous quest to be at the forefront of new technologies which enable decentralized community based financing to spread globally. The team is actively researching new products which leverage the existing Trusted Lending Circle infrastructure/platform/service in order to provide even more benefits for our community.

We mentioned in our previous update that we are exploring two efforts. One of the products currently being developed by the WeTrust team involves leveraging cryptocurrencies as collateral on a fully decentralized peer-to-peer lending platform. One of the use cases for a platform like this is that it will give holders of cryptocurrencies and ERC20 protocol tokens the opportunity to earn interest on their coin holdings. We see this as extremely beneficial in cases where the platform for an app’s token is still being built, and the token has yet no function on the app. Users often hold these types of tokens long-term, and using our product they could gain liquidity without having to sell them outright. We have been actively conducting market research, meeting with academics who have researched this topic, as well as interviewing potential users. One of the drawbacks of creating such a platform is that the regulatory frameworks are almost nonexistent, and where laws do exist, they’re very difficult to interpret. We’re regularly meeting with our lawyers to find out how we can best fulfill this gap in the market, whilst complying with existing law. WeTrust needs to better understand existing regulation in order to build a great product, and subsequently enable others to have a clearer understanding of the current rules in which they can operate.

A second product/experiment that we are working on involves enabling cryptocurrency token holders to form group “pools” of cryptocurrencies. We predict that by leveraging the wisdom of crowds, a group of people pooling their tokens together will see a more stable and consistent increase in the value of their cryptocurrencies compared to holding cryptocurrencies individually. This is a unique way to build upon the token pooling aspect of our existing Trusted Lending Circles product.

New Website

The current iteration of the WeTrust website has reliably presented our mission to the world since before the launch our token crowdsale. It has been instrumental in driving interest and adoption of our first product, the Trusted Lending Circle. However, as we continue to grow and WeTrust’s product offerings continue to evolve, the current website is no longer sufficient to present all aspects of WeTrust to the world. Our new website will continue to highlight the Trusted Lending Circle, while also promoting our soon to be released products, such as the aforementioned Peer-to-Peer lending and group token pooling. We are working with the talented Hailey Tran on a beautiful new website design that will highlight all facets of the WeTrust product portfolio.

New Hires

Are you excited by the potential of blockchain? Want to work for a fast paced company tackling challenges at the forefront of technology and community finance? WeTrust is hiring!

Our plans are gaining so much traction that we are ramping up our hiring incredibly fast. We’re currently looking for a Front-End Engineer, a UI/UX Designer and an Executive Assistant/ Operations Manager. We’ve already met with some candidates and expect to meet with many more in the coming weeks. If you or someone you know would be a good fit for our mission, please apply here!