A New Beginning

Celebrating the Past; Charting the Future.

We started RateX in 2016 to help consumers save on foreign exchange rates for cross-border e-commerce.

The whole process is easy for consumers. Through a simple and beautiful Chrome extension (RateX), and mobile app (RateS), consumers pay in their native currencies for overseas purchases at the lowest possible exchange rates.

However, as a business, dealing with multi-currency settlements and clearance and working with different financial institutions proves to be inefficient, time wasting and costly. For instance, existing payment processors charge merchants 3–5% fees per transaction, even more so if it is cross-border transactions. Furthermore, payment flows are opaque and merchants have no visibility, when the fiat currencies actually reach their accounts.

The First Step

We were very motivated to help businesses with cross-border settlements and clearance through using Stellar and Ethereum, given how we faced these problems ourselves.

The goal for Rate3 was simple: a blockchain-based settlement and clearance network for businesses. This lays the foundation for a decentralised financial infrastructure for other financial services — credit scoring, lending — can exist.

From the onset, the decision was to create a platform that could resolve all of businesses’ financial needs on the blockchain. We examined different blockchains and their underlying scalability issues, and decided that a cross-chain architecture would be most suitable.

On the technical side, the Rate3 Dual Protocol consisted of a Cross-Border Payment Protocol, and a Credit Scoring Protocol. Through the former, Rate3 aims to help businesses do cross-border settlements & clearance using the Stellar network. The Rate3 Credit Scoring Protocol taps on the Ethereum network to provide a gateway to further financial services: decentralised credit score, facilitation of credit loans, and creating bridges for other financial institutions.

Our initial token sale was very successful, having reached the hard cap of 25,000 ETH successfully. More than 1,000 investors participated, alongside top funds such as Fenbushi Capital’s token funds, Node Capital, Kenetic, FBG Capital, AlphaCoinFund, IOST etc. The RTE token started trading on several top exchanges too: Bibox, FCOIN, Coinrail and other decentralised exchanges.

Our first step involved several key development phases:

Building and shipping a cross-border settlement & clearance network entirely on the blockchain Creating an interoperable infrastructure for decentralised credit, allowing identity attestors and existing financial institutions to join the ecosystem Scaling the protocols to support new verticals and wider applications, including offline payment, insurance services, stablecoins and more

This vision is ambitious, challenging, yet very exciting for us.

The Need for a Bridge

The reality is that there is still a vast gap between the current “fiat” reality and the “blockchain” world and enterprises cannot adopt blockchain technologies effectively: they cannnot use volatile cryptocurrencies for business usage, their assets are held in fiat value, they do not have an identity on different blockchains. We believe that there are 3 fundamental reasons for this gap:

No common legal frameworks to tie ownership and control of real world assets to digital tokens Differing smart contract standards Fragmented identity ecosystem

With this new informed understanding, we are prepared to ship the broader strategy of Rate3: help businesses and enterprises move to the blockchain more effectively through both tokenization and cross-chain identity management.