We are hearing your feedback requests for more focus and transparency on technical progression in the bi-weekly. To provide greater insight towards the community, we have highlighted the latest technical & project progress made by the development teams. Please use Discord to discuss these topics in-depth, or supply us with additional feedback here.

Request Protocol

For the Request protocol, our focuses the last weeks were:

To make it easier to contribute to the protocol.

To build extensions and increase security as we’re redeploying the contract for the extensions.

Our progress:

Writing documentation on how to add a new currency, a new ERC20 and on the signed requests.

Progress on the extensions. We have a base system, plus 3 basic extensions: payment conditions, send ERC20 tokens to the payer on payment, and escrow. The payment conditions extension allows a request to be paid between 2 specific dates, and with a maximum amount. The ERC20 payback extension lets you receive ERC20 tokens when paying in ether. The escrow extension allows you to keep funds in escrow until a third party decides funds may be transferred. Extensions are still under development and not public at this point.

Refactoring to improve the speed of development and make it easier for external devs to contribute to the ecosystem.

Code cleanups, including 2 contributions from mikery.

We’ve created a repository with simple uses of request for new developers.

Added solium to analyze the code of the smart contracts, enabling all rules and the security plugin. Fixed solidity compilation warnings.

We tested our code with 3 EVM analyzers, security analysis tools for ethereum to detect vulnerabilities. We’ve executed mythril, manticore, oyente on our code and no critical vulnerability has been reported.

We’ve engaged with the builder community to answer technical related questions, alongside working together with external developers on the Hub.

What’s up next:

Write guides to help developers contribute to the request codebase and publish “good first issues” on GitHub to engage developers.

Create more basic extensions, such as continuous payment, tax & late fees, to ensure the extension system cover the necessary cases requested by the development community.

Build a crowdfunding extension that will be a composition of the 3 basic extensions mentioned above.

Make the BTC integration more flexible to allow simpler UX when requesting BTC payments.

Continue progress on the scalability and privacy proof of concept. We are currently working on a private repo for the PoC, which will move to a public repo when we have the production version.

Add an example of browser use of the library in the basic examples repo.

App.Request.Network

The last few weeks we’ve focused on improving the UX for BTC requests so that BTC support on app.request.network is easy to use by end-users while staying secure. As our preferred solution involves changes to be made in the smart contracts of the protocol, the integration of BTC on app.request.network is taking more time than we initially calculated.

Our progress:

Added functions to handle the amount of a request depending on the number of decimals of its currency.

Pull request done on the requestnetwork.js library to fetch BTC blockchain information from the client side.

End-to-end tests were added to prevent regressions in our code.

Upgraded dependencies to Angular 6.

Add a menu to set desired gas prices (based on ethgasstation estimations) to give more flexibility to the end user.

What’s up next:

Add the possibility of creating signed requests on the landing page of app.request.network to make creating invoices simpler for the payee.

Change smart contracts with the protocol team to make BTC refund addresses an optional parameter to be set by the payer.

Further improve UX and add step-by-step tutorials on how to use app.request.network, so a first user gets guided through the process of using blockchain technology for invoicing.

Accounting

The accounting app team has recently completed the ideation phase to define what the ideal user experience looks like; the next step is the development of the MVP.

Our progress:

Finished researching the target audience of the app.

Finished defining main features needed by the industry.

Defined what the app looks like for an end user.

Created a visual mockup of the accounting app to demonstrate in a presentation.

What’s up next:

Develop the accounting app MVP.

Integrate invoice metadata into the MVP of the app.

Launch the accounting app website.

Initial promotion of the accounting app.

The team working on the accounting app will showcase the future accounting app in our next project update on the 21st of August.

Payments Dashboard

The payments team has focused on improving the user experience of the payments dashboard. The Payment Dashboard makes it easy for a merchant to start accepting cryptocurrencies while giving a good overview of sales made. Usability from a user perspective will be a key factor for long-term product adoption.

Our progress:

Conducted a series of 1-to-1 user tests to deep dive into user needs and comprehension of the product.

Tested the prototype with 9 users, creating a list of qualitative feedback points to improve features and UX.

Used the qualitative feedback to find patterns and make a detailed prototype improvements roadmap.

Defined what the MVP will look like and how it will be built from a technical point of view.

What’s up next:

Make changes in the design of the MVP based on the user feedback before starting development.

Crowdfunding

With the crowdfunding app being in closed beta for some time now, the focus has been on improving the overall usability and UX of the platform based on feedback from the testers. The crowdfunding app will move into public beta on rinkeby when we finish addressing the last feedback items from our early testers.

Our progress:

Improved the UI of the desktop and mobile versions of the app.

Integrated support for GIFs in both the banner, profile picture & description field.

Integrated videos to be embedded in the description field to make projects more visually appealing.

What’s up next:

Multiple UI improvements to make the crowdfunding page more customizable.

Displaying the fiat equivalent when donating cryptocurrencies.

Native ERC20 token support.

The ability to publish the crowdfunding project to the blockchain when the creator uses metamask.

The ability to create multiple projects under one account.

REQ listing on The Ocean exchange

The Request Network token (REQ) will be listed for wallet-to-wallet trading on The Ocean, a high-performance Ethereum and ERC20 token trading platform. The trading pair will be accessible tomorrow August 8th via their on-chain order book and decentralized settlement engine.

Running on the 0x Protocol, The Ocean promotes the flow of value across the globe in a structurally secure way. No intermediaries, no deposits, and no transfer fees are necessary to start trading. Your tokens are always yours. What is wallet-to-wallet trading, and why trade on decentralized exchanges? Learn more about their vision for the future of finance on their blog, or simply dive into The Ocean below!

New European office: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

After assessing multiple capital cities in Europe, doing research on tech ecosystems and casting internal voting rounds, we have decided to set up a new European office in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. With its international FinTech culture and location as a central hub, Amsterdam is the place in Europe where we focus on attracting new talent to work at the Request Foundation. By being in Amsterdam we are well positioned to travel to other European tech hotspots such as Berlin and Paris.

The Singapore office will stay active as our base of operations in Asia, allowing us to continue to grow our Asian presence.

Looking for talent

We are currently looking to find talented individuals for the following positions:

- HR Manager

- Growth Marketer

- Product Manager

- Back-end developer

- Full-stack developer

Do you think you’d be a valuable addition to the foundation in a different position? We are always reviewing open applications. Send in your resume and motivation to join@request.network!