Introduction

It’s been a hectic week, I haven’t had a lot of time to check Discord but I’ll be popping in to say hello more starting next week. In the meantime if anyone has any questions just pop me a DM in Discord, as that’s the place where I get alerts.

If there is a question you want answering publicly that’s absolutely fine, just DM me to say in #feedback there is a question, can you answer.

Meet Adam, as handsome as ever

General

How are things going for the team?

Things are genuinely going very well internally, we are much more focused than we were since I first joined. We are really hitting our stride now with development + the other devs that have joined have been great too.

I know it doesn’t look like it from the outside but things are moving and we do have some exciting stuff on the horizon. Code takes time but we are getting there.

How about the update on the Request Fund that was promised last summer?

I will ask about an update on the fund, I don’t handle any fund applications / queries so I can’t give any information there.

There was a Request Fund applicant that didn’t seem to be able to contact the team, can you share anything on what happened there?

The Reddit user (the applicant) had been sending emails to the wrong address, it was an unfortunate mistake. Every e-mail / Discord / Telegram and Reddit message about the fund however, is handled.

Chris had checked after seeing Reddit and the e-mails had been blocked by the spam filter (which has been changed). It’s an unfortunate thing but Christophe is now in contact.

Who do you consider the decision makers on the team? Obviously Etienne, giving the long-term vision article, but who else?

It depends, generally we are pretty autonomous for our daily tasks.

The high level decisions and vision come from Chris and Etienne but we always collaborate on the long term vision fully as a team. It’s great when we all meet in Amsterdam as we can align on all of this.

What are you personal thoughts on Request not having a CEO?

CEO is just a term. We definitely do have vision and direction as a team. We have improved massively on collaborating across teams, our vision + direction etc. I do believe that teams can have a high amount of autonomy and still be aligned / have direction.

I think it’s hard to see from an outsiders perspective on how aligned we are. That is probably partly down to our communication.

V2 and Apps

We were told an update from the Apps team was coming soon, could you tell us something about the status of that?

The update was due mid last month but there were a few issues which caused delays. We are due to update everyone soon though! There are so many moving parts with protocol V2 though but rest assured we are making very good progress.

Also about the Apps team, it was previously communicated that the focus was on encryption and the core V2 platform development. Are the other internal teams working on other stuff?

The focus for the Apps team is to create apps and simplify the usage of the protocol. The protocol team are working on several things too (not just encryption) — the website roadmap is outdated and needs to be updated ASAP.

So what happened with the in-house invoicing and accounting tool?

We explored the possibility of creating our own invoicing / accounting tool but after speaking with partners + exploring more we didn’t go ahead with it. We realized early on it wasn’t the best course of action. As with any project we work on, we work quick and explore our options fully before committing. Our core thesis is still the same: create a solid protocol with an easy to use infrastructure and tools which allows businesses and individuals to build crypto applications using Request.

Can you provide an estimate for when we can actually see and use V2 beta?

You can use V2 beta already, it’s on testnet.

A quick note on the Encryption that’s in progress for V2

The encryption developed is specific to Request using channels so access can be given to external parties for Requests at later stages (great for auditing etc.). See Github here for a very top level overview.

Potential of Request plugins

Plugins are obviously something we are well aware of and exploring. We are building the infrastructure and tools (like Stripe) so we and others can easily plug-in and build on other systems like Odoo, QuickBooks, Xero etc. We are well aware of this and creating the infrastructure and tools to facilitate this is the main focus for apps currently.

Community

What do you think about community sentiment? Is the team going to change anything on that front?

We know internally that our public communication simply isn’t good enough. Internally we do some great stuff and we really need to make a conscious effort to portray those successes to the community. I am personally going to put aside more time to interact with the community and I will discuss with the team about how we can be more transparent about what we are doing with our time to keep you more informed. I understand it’s frustrating but we are working extremely hard.

We did plan on having an apps update last month like I said but it was delayed. We scrapped the bi-weeklies because the vast majority of feedback said to leave updates until we had substantially more information in them. We have probably taken it a bit too far the other way but we should definitely do more technical updates for everyone. Even if they are small.

My proposal is this: Once a month, give a recap of what the team worked on, issues they ran into, what they plan on doing moving forward, progress made, and any potential relationships or opportunities for community members. If progress is slow, literally say that in the blog post. When people hear nothing for months and the progress bars isn’t updating, they assume nothing is happening.

Definitely, that’s how I see a happy middle-ground.

Which apps would the Request team like to see developed by the community that they have an interest in funding.

I think the Mindmeister list is a good starting point. I’ll put out a message to the team as I’d like to hear their thoughts too.

Do you personally see the Request platform being in a state where the community can take over in 2020 and beyond? What are the team’s plans for Request after 2019?

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘take over’? The code is and always will be open source, any company or individual can add features as they wish. Etienne shared the long term vision here.

Gotta shoot anyway, was good speaking. If you guys need anything, tag me.