The Request Network Foundation promotes the adoption of blockchain by providing technology which allows everyone to develop their own financial solutions based on the Request Network. The foundation establishes a standard for blockchain transactions, shaping the future of payments (i.e. invoices, loans, payments, salary, donations) and their compliance for accounting, tax and audit integration.

Ask Me Anything #3

Below we’ve answered close to all questions asked in the AMA thread on Reddit. We would like to specifically thank you as part of our community for asking questions, and our community managers for making sure the collection and answering process went as smooth as possible.

We’ve split up the questions into separate themes to make it a little bit more readable. Nevertheless, as we wanted to answer as much as possible the post has become rather large.

Development

Is Fiat integration still a goal? If so, what are some details that could be shared? This was one of the things that many people were enthused by (Paypal 2.0, etc), and probably one of the things that saw the greatest amount of disappointment when it seemingly went on the backburner.

Request Network is a network of invoices. This network is connected to payment processors to detect the payments.

In v2 of the protocol, Request Network will support invoices in any currency. This means that the Request Network can be used to create and share a USD invoice. This is the base layer, the universal database for invoice. To add more value to this database for invoices, the network should also be capable to link payments with invoices automatically.

The foundation itself is developing a built-in payment processor that handles cryptocurrency payments. We are also creating the interface for other payment processors, which handle fiat payments, to connect and integrate with the network.

With protocol v2, I see a lot of good things and am excited, however, the $0.10 steady fee concerns me for small personal things like tips, or small transfers between friends. Is there going to be options for dynamic fees or less fee for something like a tip?

Transactions will be batched by gateways and we expect to commit thousands of transactions at the same time.

Our own gateway will bear the cost of the fixed fee and only ask users to pay per kB.

The fees will be adjusted if necessary when we have more data about the network.

Adding to the question above: have you looked into implementing state channels or using something like connext.network?

Yes, we have looked into this. For Request, working with state channels doesn’t make sense as all data about an invoice except the final result is deleted when a state channel closes. We suggest a spam fee of $0.03 for 10kB while in the case of Ethereum, 10kB cost 0.3ETH at 50Gwei. Our spam fee is around 1000x less expensive.

What are the current plans regarding scalability? Are you going to stick with Ethereum and hope it gets better? Or will you move to your own chain or another chain?

Scalability plans have recently been introduced in this blog post: https://blog.request.network/request-network-protocol-version-2-51e562bf7e0d

Adding to the question above: is Tangle or any other feeless chain on the table?

Ethereum is doing a perfect job at handling the consensus and gives us very strong security due to its decentralized nature. Data is stored separately on a free decentralized storage solution (currently IPFS).

So let’s imagine Request Network gains traction and becomes successful. Why would its success translate into a higher demand or price for the REQ token at all?

REQ token is both a utility and governance token. The token answers the same need than the one of Kyber or Maker DAO for example. You need REQ tokens to use the network (tokens are burnt and serve to prevent network spam) and we will slowly roll out a governance system outside of the foundation so that the network becomes entirely independent.

Since there is no associative value to the coins, IE. each coin does not represent an ownership share in the company’s assets, are there any new plans for an added utility to the token?

Kyber is an example of token burn expecting to cause increase a price in demand for the token. But coin ownership has zero effect on how a very good decentralized exchange runs. I would argue it’s current price is an example. Expecting the value of the token to increase based on scarcity would take decades.

Governance and utility are the 2 main reasons for the REQ token to exist. We can’t build the network without them. There is no plan to add non-necessary utilities to the token.

Why is it going to be easier to implement BTC in V2? Can you explain how do you plan to add different coins like Nano, Monero, NEO…. in the future, seeing how difficult has it been to add BTC? And the most important part, will people need to hold ETH in this new V2 when paying in other currencies (fiat, BTC, LTC, NEO…)

Bitcoin will be easy to integrate because an unused address can be used to identify a transaction and link it to the request. This system will work for most currencies, for others, we will use the transaction data or more complex mechanisms that we will introduce later.

Holding ether won’t be necessary to use Request, thanks to the gateways.

How is the auditing app going? It is been 3 months since you presented it, are any business interested already or is it still in a really early stage?

The Accounting App (Boundless) is the main goal of our Analytics Team and is in the early stages of development. To be able to develop a quality product, the team is first tackling the technical challenges linked to analyzing requests in real time. For example, caching requests so we have faster response times for apps (queries in milliseconds instead of many seconds) or so we can make complex queries we wouldn’t be able to do directly on the blockchain. These solutions will also be published and available for other developers on the community to use on their apps.

We are also working closely together with the Protocol Team to help them better understand our needs when developing the Protocol V2, for example on encryption (private/encrypted invoices is a requirement from a big part of our accounting potential customers).

What is the current status of the BTC integration? I know we got an update a bit ago about why it is delayed, but has there been progress since?

BTC is available in the library and can be used by builders. Builders who want to know how to use it can follow the example in the bitcoin tests of the library. The barrier to usage of BTC requests is that the end user needs to have an Ethereum address and some ether to use it. We’re solving this in v2.

Additionally, you can check the smart contract itself or its documentation.

The whitepaper is undoubtedly what got most people in the crypto/blockchain community enthused about REQ in the first place. PayPal 2.0 etc. With the recent 2.0 protocol announcements, some key aspects of the white paper appear to have been obliterated. Point 5.1 (page 15) is the most immediate, with a 10c fee having replaced a 0.5–0.05% (and decreasing as network usage grows) fee. By my calculations, at a transaction value of under $20 (0.5%) or under $200 (0.05%), this makes REQ more expensive to interact with. This appears to eliminate or disincentive a lot of use cases compared to what the White Paper promised, especially when instant, feeless cryptos do exist as payment options.

So; How exactly do you see changes to such crucial promises from the white paper as beneficial to the TOKEN HOLDERS?

A request will cost far less than $0.1. The fix batch fee will not be borne by the end users but will be covered by gateways, with one being operated by us. Today, merchants are already willing to pay more than 10 times this amount to work with payment processing companies. We have no doubt that the cost will be reduced further after having verified the stability of the system.

Is Coinbase’s upcoming ERC20 USD stablecoin a big deal for the REQ team? If so, how big of a deal is it?

Do you plan to implement the stablecoin into REQ’s network promptly?

It’s good to see an increase in popularity in stablecoins. More ERC20s will be integrated into V2.

Is Proof of Stake still on the table? Could it be implemented just to increase the token utility?

It is possible that staking will be introduced in the future. No plan for it now.

Can you give us an update on the governance implementation? Have you found a good system that is both secure and easy to launch updates on? What level of decision making are you planning to give token holders via governance?

We decided to prioritize usability of the network over governance. However, we are still entirely committed to having a 100% decentralized network that does not rely solely on the Request Network Foundation. We believe in having both on-chain and off-chain governance relying on the use of the network and token ownership. We also believe in liquid democracy and quadratic voting. Our favourite option today would be to use the UX of the Aragon project with a proven or experimental type of governance as soon as they are ready.

Can we get an update on the state of the Point of Sale and a Supply Chain and Traceability Dapps?

Point of Sale: The foundation team is not working on a Point-of-Sale product at this moment, and instead focus on Payments & Analytics solutions first.

Supply Chain/Traceability: In line with above, the traceability product is currently on hold in terms of development efforts, as we’re focusing on the two solutions mentioned.

I have a few concerns with the pricing model. The blog post says Request tokens will be burned based on the size of the request uploaded to IPFS. Does that mean, request foundation will be responsible for files uploaded to IPFS? Or, will the users themselves need to host IPFS instances and track/store their files? If it is the first case, then how is Request planning to manage funds for storing the files in IPFS? If it is the second case, what is the use of Request token burn?

The first case, data can be hosted by “nodes” of the network owned by those who have an interest in the network. The foundation will host at least one with redundancy. Then gateways, institutions, companies or any individual can also launch their own “node”.

Are there any plans of supporting WBTC in Request?

WBTC will be supported.

Any idea if Request will support tokens from STOs (i.e Nex, Nexo)?

STO support will be part of the built-in payment processor currency integration roadmap.

What is a declarative USD payment request? It’s been mentioned multiple times but there are no details on what it is.

A request that is done in USD where there is no payment processor to enforce the payment. It is up to the stakeholders to decide whether or not the transaction has been made. Today, outside of the blockchain industry, most companies invoices are settled in this way.

Why the immediate need to focus on scaling (with V2 protocol) when there are so many other intelligent people trying to figure it out, and there is almost no network usage at the moment? Isn’t that a misplaced priority, when you could be working on other things like network capabilities (cross currency, network extensions etc.)?

First, time and cost are the biggest barriers to bigger adoption. Decreasing the time it takes and the cost of creating a request is a big priority.

Secondly, V2 is about more than just scalability. It introduces simpler payments, privacy which is very important to adoption and easier evolvability of the protocol.

I know this might seem like trolling, but is AdmReq, a telegram admin, the only person who is developing anything?

Adam is, apart from a skilled telegram admin, also a skilled developer. He is doing great work producing end-user facing solutions, while the team is developing the engine powering them. Research and development on backend projects are less visible and happens on a longer timescale.

When encryption is not needed in protocol v2, can we have a proportional fee?

We might reduce the fees for an unencrypted transaction as we can verify the data.

Are the gateways responsible for validating that transactions have been made? In protocol v2, it sounds like there will be the possibility of integrating both non-custodial (directly between payer and payee) and custodial payment processors. Is that right?

The gateways presented in the article won’t handle the payment detection, because the information is encrypted at this point. Later, there will be higher level gateways that handle the keys and the payment detection.

Custodial payment processors can be integrated when they provide access to the information (API).

For fees, the v2 article says that 10kB is the approximate size of a Request. Is this the smallest size a Request could be? So any metadata means a larger size?

10kB is a request with a lot of data, it will be exceptional to have a request with more than 10kB of data. We’ll give an example of sizes later.

What do you mean by ‘The network will ignore this data’ in the protocol v2 article?

Gateways won’t store data of a request that didn’t pay the fees to avoid storing spam data.

If the fee was paid, the data can still be incorrect. The gateways will store them as they are encrypted and not verifiable. Yet the network won’t be able to decrypt it and will ignore them.

General

What is the status of the Request Fund and why hasn’t an update been given as the 2nd AMA mentioned?

The Request Fund has made 2 investments and given a few grants. There are NDAs in order to disclose more info only once the team has reached specific milestones. The blog article we originally planned after answering questions in our last AMA is currently not on our agenda anymore. The goal is to maximize the efficiency of mutual communication.

As a decentralised project, funding transparency is important. I have no complains about req and I like they are quite conservative about the money. I know how much req the team has and its’ allocation. I know the 75k ETH they still has. But what happened to the rest (40k ETH that the team moved a year ago)? Did they cashed it out (and when as ETH went from 300 to 1400$ in weeks)? I followed etherscan but there is not a clear trail (not for me at least). Or did they have part in a “secret” wallet for salaries or development (as this may require privacy)? I don’t need the exact numbers or addresses but a grasp of the total current funding.

Out of the 100k ETH received last year, there is 25k ETH that has been withdrawn from the Foundation wallet for different matters mentioned in our blog post here https://blog.request.network/request-networks-token-sale-terms-overview-ca4278606c3.

Additionally, we are following a hedging strategy. Ideally we will keep supporting the Ethereum ecosystem by staking the funds and paying the salaries and expenses from the staking rewards.

Thinking about the future. Do you think req will be able to be used as a kind of transferwise? Is it possible? And if yes, can you explain why it d be a cheaper option than a bank or transferwise?

No, Transferwise is used for foreign transfers and exchanging currencies, Request is used to request and document transactions.

You could use Transferwise coupled to Request Network though, i.e. Someone sending a request for international payment to you, your Transferwise app detecting the request and asking you to confirm the transfer.

Do you have any idea how much the perception of and enthusiasm for this project has fallen off the face of a cliff in the blockchain/crypto community? You might have the argument that the crypto community doesn’t matter since you’re targeting businesses etc, but given the delays in fiat integration until crypto goes fully mainstream, the only people your products can interact with are crypto enthusiasts. They are people for whom the REQ name is tarnished or reduced to a punchline (REQT! Mozzarella!) after repeated errors (Wiki France debacle), pseudo-duplicitous behaviour (hiding the lack of fiat development behind a jpeg of a “fluid roadmap”), lack of promises updates (REQ Fund?), and just plain failure to (visibly) deliver on stated goals and releases (whether it’s fair or not, given that he’s building on top of the REQ protocol, AdmREQ as primarily a freelancer has put out a hell of a lot more visible product than the entire REQ team).

So; How exactly is it possible that you as a team were so blind to community concerns that you thought releasing something like the “Mozzarellagate” biweekly update was a good idea? How did people look at that and think “ yes, this is a good idea to release to this community at this point in time”? How exactly do you plan to ensure that you aren’t tone-deaf to community mood and concerns going forward? Is there an expectation that the rebrand will just “ wash away” all the things REQ have done to damage their own reputation?

Thanks. We are reading all the feedback we receive from our communities on social media. Most of the time feedback given is very constructive which is great to see. About the Request Network communities, we believe we are a smart group of enthusiasts asking interesting questions most of the time that we’re happy to answer. It helps us to open our minds, especially when we meet community members who are actively working on Request powered products or services. The relationship we have with our communities is important to us and we keep looking for ways to improve this, which includes discussing with our community manager team on a daily basis to see where we can learn.

Which part of the Request Network ecosystem are you personally looking forward to the most?

A global database of invoices with dashboards personalized for cities, companies and countries.

Biggest/toughest learning moment regarding Request Network?

Do not rely solely on the ecosystem to build the missing pieces. We can build ourselves a modular system with flexible and independent pieces.

Is the current state of Request Network as expected, or less than expected or more than expected?

We are very optimistic. We had to change many parts that we did not expect though we are confident that we are building the future of networks for transactions

Not sure if this is realistic, but regarding US tax laws I would love to see Request Network simplifying the process of paying taxes on crypto holdings. I am not an accountant and every year it is such a process. Is there any way Request would fill this need? Cheers.

Request have limited ways of helping on this case since we can’t account for transactions that don’t generate Requests (like exchanges).

Request can help with one of the most painful parts of this process, though, accounting for the expenses and payments using crypto. By using request for crypto payments you will have your taxable events stored and easily accessible. An app could use Request to calculate part of the US individual taxes, by identifying which request is a payment (capital gain), which is income, etc.

How do you feel about the significant drop in rank on CoinMarketCap since early 2018?

Ranking amongst the top 100 on CoinMarketCap is good for exposure to the project itself, which is a powerful way to introduce new people to Request technology, rather than the price associated with it. For visibility of the project, it would be good to get back on the first page.

Can you give us a round up of all the current websites, DApps, etc. actually using the network today, that we can visit and use ourselves? Not testing, but actually have the ‘Pay with Request’ (or something similar, one of the plugins perhaps) button on their website ready and waiting for payments.

I know AdmRequest has a list of websites currently using the WooCommerce and Shopify sites, but can we get a wholesome list from the official REQ team at all, so we can have a look at each use case, and, who knows, maybe some of us will help spread the word and get some traffic through the network, through those sites. Thanks.

We track it on a weekly basis, but to respect the privacy of adopters we can’t publish it to everyone.

Who do you see as REQ main competition and what separates REQ from them?

While we can see Payment Service Providers such as Stripe, Paypal, Square or Adyen as competition for a piece of the payments industry pie, we believe a big part of Request can be complementary to the payments industry in general, making it more connected and interoperable with each other.

The universal database of invoices which Request is building can be beneficial for any company that creates/runs a payment processor, as they can connect/integrate with this database and process all payment requests that are recorded on Request.

Looking at purely the payment processor part of Request, there are five main differentiators:

Open. Request Network is open, which allows anyone to connect to the functionalities of the network and allows for an interoperable global economy. The code is also open-source and anyone can contribute, enabling fast innovation in the FinTech sector.

Privacy. No data is stored and analyzed by a centralized third party. This takes away the current risks of big data leaks and misuse of private data. It also eliminates centralized high-value data troves for bad actors to target.

Independence from centralized organisations. This provides autonomy, eliminating the risk of a service being shut down by a third party, or of that third party ceasing to operate and having a negative effect on your business.

Immutability. Payments processed on our network are logged on the blockchain, creating an immutable record. This means that all transactions are verifiably unmanipulated, and recorded indefinitely.



Low fees. Because there is no central organisation that needs to make a profit to cover its operational costs, we are able to cut transaction fees significantly.

What do you think is the biggest hurdle in achieving more adoption for crypto in general?

Adoption will really start when we use it without being aware it’s crypto. UX in decentralized systems is a big challenge to overcome.

Why do you think so many projects in this space fail?

We think there are many factors and some misconceptions.

With the 2017 boom of ICOs, there was a mix of legitimate and illegitimate ICOs.

The reason for the illegitimate ones are clear:

Ill-intentioned people took advantage of the ICO craze and scammed investors, creating fake projects. These are crimes and not project failures.

For the legitimate projects, the failure rate is not that disproportionate anymore. Startups, in any domain, fail a lot. For example, 20% of US startups fail the first year.

In our opinion, the impression of a high rate of failure is due to the visibility projects have in this domain at a very early stage of existence. A “common” startup doesn’t need to invest in marketing on its early days and only a limited few people will hear about it until it “succeeds” on a product level. You will never hear about most of the startups that failed. Projects in this space need good publicity from the start for their ICOs, so early-stage startups, prone to failure, are well known publicly. The amount of people investing in them amplifies this effect (compared to a few VCs). In the end, funding can’t buy success.

Do you think ICOs are dead?

We don’t think they are dead and see 2017 as just the beginning for a new way to raise funding for projects. We already see a big evolution in the STO space, which will continue to evolve further as time progresses.

What crypto projects are the team fans of?

We’re not fans of any project in particular, but we like to follow the progress teams make building on Ethereum and see this ecosystem grow.

Marketing & Communication

Is the rebrand/new website still on track to be released before EOY?

No, the public release of the new website (and thus simultaneously the introduction of our new brand visuals) will be delivered slightly later than its original target go-live date.

While we’ve already made big steps on the rebrand project, we’ve done more feedback sessions than planned in the original project planning to make sure everyone is happy with what’s being delivered. This has caused a delay in the final targeted launch date, setting back the current target towards the end of January/beginning of February. If we don’t stumble upon any more roadblocks finishing the website, this should be a realistic target to reach.

Will you consider marketing and making headway towards the gaming industry, particularly towards the digital asset sale aspect of it (Skins, Digital copies, Lootboxes, etc..)

That has not been on our own product radar yet, but cryptocurrencies and -assets are an interesting idea for AAA game studios to introduce to their product. We could definitely see an app built with Request that targets the gaming industry specifically.

I’m here for Marketing. Are you planning a more effective way of marketing? Marketing as it is with all honesty is insufficient. We need marketing campaign asap. A good quality one, with OGs/exchanges/podcast/ guerilla any kind. I’m not talking about Justin Sun kind marketing but a better relationship like GO team doing now. Whoever doing our marketing now is not doing a good job imho. Also yes we might need marketing before the product is out because people should know about REQ and what is it about.

Today, we are mainly focused on improving our products with one main goal: how to make sure our users keep using Request products? This is called retention, which is part of our growth marketing plans.



We do unscalable things to get the first users, talk with them, create a relationship, get feedback and improve our products from real usage issues.

Once it’s done, we will be able to start performance & brand marketing as you mention above. Today, we consider there is no point to scale these parts as we have a lot to do first to increase the retention of our products.

There have been criticisms from members that a few the bi-weekly updates have been flat and didn’t contain anything worthwhile…Will the team consider just a monthly update instead?

We have thought about moving the bi-weekly to a monthly planning after the comment was made in our feedback channel on Discord. While it sounds like a way to get more meaningful updates, this wouldn’t impact the content that is listed in the updates itself.

We treat the bi-weekly summaries (we switched the naming four weeks ago by feedback from the community) as a place on our blog where you can easily read back a summary of everything that happened over the last two weeks. Most of the time, the information that is summarized was already public. Sometimes it happens that minor updates or specific events such as new team members joining, fall on the same release schedule as the bi-weekly making it new information. Moving from bi-weekly to monthly (or even quarterly, as some suggested) would only switch the amount of summarized (already public) information, rather than introducing more worthwhile content to read.

Instead, we are looking to get more output in (written) content that is focused on speaking to our target audiences (developers, businesses/partners, governments/authorities). To achieve this, we’re recruiting a dedicated communication & PR person to lead this initiative.

Is the team currently working on any plans to gain more exposure in the US(which is behind in cryptocurrency adoption/awareness compared to other countries)?

No, we do not target one geo over the other at the moment.

Are you excited so far about the rebranding and the direction the Request Network is heading?

Is there anything you can share with us regarding it? Who? How? When? Thanks!

In short: Yes, we’re very excited to introduce the new visual identity for Request!

While we won’t be able to tell which agency we’re working with until after the launch, we can tell you a little bit more about what we’ve done so far and what we are working on right now.

First of — why are we rebranding?

While in the cryptocurrency industry the word rebranding is sometimes associated with an event that is done to directly impact token price, rebranding in itself serves a much different purpose for Request. We’re rebranding to:

Have a brand system which we can use to differentiate Request products, while still feeling like a Request brand. The original brand design is not flexible enough to answer to this need.

Speak to the right audience, as our target audience focus has become more clear. The original brand looks, feels and speaks to the past.

Have a future-proof brand identity. The current brand is too restricted to use over a longer period of time.

So what does rebranding mean for Request?

The full rebranding project consists out of several smaller projects all following each other up. After we’ve picked the agency we felt most comfortable working together with, we started out with the basics of brand strategy: workshops to redefine our positioning as a brand, crafting our brand story, and making sure we’re creating a brand that lives internally.

Next up was creating the new visual identity for Request. This turns learnings from the previous project (strategy) into multiple visual assets that rhyme with our culture and the image we want the brand to have long-term. Final deliveries from this part include assets such as a new logo, a visual language (patterns/shapes/movement) and fonts.

With this new visual identity in place, the last two projects start running simultaneously — website creation & content creation. This is the part we’re currently in, giving feedback on website designs while supplying content creators with the right information to create copy for the website, as well as video production. Approved website designs are currently being used by the agency’s front and back-end devs.

To answer the when question: the target launch date is currently set to end of January/beginning of February. As it’s a target date (and not a deadline), all additional work needed (such as extra feedback rounds) that were unforeseen in the original planning impacts the launch.

Organisation

What is the status of adding team members? There have been postings open for quite a while now and no new people.

We are constantly open to recruiting new members and have hired several since job postings appeared on our website.

One of the key areas of frustration for me (and from memory, many other members of the community) has been a lack of visible leadership for the team, which creates the impression that there is no accountability (and thus no incentive to push hard to reach any stated goals), and no transparency as to what’s going on. The “no leadership by design because it’s decentralised” line can ring very hollow as far as addressing this.

So, How exactly do you plan for the leadership of the project to be more visible, thus providing more clarity, accountability, and therefore confidence? We’re living in a post-Bruno Block age now, so confidence in leadership is crucial. An AMA is nice, but disappearing for at least three months afterwards isn’t.

In our opinion, having public leadership for a project does not have a relation to the dedication of a team behind a project. In a decentralized world, it does not necessarily make sense to show strong (hierarchical) leadership externally, as long as it’s clear for everyone what their role in the organisation is. We do agree community engagement coming from the team can always improve, but this takes time to become second nature.

Looking at accountability, every team member is responsible for achieving her/his predefined goals, which are all agreed with leadership. While we try to be as transparent as possible, being transparent about everything that goes on within an organisation would introduce losing first-mover advantages from a product perspective and could damage working relationships when there are NDAs in place.

From a visibility for Request perspective, we are still thinking about needing a public figure or not, as both decisions have its pros and cons. Before we make that choice we prefer to first focus on:

Building a strong brand visually via the rebrand project.

Making big improvements to the protocol with the V2.

Building UX friendly apps on top of Request Network.

What are your thoughts on having country-specific delegates? That can promote the Request protocol and specific Dapps in their region.

It’s a great idea to cultivate local expertise and make our reach longer. Anyone interested in this sort of role should reach out to us directly at hiring@request.network to speak more in depth.

At the end of the day, who makes the hard decisions? Is it Christophe or Etienne?

Both, the scopes do not overlap. If there is a hard decision to make, it will be either taken within a group of coordinators from each department or directly with the experts related to the domain.

The team grew from 6 members to over 20, and you plan to be over 40 next year. How are you dealing with this exponential growth and how do you plan to overcome all the challenges that come with this?

Dealing with exponential growth within a company is a continuous circle of hiring new talent, welcoming them and integrating them into the current structure. When we grow too big for the current structure to work, we re-structure and repeat the process.

Can you tell us about how your decentralised organisational structure works and why you feel you don’t need a ‘CEO’ or hierarchical tree at all? Is this purely a ‘we’re a blockchain company so we’re decentralised’ or is there more to it than that?

We have 3 departments: Protocol, Apps and Education, working together with the community & ecosystem.

The protocol department is working on providing a simple, fast, cost-effective, flexible and privacy-enabled system. The Apps department is working on getting adoption of the network by creating applications and building blocks for developers. The education department has the target to make it easy to understand Request and getting a maximum amount of organizations and people aware of our work.

We are working closely with the scrum agile organization model that has been implemented in companies such as Spotify (see video). This ensures a lot of autonomy for every developer working within the Request Network Foundation.

How do you feel the idea of Request Network has developed and changed, thus far from its original vision and what do you see in future based on this shift?

Everything falls into place. We personally see Request as an open database for invoices and financial transaction request on which services such as payment processing or analytics (audit, accounting) plug into. The vision is way more modular than it used to be. If we look at Europe and all over the world, countries are setting up their own national invoices databases. We are providing an international one with enforced privacy, immutability, independence and open to everyone.

Are there any concerns of the REQ utility token being ruled a security?

We’ve been assured in a written manner by specialized lawyers that REQ does not qualify as a security.

What is your top priority for 2019?

Releasing protocol v2.

How hard was it to find developers? Not a lot of developers know solidity, are you willing to hire good developers that don’t know solidity but can quickly ramp up?

It is hard to find talented developers, just like in any tech company. We’re lucky to have above average visibility and a vision people believe in and that motives them. This brings us a good number of candidates.

We’re hiring talented developers with skills and personality that fit our long-term needs. Experience in Ethereum is a bonus but not a requirement. You can see it reflected in the job description.

Are the Request employees paid in crypto?

Depends. Most of us are paid either 100% crypto or at least partially.

Will the Request Foundation ever release annual/quarterly financial reports? One of the reasons for the REQ token is for raising funds for the Request Foundation, so when someone buys REQ they are largely investing in the Request Foundation. Publicly traded companies raise money using the same principle but are required by law to provide quarterly financial reports. Making this data public would surely generate more interest from investors and analysts. It would also help to provide padding between the REQ token market and the overall crypto market, in turn making it a more stable, predictable, and “friendly” investment.

Request Network’s financial assets have mainly 2 purposes: support the internal growth and proactively support Request ecosystem’s decentralization.

We believe that financial transparency would have positive outcomes for Request Network, it might even help some supporters become more supportive.

For the moment most of our team members focus on operational matters. The non-operational matters such as financial transparency are important too and will be dealt with.

Does REQ still receive support from Y-Combinator?

Once you are in the YC network it’s forever.

Partnerships

What can you say about NDAs or partnerships? I understand it is confidential and we don’t want names. But a number or some hints about who is request working with or how many businesses are playing with req would be nice.

We cannot disclose such information under NDA, even the industry in which contacts operate.

The decision to disclose information is often in our partners’ hands.

When will you start actively seeking business to use your network for payment and invoicing services? If this has already been pursued then when will the network start being used so there is a consistent increase in the number of tokens being burned daily?

We are constantly speaking with partners to adopt our technology, and have launched pilots and collected feedback on their experiences using Request. We cannot give a firm estimate on when daily usage will grow, but we are using the feedback to improve usability and encourage adoption.

Can they tell us a little bit more (or share some news) about the partnerships with the Accounting Blockchain Coalition etc?

We attend working groups weekly. ABC is a great vehicle to access the folks defining the role blockchain will play in accounting in the near future and beyond.

How are things going with PWC partnership? Working on an accounting app together? What will be the results of that partnership?

PWC is not only working in Accounting or Audit, but PWC and other BIG 4 are also the trusted partners of many corporations advising them in Innovation and new Tech. Request is bringing the financial innovation through its blockchain based universal database of invoices and payment processor.

Together with PwC, we provide the tech side of financial innovations and the trust of their historical partner towards corporations.

Are there businesses you are targeting more than others for B2B? Maybe non-profits or financial institutions?

Absolutely. A donation is a subset of payments, and with the very simple transfer of value is a great testing ground for our technology. With this in mind, we’ve been engaging with many NGOs and will continue to do so.

Please give us specific development updates with your collaborations with Chango, Ripio, Bee Token, Fund Request, PwC France, Air Swap, and Request Fund projects. Are there certain partnerships that have ended already?

Over the time Request exists, all these projects have been pronounced as “partnerships” (working together), while they were also projects building on top of Request. Here is the clarification of the current relationships with the projects mentioned above:

iExec: Technical exchanges to develop the best systems. In the long run, iExec will use Request to manage their payments and we will use iExec for every off-chain execution we need (i.e. decentralized audit)

Chango: A project that announced that they were working on top of Request.

Ripio: Project that announced that they were building with Request.

Bee Token: Project that announced that they wanted to use Request. We haven’t had contact since the original announcement on our blog.

FundRequest: We’ve had concrete discussions about using their solution if we aim to launch a bounty program in the future.

Airswap: We don’t have a formal working relationship, and this collaboration is mainly about knowledge sharing between teams.

PWC (France & Francophone Africa): This is an official partnership with concrete intention to work together on use cases.

Request Fund projects: This is answered in a previous question, but there are currently two projects that have signed an agreement under NDA. We support these teams on several fronts, such as funding when milestones are reached, knowledge sharing and communication.

Are you guys still actively seeking partnerships with already established companies/institutions?

Absolutely. If any community members have introductions they would like to make to help stimulate this activity, please reach out to @CFO directly on Slack or Discord.

A main (if not THE main driver) for adoption, price increase, visibility, etc is a working use case/partnership in the real world. Is this being pursued as the main priority and can you speak to progress/timeline for this happening?

Working together on useful use cases, together with partners, has always been a priority of the team.

Do you think it is possible for the “Pay with Request” button to be implemented on sites like Amazon? Do you think they will just create their own in-house version so they can collect the fees?

Choices will be king in the future of payments, and many companies are realizing this. Amazon can absolutely build their own blockchain based payment solution, on top of Request even, but their past behaviour indicates that they would rather use a 3rd party service to accomplish this. I don’t think they are worried about fees, especially considering that payment processor today charge upwards of 4% per transaction (Request payments are significantly less expensive than this).