With the release of mainnet comes the first iteration of the Request Network Payments solution, allowing you to accept cryptocurrencies natively on your website. Are you a webshop owner looking to accept cryptocurrency payments? We’ve got you covered!

As this is the first version of the Payments solution, future updates will make it even more simple to integrate and seamless to pay. Make sure to sign up on the website to be the first receiving updates.

Find all the necessary information to get started by heading over to the Request Network Payments website!

Request Network partners with PwC France and Francophone Africa

Accelerating mainstream adoption of financial blockchain services

Request Network partners with PwC France and Francophone Africa

We’re super proud to finally announce our collaboration with one of the four biggest accounting firms, PwC France & Francophone Africa, to build the future of professional services together. We have been working closely together since september and will continue to do so, accelerating mainstream adoption of financial blockchain services.

As one of the Big 4 professional services, PwC is experiencing a surge in demand for blockchain transformation. A partnership between PwC France and the Request Network Foundation will serve as a centre of excellence, accelerating R&D and increasing adoption of real world financial blockchain solutions.

This partnership will shape and collectively develop the future of professional services, taking a leading role in offering solutions to clients’ needs of on-boarding blockchain to their business practices.

This collaboration is an important milestone for the Request Network; it is an excellent way to reach our ambition to bridge the currently established and the blockchain worlds. Working together will accelerate mainstream adoption of financial blockchain services.

Read the press release to get full information.

We expanded the app development team

Welcome to our new team member, Benjamin Shafii, who will take the role of Full Stack Developer at the Request Network Foundation.

Benjamin has spent the last few years working in a growing startup in Brussels, developing modern enterprise scale web applications. He decided to join the Request Network adventure and has now joined the Foundation team in Singapore.

Benjamin will focus on growing the Request Network ecosystem. As a Full Stack Developer, Benjamin will ensure that a wide number of use-cases will benefit from Request Network’s protocol through the development of applications. This includes using state of the art web technologies for designing and developing efficient apps that interact with our smart contracts.

Burning Mechanism is live!

It helps to incentivise and accelerate ecosystem growth.

The Request Network Burning Mechanism is live. As the Request Network is operational on the Ethereum blockchain, every creation of a Request now requires a minor fee. This fee will be burned to incentivize and accelerate ecosystem growth. To illustrate, the image below shows exactly what happens with your fee before it enters the Request fire pit.

Burn baby burn — The Burning Mechanism in 4 simple steps

We want to give you a good idea of what happens with your Request Network Usage Fee*. These four simple steps show you how your fee is stored, converted and burned.

1. When broadcasting a payment request, Bob (Payee) pays a small fee** to use the Request Network. This fee is sent towards the Burner smart contract. The Burner stores the collected fee until anyone interacts with the smart contract.

2. Anyone can interact with the Burner smart contract at any time by calling the burn function. Doing so initiates the full burning sequence, as written in the Contract Source. The Request Network Foundation will call the burning contract at random intervals.

3. When step 2 is performed, the Burner Smart Contract will instantaneously swap the full amount of stored ETH into REQ. This is done through a market order on a decentralized exchange (DEX). The DEX that is currently connected to the Burner contract is Kyber Network. The equivalent of ETH to REQ is now stored in the Burner Smart Contract, triggering step 4.

4. Total amount of REQ tokens coming back from DEX are simultaneously burned.

*Network usage fee is a fee that is paid in ether to use the Request Network. This fee is additional to normal blockchain transaction fees.

**The network usage fee of the Request Network is in-between 0.1% — 0.005% of the payment amount requested in dollars. The maximum fee paid per request is 1.50 dollars.

ERC20 management

The smart contract for ERC20 token integration is completed and available on testnet. Library development is currently being finished. The ERC20 token management extension will soon be audited. After a successful audit, the extension will be released on mainnet.

After release, the smart contract will allow you to make and pay requests in any ERC20 token. Token support will gradually increase as we extend the extension.

New exchange listing

The REQ token has been successfully launched on Huobi Korea today. This makes the token even more accessible than it was before!

REQ listed on Huobi Korea

REQ/ETH and REQ/BTC trading pairs are now fully operational.

Blockchains are rapidly evolving. So are we.

We will extend Request Network so it is fully functional with all blockchains and payment/state channels.

The Request Network Foundation is rapidly growing their operations. While we are very proud on the milestones we have hit, we realize that everything we have achieved up until today is just the beginning of something much greater. Blockchain development all across the board has seen a massive leap in progression. A multitude of entirely new blockchains have risen to the top, and enable technical features such as almost-instant transactions that were unimaginable a year ago.

As the main mission of the Request Network Foundation is to accelerate blockchain adoption in the financial industry, it only makes sense for us to be as inclusive as possible. We aim to expand Request Network to be fully functional with all blockchains and payment/state channels that are available today and in the future simultaneously. This will allow anyone to keep using their preferred blockchain, while connecting to the universal Request Network.

This massive journey starts today and will introduce a fully reimagined roadmap on our website soon. While we slowly transform from a quarterly based roadmap into a progression based roadmap, it will give you an accurate and in-depth view on the larger scope of the Request Network. Changing the way we communicate our roadmap will have a positive effect on transparency, as you can track progression real time instead of being partly reliant on bi-weekly updates. It allows us to be as agile as possible in this fast moving industry, switching development direction when we discover unique opportunities that can accelerate market adoption.

Details of this new roadmap will soon be available on our website. We will still use the bi-weekly updates to give more details on everything that is not covered on the roadmap itself.

While we are excited to show you our reimagined roadmap for now and onwards, let’s first look at how we performed this quarter:

ERC20 support is currently being finished before release on mainnet. Bitcoin support needs a bit more time, as explained below.

Tech-talk

Aside from the milestones we have worked on the last months, we’ve worked on multiple other development objectives. The most important objectives are mentioned below:

Implementation of the Bitcoin Oracle

As seen above, the milestone we did not reach this quarter is implementing the Bitcoin Oracle alongside the mainnet protocol release. We chose to take a bit more time to finish an exceptional product, rather than launching something mediocre just to respect the roadmap.

The foundation shifted its priority on this as we believe prioritising cooperative partnerships such as PwC will have a more positive long term effect on the overall Request Network ecosystem. For the last six months we have been working together with the PwC Blockchain Lab, shaping a cooperation which will result in a smart auditing solution, among others. Bitcoin implementation will be launched on mainnet when we are 100% sure that it functions as you would expect.

Develop extensions on the Request Network protocol

A big priority of protocol development is to make advanced payment conditions available. An advanced payment condition is a set of rules that you can add to your request. This makes it possible to use escrow, down-payments, late fees, factoring, trade laws and taxes.

The first rule we will make available to protocol users is a maximum cap per request. The second will be a prohibition to pay a request after a predefined date. Implementing these two rules is a high priority, as they will be used in a crowdfunding/ICO dApp we are currently creating.

Work on data encryption

We’re currently focusing on data encryption. This will make it possible to keep payment data private and only accessible by payers/payees involved when using the Request Network. We are heavily researching and testing which solution will be capable of achieving this. zk-SNARKs is currently not advanced enough to be a realistic solution for us in the short term, but will be monitored regularly to see if development improves.

Work on scaling solutions

We are working on scaling by discovering all possible options including Plasma, Raiden and the Lightning Network. We take a proactive role in this by testing multiple scaling solutions to make sure the Request Network stays on the frontline of the blockchain evolution. This is closely tied to our new roadmap, where we elaborate on being interoperable with every blockchain and state/payment channel available. This highly increases the chance to scale rapidly.

We start building three apps. They focus on payments, crowdfunding and accounting

To kickstart the ability of building functional dApps using the Request Network protocol, we will focus our efforts on creating three applications simultaneously. Three solutions we currently see as market opportunities are:

Payments app : We have launched the initial solution that enables businesses, webshops and merchants to accept any cryptocurrency to pay on their platform. Any business can now integrate cryptocurrency payments by following our Get Started guide. Development does not stop there.

We are building an online payments dashboard, allowing merchant to have an overview of all its requests/payments in real-time. We plan to integrate invoice data into requests. With this, the merchant can integrate cryptocurrency payments into his formal accounting like any other payment.

: We have launched the initial solution that enables businesses, webshops and merchants to accept any cryptocurrency to pay on their platform. Any business can now integrate cryptocurrency payments by following our Get Started guide. Development does not stop there. We are building an online payments dashboard, allowing merchant to have an overview of all its requests/payments in real-time. We plan to integrate invoice data into requests. With this, the merchant can integrate cryptocurrency payments into his formal accounting like any other payment. Crowdfunding app : There is currently no all-in-one solution that allows cryptocurrency payments and is easy to integrate with a crowdfunding and/or ICO campaign. Many projects struggle with the technicalities of managing cryptocurrencies to raise funds. We want to take a leading role here. Our technology enables them to secure the process of fundraising, increase funds raised and make it simple to bookkeep.

: There is currently no all-in-one solution that allows cryptocurrency payments and is easy to integrate with a crowdfunding and/or ICO campaign. Many projects struggle with the technicalities of managing cryptocurrencies to raise funds. We want to take a leading role here. Our technology enables them to secure the process of fundraising, increase funds raised and make it simple to bookkeep. Accounting app: Accounting and tax management of cryptocurrencies is still very vague for many people. People don’t know how to declare their cryptocurrency assets to their local tax system. Recording and integrating crypto financial flows in their formal accounting is even harder.

Accounting firms experience a high demand from companies to manage their crypto financial flows. Request aims to be a major actor here. We’re already integrating metadata into the payment requests (invoice metadata, salary metadata,…). This integration is the first brick in building a formalised accounting app to document and track cryptocurrency payments. It’s the future of accounting.

We’re very glad to start working on the applications use cases as it represents the beginning of an ecosystem that aims to gain mainstream adoption of financial blockchain services!

Apply to join the Request Network Foundation

Do you want to join the Request Network Foundation? Even when there are no open positions available that are a direct fit for you, we are open to receive any application that matches the Request Network Culture. Send in your resume and motivational letter to jobs@request.network and we will be happy to get to know you better!

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