So what does that mean anyway?

Blockchain based applications are here to stay, so far there are Tokens and Chains that aim manage anything from monitoring temperatures of medicines as they move along a supply chain to accounting and paying for green electricity produced by anyone with a solar panel. Blockchain tech is useful here because data is stored on an immutable public ledger. It cannot be tampered with by a dodgy courier company or in the case of the case of electricity anybody can see how much energy was produced and where it went.

The tokens (coins) that power these applications are there as an incentive for people to run the nodes to keep these networks alive or as credits for electricity generated etc. They also allow a means to track and account for transactions that happen on these networks.

Whats wrong with fiat?

Nothing, it’s the standard for exchange of value. It is however not always the best way to pay for things in our increasingly automated and networked world. Machine to machine payments are going to be a very important part of our future. That is when one machine or system pays another machine or system automatically for a resource or a service. Bare with me, we’ll get there eventually.

REQ: Some use cases

At the moment what I see on a lot of forums is the PayPal 2.0 paradigm. This is all well and good as it is the first thing people think of when they hear the term “Payment Platform”. To be honest, this concept is rather underwhelming, but its what people think of.

Basic Example:

John wants to buy a bike for his child. Jane has a bike she wants to sell. John finds Jane’s bike on www.cryptobay.whatever. He pays with ETH but Jane wants ARK. REQ handles the situation like a boss, the ETH is converted to ARK via Kyber Network and both the buyer and seller have the sale logged in their REQ integrated accounting suite.

Pretty cool, but hey they could have paid in fiat or John could have bought some ARK of Binance with his ETH, probably paid some hefty withdrawl fees and sent the ARK to Jane.

This example is for all intents and purposes the most basic thing REQ network can do.

Now, lets leave our comfort zone (mentality circa 2002), hop in our mental time machine and arrive in 2019.

Shit gets real example:

We have arrived in the now. A world full of interconnected devices, sensors and techno voodoo. John does not need a bike, John is an amateur mycologist and maker prototyping his own basement mycoprotein farm (These sorts of things exist, its 2019 remember, hell you can buy kits that let you hack bacterial DNA or grow sheets of your own skin of Amazon a few years ago already)

John is buying some rare mycelium that is light and temperature sensitive from a supplier called Jane. Jane has this shit covered, she uses an awesome Ambrosus enabled courier to ship her goods. Both her and John know that the courier is not going to fuck around because the whole world will know if he hot boxes his van and accidentally raises the temperature enough to kill the designer mycelium he is transporting. John doesn’t worry too much about crypto, he uses mastercard.

Jane, being a tech savvy shroom grower of the future runs her labs off solar power. She is connected to the power ledger network because she lives somewhere sunny and cares about the environment. Jane does a lot of business and uses more electricity than her solar panels can provide so she has to pay for that with POWR. She loves crypto but also needs to pay the local supermarket with cash, because that’s what they like.

The courier takes fiat, but they have to pay to use the Ambrosus network so they need sweet sweet AMB to pay for that.

Jane being a tech savvy entrepreneur paid a REQ integrator with a good reputation to integrate her eCommerce/ERP system with Requests. Her syste is pretty cool, a payment comes in and is split 3 ways. Some cash goes into her cash account, her POWR account gets topped up and her electricity is paid for and the courier gets their fee instantly once the product has been confirmed delivered and viable.

John is happy, he paid with his mastercard and still doesnt care to know how it all happened.

The Courier recieves payment in AMB which has already partially been converted into cash and the rest sent to their pool to pay for using the Ambrosus network.

All of the above instantly have all their transactions registered in their REQ enabled accounting software.

Still here? Still think REQ is just Paypal 2.0?

As I said before, sure you can do simple person to person payments with it, but the reality is that it has the potential to do so much more.

If you feel a bit more enlightened feel free to tip with some ERC20. I am always happy to to take your bags :D

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