Request Team AMA

This was a pretty great year for Request. I remember around March this year there were already 8 crypto companies in the top 100 CoinMarketCap using Request. What's the score right now? Granted, the top 100 looks different now compared to March. How many clients in the top 200 could be interesting as well.

Answered by Christophe L.

It’s a work in progress. First, we don’t know most of our users, and sometimes when we know them, we respect their desire to keep some privacy over the financial system that they use.

Among the top 200 on Coinmarketcap, ~80% are qualified to become Request users, while others have shown no demand for a compliant B2B payment system and prefer to transact in Bitcoin, Monero, and Zcash, for example. About 10-15% of them have adopted Request. There’s still room to grow.

The team has expanded quite a bit this year. Do you think we'll see such an expansion in 2022 as well?

Answered by Christophe L.

We measure performance and adoption rather than the size of the team. As the adoption increases, we’ve opened more positions for great talents, as you can see here https://request.network/en/career. Not only does the core team need to grow, we expect the community of builders to grow as well.

Are you pursuing any public organizations or governments that would record unencrypted invoices using Request for transparency purposes?

Answered by Christophe L.

No. I initially thought that some organizations would want to show transparency. But this is not always the case.
We pursue moonshots in the web3 industry. We carefully select the public & private institutions and banks that we talk with, and 99% of the time we postpone the discussion until much later.

Anyway, do you think the next voting system will come up from our governments or the web3 industry? What about the next tax/solidarity system? Or the next economy? I believe the place to grow and have an impact is in the Web3, DeFi, and Metaverse industries.

What are the goals for transaction volume and tx per day for EOY 2022? This year has seen pretty awesome growth (as seen at https://req.network), but I would imagine that you guys want it to grow even more. What is the forecast there, and what big players are you going to go after in order to make that happen?

Answered by Christophe L.

10x ASAP. Then 10x again. The activity went from 3,500 in 2020 to +20,000 transactions in 2021. Let’s reach +200,000 transactions in 2022.

When will $REQ be in a partnership with $MANA and $AXIE?

Answered by Christophe F.‍

As of today, There is no official partnership with $MANA and $AXIE.

I met a lot of DeFi and Metaverse ecosystem members and the feedback is that Request is perfectly shaped to streamline the complexity of making multiple payments.

The first learning is that Request is built with an efficient technology to process hundreds of crypto payments for different wallet addresses in just a few clicks. From salaries, contractor’s payments to ecosystem grants and bounties, Request makes daily operations smooth and easy. 

The second learning is that the Request API is well suited for in-game transactions and more globally metaverse purchases, every single payment can be properly documented with the API for operational performance monitoring, accounting and auditing.

What is the status of Fiat-to-Crypto becoming available in the US/USD?

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Answered by Christophe L.

It will depend on the adoption of the Fiat-to-Crypto feature with the EUR first, and on the progress we make with our partners for USD. The next currency is likely to be GBP, and then USD.

What are the biggest challenges Request faces today?

Answered by Christophe L.‍

In such an exciting industry, there are so many opportunities. We need to execute in a laser focused way and say "no" most of the time to make sure we constantly deliver. From the perspective of increasing adoption, should we onboard a big web2 player that we’re going to need to educate for months or years before they fully adopt the product? Or should we onboard 10 promising DAOs in the meantime? That’s the kind of challenging questions we face every day.

What were the greatest disappointments you had to accept in the past year?

Answered by Christophe L.

It’s hard to build in the web3 industry. Sometimes we think it’s easy with DeFi Legos but it’s not. Most of the time we’re the pioneers of the industry. We’re the first ones to build on top of some protocols. We’re the first ones to need perfect stability from BSC. We’re the first ones to build a Near subgraph. And it takes time, energy, and grit from our engineers. Luckily, they don’t lack enthusiasm.

It’s challenging to listen to the community sometimes. Hundreds of community members voted for Fiat-to-Crypto, but only very few actually used it. The rest of the users that onboarded for the feature came from different sources. Hundreds of community members asked for REQ staking, which is by the way not very logical for a deflationary currency like REQ, but just a few staked REQ on Bancor, even at +130% APY at some points.

Any contact with neo-bank dedicated to SME market? Request could build a strong differentiation features for them: manage your crypto money cash-in or out in a compliment way

Answered by Christophe L.‍

Not yet. We are close to some of them though. We are already building the bridge from EUR to crypto, without neobanks. We need to understand that banks, including neobanks, don’t really make sense in the web3 world. The web3 industry is about cooperation and interoperability. Banks do the opposite so far.

Product, Roadmap, and Tech

What is the outcome of recent REQ integrations with Xero and Stripe? Is it demanded?

Answered by Julien

Not much demanded. They are features that are not really used, for diverse reasons.

For Stripe Integration, since we decided to focus on crypto companies, our users don't need it at all. Maybe later, when we'll onboard more regular profiles.

About Xero, it's different. We never succeeded in shipping a "minimum viable feature." It means we never delivered enough value to our potential users to use it on a monthly basis. It's way more work than what we imagined. Our priorities are somewhere else today, but be assured we didn't give up.

Answered by Christophe L.

‍Request users don’t need Stripe much after all. Instead, they might need Request to become the Stripe of web3.

We recently partnered with Cryptio to handle the bookkeeping part. Cryptio connects with Xero and Quickbooks. Request users appreciate this integration.

Additional details here: https://www.request.finance/post/managing-financial-operations-in-crypto

Do you intend to stay on the Ethereum chain only? Or is there a way to use REQ cross chain? 

Answered by Christophe L.‍

As a first step of its network expansion, REQ will be going to the Polygon chain. Wait for the official announcement soon.

What feature do you think your customers (current and potential ones) demand the most but is not implemented yet? Do you think WhatsApp crypto payment functionality poses a serious threat to Request?

Answered by Julien

I think you will be disappointed here as the answer is not very exciting. The most demanded but not yet implemented as a feature is the ability for users to modify their email address. We used to do it manually since the beginning. But since our product usage increased, we receive more and more demands. We always have new priorities, which pushes this feature back from being implemented.  

Answered by Christophe L.

We take the feedback of our users very seriously. Here is a place where we collect them: https://feedback.request.network/?view=most-wanted

The Fiat-to-Crypto feature has been launched for EUR so far. The Batch Payments as well, and this is one of the most successful features that help with the mass payment of crypto invoices and salaries to various wallet addresses simultaneously .

The Escrow system, Reputation system, and the Visual Dashboard are three main features highly requested by the community. Escrow’s first MVP will go live in Q1 2022.

What else can you use Request Finance for other than invoicing and payments to employees and contractors? 

Answered by Julien‍

It's all you can do today, and it's a great start. Keep in mind that one year and a half ago, you couldn't do anything 🙃 

We found a product-market fit with our crypto invoicing tool and decided to focus on it for a long time. But as you know, we aim to ship salary and expenses management tool too. Our goal is to help crypto companies improve their whole treasury management. So you can expect more in the coming months and years.

Now $REQ is available on Polygon, are you planning on launching new/other applications on Polygon?

Answered by Christophe L.‍

We might. We did not ‘officially’ announce that REQ is available on Polygon yet. That’s a first step we’ll need to wait for. Request Finance is already connected to Polygon, but also Fantom, Fuse and Near Protocol, among others.

Are there insights into the new Tokenomics 2.0? Is there something already guaranteed to happen, like DAO, any changes to the burn functionality etc.?

Answered by Christophe L.‍

We want the Request Network Protocol to be community-held. Not half-centralized. That’s why Request DAO will take place, step by step, with a transparent governance structure.

For Tokenomics 2.0, we firstly need to achieve critical mass. That’s the most important concept here. We might make our plan transparent for Tokenomics 2.0 before reaching critical mass, but we can’t expect a mechanical impact other than speculation. Why is critical mass a REQ challenge? Because, contrary to trading activities, the Request volume is not as big. It’s low because it represents 1-1 of a real-life business transaction and not infinite trades on the same asset. “Timeshifting money” is one of the most promising concepts to get critical mass: the money being paid for invoices or salaries could circulate faster by ways of financing, for example.

What are the team's plans for Tokenomics 2.0? Any good ideas that you're willing to share?

Answered by Christophe L.

We talked about Tokenomics 2.0 earlier this year. The key principle is to ensure that the REQ token is successful if there is a growing adoption of the Request Network protocol. Today, there is a burn mechanism that needs more critical mass. In the next few months, this can happen in two ways: growth or fee/burn increase.

To drive the growth up, we welcome entrepreneurs building products with the payment request technology. The Request Finance app also needs to keep growing fast. To increase the burn, we would need to define how much, that’s pretty simple, important, and not urgent because it’s not impactful as long as critical mass has not been reached.

Keep in mind that success will be the product of an ecosystem of entrepreneurs building interoperable apps on top of the tech. Entrepreneurs, users, and REQ holders need to be incentivized.

How will Eth 2.0 impact REQ token? Do you see a correlation between token holders and market acceptance of REQ? Are there any new ideas to be considered to reduce the supply of the REQ coin (coin burning) and give us long term holders and incentive to continue holding?

Answered by Christophe L.

REQ's positive volatility is good for awareness. The way that the REQ tokenomics is set up right now helps to correlate adoption with success. At the moment, the best way to speed up the token deflationary mechanism is to increase growth. Growth mostly happens thanks to the Request Finance app. We expect many apps similar to this one to pop up in the next year or so.