Ecosystem Update - June 2023
Alex Stoicescu
Jul 10, 2023
5 min.
Greetings, Request Network community!
Welcome to the Request Network ecosystem update for June 2023.
The Ecosystem Update focuses on protocol usage and our vision to build an ecosystem of decentralized apps for payment requests. Here you will find our ecosystem updates, major news and announcements, network usage, and anything else that interests the community.
Request Finance is the first successful application built on the Request Network protocol to generate, track and pay invoices, serving more than 2,000 companies, DAOs, freelancers, and web3 native projects such as The Sandbox, Aave, and The Graph. If you’re interested in using Request Finance, check out ‘Request Finance in numbers’, which focuses on reviewing the Request Finance application’s usage metrics, an example being the cumulative value of crypto payments made through the app.
Major News and Announcements
FLock.io grant
Since we’ve relaunched our grants program, there have been quite a few talks & meetings with various teams and individuals. One of these teams is the stellar team from FLock.io – congratulations on securing a $25000 grant from the Request Network Foundation!
A London-based startup, FLock is derived from Federated Learning Blocks, which gives you a slight hint related to their field of interest: machine learning leveraged with blockchain technology. The combination of the aforementioned technologies has the potential to create an on-chain neural processor, enabling data owners to train machine learning models without sharing their source data while still reaching a consensus on the output in a decentralized way.
The use case we imagined with the FLock team is set to revolutionize credit scoring in DeFi, bringing another financial service to the same table with Huma and Copra, two lending/borrowing projects already actively building in the Request Network ecosystem.
BSOS grant
Another grant we closed in June is for the BSOS platform, snatching $50000 from the Request Network Foundation. Their main product is SUPLEX, and you can try it out now to get a glimpse of how the BSOS team is reinventing supply chain finance (SCF). For those of you who wonder what SCF is, here’s a brief explanation: a game-changing solution for the supply chain industry, supply chain finance enables buyers to extend payment terms to suppliers while offering early payment options to provide lower financing costs and increased business efficiency, ending cash flow issues forever!
With offices in New York and Taipei City, BSOS was established in 2018 and is a pioneer in supply chain blockchain technology. Moreover, they have been selected by JP Morgan’s Quorum blockchain as their Technical Partner in Asia. The platform they are building, SUPLEX, empowers corporations to get value from day 1 with web3 liquidity, bringing value to buyers and sellers. Some companies they process invoices for are Volvo, Adidas, Tesla, Uniqlo, Intel, and HTC.
We’re eager to integrate with BSOS and SUPLEX to provide the users and builders in our ecosystem with an option to use supply chain finance and generate new invoices and transactions on the Request Network protocol!
New recruit
A warm welcome to Alexandru Popescu as he joins Request Network as Marketing & Branding Lead. Alexandru will focus on driving brand awareness and protocol adoption in the industry through strategic marketing efforts.
In his previous roles at Celestia Labs and StableLab, Alexandru successfully built and launched branding and marketing strategies, including Celestia’s pre-mainnet presence. Moreover, he’s had great success while working at Mindvalley, with the results of his team published by Google themselves in a case study. Lastly, Alexandru is based in Kuala Lumpur and was invited as a speaker at an ETH Kuala Lumpur meetup in 2022 – we can’t wait to have you with us at events!
Find out more about Alexandru in the inevitable Meet the Team blog post.
PS. There are now two Alexandru in a team of four 😅 Can we get a third one? Keep an eye out for job openings.
Network Usage in June 2023
Request Network transactions (i.e., creation, approvals, and/or rejections of invoices) are illustrated in the above chart.
June 2023 has seen 8409 transactions on Request Network, in line with our prediction from the previous month – summer months have historically been on the lower side. We look forward to onboarding multiple builders to our ecosystem in the following months, with the end goal being a sharp increase in the number of transactions.
ABOUT REQUEST NETWORK
The Request Network Foundation’s mission is to re-invent accounting and finance by creating a decentralized network of interoperable apps that promotes transparency and real-time reporting.
We inspire and educate developers, partners, and authorities to use the Request Network and build an ecosystem of financial applications together that is open source, seamless and interoperable ecosystem of financial applications.
We’re building a network that connects businesses worldwide, giving them ways to do business at the speed of the internet.
