Request Network is a fairly new crypto that rather quietly held their ICO in October. The token has an amazing idea, and is breaking into a billion dollar industry with a bold goal: Replacing Paypal.
Request Network bills itself as a decentralized network for payment requests, using a ledger to track all payments and making those payments far more secure than more traditional methods of payment, such as Paypal. Request is built off the Ethereum network, and also makes use of other big names in the Cryptocurrency space such as 0x, Civic, and Aragon.
The massive industry this token is breaking into, and the professional team assembled, caused other groups to back them. ING Group, a massive Dutch banking group with revenue and assets measured in the hundreds of billions, gave them backing. YCombinator, a very famous Silicon Valley seed accelerator, who is responsible for backing such projects as Twitch.tv, Airbnb, and even Reddit, has given them their backing.
Yup. These guys.
Despite all this, the project currently only sits at a market cap of $36,000,000. Why, you may ask? Well, there are several reasons. For one, REQ chose to launch their ICO at the wrong time. In the midst of a Bitcoin hard fork that pulled a large amount of money out of alts and lowered general trust in cryptos, they also came at the tail end of a summer filled with ICOs, some of them turning out to be scams. By October when their ICO launched, public trust had wavered heavily.
What's next for REQ? In my opinion, it is going to take 2018 by storm. They are already ahead of schedule, with plans to launch their platform by the end of the year instead of Q1 2018. This is, in my opinion, a great token with a bright future ahead despite a rocky start.
Sources:
https://request.network/#/
https://www.ycombinator.com/
Link to Whitepaper:
https://request.network/assets/pdf/request_whitepaper.pdf
Link to Yellowpaper:
https://request.network/assets/pdf/request_yellowpaper_smart_audits.pdf
