If you're a decision maker within a company in the cryptocurrency industry, you should be dogfooding crypto.
Eating your own dog food or dogfooding is the practice of an organization using its own product. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding demonstrates confidence in the developers' own products.Wikipedia
This means paying your team members in cryptocurrency and, when possible, your vendors and suppliers as well. Thankfully, many companies in the space already do this, such as our friends at Edge Wallet which have been paying their employees in cryptocurrency since inception.
By using crypto regularly, we can better understand the challenges of our users and customers. What crypto-related pain points do they experience sending and receiving cryptocurrency? When you make a payment, how are public addresses verified and managed per employee or vendor to ensure payments are always going to the right place (no man-in-the-middle attacks) while preserving privacy and avoiding address reuse?
The FIO Protocol was built to solve this problem (among many others). The Foundation for Interwallet Operability runs as a DAC (Decentralized Autonomous Consortia) where all team members are not only paid in cryptocurrency, but they are paid each month using FIO Requests. We are eating our own dog food, using FIO almost every day.
You can see our Worker Proposals board here if you have a free Atlassian login. Everything is done openly and transparently. Each month, team members create a sub task on their active proposal (a Jira issue type we've called a Payment Request) and include proof of deliverables for that work period.
On the first of the month, the closing price from the previous day is used to calculate the pay for that period and a comment is left with instructions for that team member to send a FIO Request to get paid which includes a reference to the correct Payment Request in Jira. This helps the accounting department keep everything straight.
Each team member takes just a few moments to create a FIO Request (or multiple FIO Requests if their pay is split across multiple tokens). The public block chain address along with the amount and memo are encrypted on chain in the content of the FIO Request, preserving the team members privacy and allowing them to use a different native public blockchain address with each request, if they so choose. Only the two parties involved with the transaction can decrypt the data and view the details. On chain, everything is encrypted:
By using FIO Requests, it greatly simplifies the process for the accounting department. Instead of spending time coordinating with each and every employee or vendor to verify their public block chain address each month and send test transactions to confirm ownership of the address, everyone sends their own request from their known FIO Address on file. The individuals self-sovereignly control those address via their FIO private key so they are the only ones who can send a FIO Request from that account with the proper native blockchain receiving address. Team members and vendors are motivated to create the requests (people like getting paid!) and it only takes them a few moments instead of one person in payroll doing all the work themselves.
Simple, easy, joyful dogfooding crypto for everyone involved. :)
If you don't have a free FIO Address yet, get one while you still can: https://fioprotocol.io/free-fio-addresses/
If you have any questions about how this works, please leave a comment below or join our discord: http://fioprotocol.io/chat
If you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved with the FIO Protocol, please see our previous post: Tools for the FIO Community: Initiatives, Opportunities, and Worker Proposals
Also, since this is the Hive community, I hope you got a chance to see 