Our Co-founder and CEO of Request, Christophe Lassuyt, reflects on the accomplishments of 2021 and looks ahead to the plans for the coming year, and beyond.
Dear Request enthusiasts,
I write this letter to express how truly grateful I am for our community of users, partners, collaborators, and contributors.
Each year, I marvel at how people from all around the world continue to rally together around a shared vision of a future. One where our financial and economic systems work in service of the many, rather than the few.
Crypto is not just an exciting alternative asset class for investors. It is fundamentally transforming the way we live, work and play. But being able to account for and easily manage financial operations in crypto is still incredibly hard - for both organizations and individuals.
Request has been building tools to change that, starting by helping DAOs, metaverse projects, and other crypto-natives send and pay thousands of crypto invoices with ease. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. If we are to build a composable ecosystem of tools that will enable crypto assets to truly become a part of our everyday lives, we cannot do it alone.
My team and I are incredibly proud of the different parts you all have played this year. Whether you were contributing to the open source protocol for payment requests (Request Network), taking an interest in the token (REQ), or an avid user of the invoicing and payment application (Request Finance). Every little bit has helped, in ways you could not have imagined.
2021 saw significant growth for Request - both at the app level: Request Finance, and the protocol level: Request Network. For those who may not be familiar, Request Finance is to Request Network what Consensys is to Ethereum. Request Network is the open source technology that Request Finance is building apps on.
Request has come a long way
In January, there were only 603 transactions in total on the Request Network protocol, with less than 10 businesses using the Request Finance app. The total amount of crypto payments made on the platform at the time was just over $1M.
Today, the Request Network protocol is projected to reach +4,500 transactions per month by the end of the year, with each month seeing new all-time highs in payment activity.
Furthermore, the Request Finance app now helps over 1,000 businesses in managing their crypto payments and financial operations. That’s a 100x growth in our users this year, with the total cumulative payments amount now exceeding $160M.
When we started in January, the app only supported 11 currencies. Today, with a growing list of 40+ currencies, 10+ fiat currencies, across 10+ blockchains available as payment options, many more businesses across different Web 3.0 ecosystems can pay each other seamlessly.