Verida - Reimagining the data economy

Verida found a growing need for a hassle-free way to manage payments to suppliers, and salaries in crypto with Request Finance.

Verida - Reimagining the data economy

Verida found a growing need for a hassle-free way to manage payments to suppliers, and salaries in crypto with Request Finance.

Overview

Hear from Ryan Kris, co-founder and COO at Verida, about how Request is helping them manage their crypto payments in a growing Web 3.0 economy.

Request gave me structure. It gave me a workflow to manage supplier payments connected to the contacts of those suppliers along with their wallet addresses. It gave me confidence knowing that I would be sending funds to a supplier's wallet address they have entered directly into their invoice. 

About Verida

If data is the new oil, then tech giants are the oil barons of our age. Just like their hydrocarbon counterparts, the barons of big data have proven to be equally prone to bad behavior. And as with oil, it is seldom the individual that profits from the data they produce. 

What’s more, people’s data is siloed across multiple applications owned by different companies. They cannot view their data in one place, easily delete or move their data, and it is rarely properly stored and kept, leaving users vulnerable to hackers. 

Verida hopes to turn the tables with its multi-chain protocol where users, not platforms control access to their personal data. In 2019, Verida created an architecture for decentralized control that is compatible with traditional database technologies. Its open-source library enables any decentralized application to be built where users can own, control, and store their data using public encryption keys. 

In June 2021, Verida closed its seed round of $3 Million to accelerate the growth of the Verida protocol, and its community of developers working to build apps for a Web 3.0 world. In the coming year, the team has ambitious plans in its roadmap to release multiple tools for developers to easily build new applications on Verida, expand its multi-chain capabilities, enable APIs, and launch its public mainnet.

How is Verida being used in the real world today?

We recently launched the Alpha release of The Verida Protocol for Web3 developers and now have a number of projects using our software development kits (SDKs) and building on Verida. 

Primacy is a privacy-focused tech company helping customers comply with their regulatory obligations. They’re building Desca, a tool for lawyers, accountants, and other professionals providing an end-to-end blockchain-encrypted vault for sending and storing confidential documents.

MAPay is building a decentralized health technology network in Bermuda, using Verida to power decentralized identity, trusted storage, private data ownership, and decentralised messaging capabilities.

Nimble is building a new technology for the insurance industry that allows communities and members to participate in the insurance process, earn yield, control their private data, and be a part of an insurance process that provides real value to the insured.

We have more to announce in the coming year, and projects wishing to build or integrate with the protocol should check out our Early Adopter Program as we get closer to mainnet. 


What challenges led you to use Request?

Before using Request, we spent a lot of time manually copying and pasting wallet addresses, and payment details just to make crypto payments! We used a company wallet to make direct transfers one-by-one, based on each of the invoices we needed to pay. It was a painstaking process.

I heard about Request when it announced the launch of its integration with the NEAR protocol. Verida works closely with the NEAR ecosystem so I began to explore how it could take the hassle out of managing our crypto payments.

How did Request meet those needs?

Request gave me structure. It gave me a workflow to manage supplier payments connected to the contacts of those suppliers along with their wallet addresses. It gave me confidence knowing that I would be sending funds to a supplier's wallet address they have entered directly into their invoice. 

Who in your team uses Request the most, and how?

As the COO, I use Request the most, predominantly to pay suppliers’ invoices for services rendered. Increasingly, I’m finding that service providers are open to receiving payment in crypto. I love how easy it is to manage all my invoices in a single dashboard. 

We are also exploring using Request to manage salary payments in crypto, which we have been processing manually. I am especially eager to test this new feature, given that we are a remote-first company with a team of 10 full time staff spread across the globe in Singapore, Australia, US, India, Vietnam and Nigeria.

We also use it for managing payments to our Ambassadors around the world, as part of our Ambassador program

How have you benefited from using Request Finance?

The three of the most important gains that I have seen from using Request are: (i) I have a single place to go where I can manage all my payments, (ii) I don't have to worry about manually tracking wallet addresses for suppliers, and (iii) Request’s multi-chain support for over 60 different cryptocurrencies and stablecoins gives me the flexibility to process different payment types to suppliers. I also took the opportunity to get our wallets setup for Polygon and worked with suppliers to switch as well so we could minimize gas fees on payments. 

Since using Request Finance, I’ve saved anywhere between 5-10 minutes per invoice processed. The time savings are certainly going to add up as Verida continues to grow along with the volume of payments we have to process. 

What made Request stand out against other alternatives?

I didn’t really come across any alternatives, although I didn’t conduct a broad analysis. But Request seemed to meet my initial needs out of the box. 

I needed a solution that is simple to use, with a clean interface, that provides me with a good audit trail of all the incoming and outgoing payments I make. Request was that solution.

How long did it take to get up and running?

It was pretty straightforward. 

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