Request Network’s performance has been quite erratic as of late. July was a month of heavy turbulence, as the currency experienced several ups and downs throughout the month. The highest the price got was $0,101463 USD/1364 satoshi on July 18th. This breakout was short-lived as the coin soon entered a downwards channel which plummeted the price to monthly lows of $0,059494 SUD/767 satoshi.
The month of August seemed to be starting off a little better for REQ, as its price managed to reach the monthly peaks of $0,073911 USD/1038 satoshi. This positive break-out was short-lived as the entire market got jolted by BTC dropping hard after the SEC postponed the decision on the Bitcoin ETF’s. Trading volume almost quadrupled in less than 24 hours, with bears assuming control and bringing the REQ price down.
At the moment, one REQ token goes for $0,043649 USD, which is a 5,73% drop in the last 24 hours. At the same time, its BTC price sits at 705 satoshi (1.15% jump in the last 24 hours). The trade volume died down a bit and is currently at $2,829,839 USD/437,82 BTC for the day. REQ currently boasts a market cap of $30,154,478 USD which makes it the 159th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world.
The Request Network Foundation is a company that provides a protocol based on the Request Network technology that aims to establish a standard for blockchain financial solutions. Payments like invoices, loans, salary, donations and regular transactions can be made with any blockchain with the help of the Request Network.
The project recently got into some hot waters regarding community interaction. People started criticizing REQ’s bi-weekly updates as they haven’t been providing any information about the technology and development. Some claimed that there wasn’t enough clarity regarding various decisions made around the project. Complaints about lack of dApp previews, lack of concrete dates, lack of promotion and information about the Request Hub all surfaced during the last couple of weeks. The issue was hotly debated on various Request Network forums, including Reddit and Telegram, so much so that the team was forced to react. AdmREQ, moderator of REQ’s Reddit page and a member of the community, confirmed that work will be done on these updates:
“This will be an ongoing discussion with the foundation, it will take time to refine the bi-weeklys and we also need to find a happy medium that suits both the foundation and the community too,” he claimed in this Reddit post.
After all that commotion, the communication team at REQ released an update focusing on several important events that happened in the last two weeks. Posted on the account of Robbin Mazurel, Brand Manager at Request Network Foundation, the update expectedly brought new information about the technical improvements of the protocol and apps, as well as an update about the listing on The Ocean exchange and news about a new European office in Amsterdam.
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The tech updates were pretty substantial this time. Some of the key points announced include:
- Written documentation on adding new currency
- Progress on payment conditions, send ERC20 tokens to the payer on payment and escrow extensions
- Refactoring to improve the speed of development and make it easier for external devs to contribute to the ecosystem
- Code cleanups
- tested the code with 3 EVM analyzers, security analysis tools for ethereum to detect vulnerabilities
- executed mythril, manticore, oyente on the code and no critical vulnerability has been reported
- Created a repository with simple uses of request for new developers
In the future the team plans on writing more guides that will ease in new developers and help them publish “good first issues”. More basic extensions like continuous payment, tax and late fees are in the working as well. Finally, they will be making an effort to improve BTC integration by releasing a simpler UX for those who are requesting BTC payments.
The update also details improvements and future plans for the App.Request.Network, Accounting, Payments Dashboard and Crowdfunding. They also announced that REQ will be listed for wallet-to-wallet trading on The Ocean exchange (0x based DEX). The trading pair will be accessible from August 8th via their on-chain order book and decentralized settlement engine. The last piece of information from the update announced that Request Network decided to set up a new European office in Amsterdam. This city is seen as the center of the continent’s FinTech culture and this made the network believe that there will be plenty of talented people there that will help the project grow.
REQ is one of the worst faring projects on the market right now. It managed to drop a staggering 96% from its all-time highs and many are wondering why. Some people feel that the Wikipedia fiasco the project was embroiled in broke the camel’s back and made investors completely lose faith in the currency. Others might be vary because they remember how the project was once strongly embraced by Ian Balina, the man who managed to get his crypto wallet hacked on a livestream and lose $2 million USD in the process. The community for sure isn’t very pleased with the recent events surrounding the project and we will see if upcoming strong technical development can provide enough “oomph” to lift REQ out of the gutter.
