through the use of smart contacts, and secures funds with multi-signature wallets. Our software also enables useful features such as credit scores, which allows individuals to build a self-sovereign identity/ credit reputation through time, creating stickiness for our platform. Lastly, the decentralized manner of our platform and the incentive structure we design will incentivize local organizers to grow the network, since they will participate equitably in the success as adoption increases.
Ultimately, any individual who uses financial services will benefit from our innovation.
How did you come up with the idea for WeTrust?
I have a background in finance/ accounting and noticed many inefficiencies within the financial world, particularly within the remittance (e.g. Western Union) and fund management markets. I had heard about Blockchain technology from a few friends and after doing a bit of research and investing, learned about many of the benefits that this technology brings, namely: automation through smart contracts, significantly lower transaction fees, and elimination of a single point of failure. For me, this was extremely exciting and made me realize that Blockchains would be the perfect tool to revolutionize the financial industry.
Mainstream adoption has always moved slowly for cryptocurrencies, do you think WeTrust can help with this. and if so, why?
Our goal is to create a product that solves problems for our end users: people who are looking for better ways to save and access credit. While our initial product might spur some adoption and interest in the cryptocurrency, the goal is to make a product that abstracts as much of the cryptocurrency aspects as possible, so that people do not need to understand the underlying technology. Just as M-Pesa is now used by 70% of people in Kenya, we believe that by demonstrating value, people will adopt and use WeTrust, whether it is implemented using a cryptocurrency or not.
The first product of WeTrust is a decentralized ROSCA platform. How does it work?
Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCA) have been used by communities around the globe for thousands of years, as a grassroots form of financial institution. A ROSCA is “a group of individuals who agree to meet for a defined period in order to save and borrow together, a form of combined peer-to-peer banking and peer-to-peer lending.” ROSCAs are commonly built along clan, geographical, social, or professional networks. In countries around the world, ROSCAs have a variety of different names such as: susus (Ghana/ Caribbean Islands), tandas (Latin America), hui (China), chits (India), cundinas (Mexico), etc.
Individuals contribute a fixed amount at regular intervals for a set duration of time, and the money is distributed in each interval to individuals via either a lottery or a bidding process (the example below shows bidding, whereas a lottery is a random selection). ROSCAs produce results where all participants are individually better off (or no more worse off) than not participating in the group (pareto efficient).
7. WeTrust chose the Ethereum blockchain to develop its ROSCA platform. Why? And is this decision final?
Currently, the code being written is in Solidity and the MVP will be on Ethereum. We chose Ethereum because of its wealth of code documentation, relative maturity and strong community support. While the MVP is built on Ethereum, we plan to be “blockchain agnostic” and will be building in such a way that we can port our code to another platform if see it is more promising for our use case.
8. This project is currently self-funded. Are you planning on doing a crowdsale for WeTrust or any of its products?
We will be planning a crowdsale for WeTrust contingent on a successful deployment of our MVP and strong community support and demand for our future products.
9. When can we expect the ROSCA platform to be launched?
Our MVP has a targeted completion date of January 8th, 2017. The ROSCA platform should be ready mid-late 2017 contingent on a successful crowdsale and continued full time development from our team.
WeTrust interview