A whitelist contribution period took place from October 17th 2017 till November 3rd 2017 during which time interested parties could purchase tokens at a rate of 32000/ETH. A total of approximately 18 million USD was raised through this mechanism outside of public distribution. The pre-sale itself ran from December 11th 2017 till January 4th 2018.
The public distribution of REQ tokens will begin on February 1st 2018 and last for one month or until the hard cap is reached. The hard cap has been set at 100,000 ETH. Investors are only allowed to participate through wallet contribution in order to prevent large investors from buying up most of the token supply while smaller investors get undervalued allocations.
REQUEST Network's vision is to provide the internet with a decentralized infrastructure that enables software developers to easily integrate payment requests into any application without needing to know anything about cryptocurrencies, underlying protocols or technical details of blockchain interaction.
This would facilitate new types of interactions between parties who do not know each other’s banking details but still want to engage in a transaction. REQUEST Network is also building a liquidity network that allows anyone to monetize their invoices and credit lines by providing them as a service to the Request ecosystem.
The Request Network Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that has been created to manage the development of the Request protocol. The foundation will be in charge of maintaining the codebase, developing integrations with third party applications and promoting the Request Network within the business community.
The foundation has partnered with KyberNetwork, an on-chain liquidity protocol for cryptocurrencies, to provide liquidity for all REQ tokens used in the Request Network ecosystem. This partnership will allow users to convert any token into any other token on Kyber's network, including REQ tokens. The foundation is also partnered with Civic, a blockchain-based secure identity platform, to simplify the process of signing up for Request Network’s services and products.