Today, Reserve's users are normal people and business owners in Venezuela. We help them save in dollars and transact with low friction. They can cash-in and cash-out with PayPal, Zelle, and Venezuelan bank transfers. For example, to cash-in, users initiate a transaction in our app, then are prompted to make a transfer with whatever payment method they have selected. That transfer is received by one of the traders in our network, who responds by sending the user RSV – this can be automated or manual, depending on the payment method. Once the user has RSV, transactions between users are simple. If a user wants to cash-out some funds they have received in RSV, they can use the same process in reverse, and receive a transfer from one of the traders in our network. The traders sell RSV for a little more than they buy it back for, so they make their money on the difference.
This itself is a fully functional product with a growing user-base, but it's just the start of our product vision. We plan to extend this cash-in and cash-out network to span the entire globe. We also plan to go way beyond just offering users the ability to make basic transactions – think payroll, automated cross-currency transactions, incoming and outgoing card payments, and so on.
Most of what we intend to build has been built before, but there are a lot of places that are cut off from accessing these modern tools freely. It's hard to explain if you don't already understand what we mean when we say "cut off," because it's for a tangled mess of reasons. But to boil it down:
Crypto dollars (and eventually stable non-USD-denominated cryptoassets) really can be used to run entire economies. And because transactions are peer to peer, they are much different from a regulation perspective than normal digital money. They are both (a) not regulated – i.e. when I transfer some RSV to you, no company or person in the world is responsible for tracking that transaction or knowing our identities, at least from the US legal perspective, and (b) harder to regulate – e.g. governments that control bank rules in order to stop their citizens from buying foreign currencies will have a harder time controlling these P2P transactions.
Crypto-as-money is still young. We have a lot to do. Do you remember Napster? Tether is kinda like Napster – it's taking off, people love it, it's a little sketchy, and it's probably not the design that will last. We don't want to make the equivalent of Kazaa – another blip in the history that ultimately doesn't ultimately work out. The challenge is to build a platform that's as robust as BitTorrent and as great to use as Spotify and Netflix.
