Fantom Ecosystem Spotlight – Retreeb
At Fantom, we derive immense pride from our community: across the board, builders on the network are driven by a desire to fundamentally improve people’s lives by opening financial networks, developing tools for DAOs, opening formerly exclusive art markets, and so much more. The Retreeb payments solution ranks high on this list of changemakers.
With an innovative stablecoin that resolves the thorny KYC issues that frequently plague payment dApps, Retreeb is committed to making the world a better place with every transaction made on its system.
Retreeb is free for consumers, low-fee for merchants, and dedicated to building a sustainable future ‒ what more can one ask for?
1. What is Retreeb?
Founded in 2019, Retreeb is a blockchain-based fintech that is developing a decentralized, simple, and sustainable mobile payment method.
We offer a consumer-facing, open, permissionless, and free payment service relying on a multi-local stablecoin network and Fantom's infrastructure.
Our solution empowers users to make choices in accordance with the universal values of ethics, sharing, and solidarity.
Retreeb represents a new model of value redistribution ‒ a novel paradigm that reinvents payments systems in line with the needs of a sustainable world.
Retreeb is the first financial institution that links its business performance to its social contribution. We do this first by removing middlemen like Visa, Mastercard, and corporate banks ‒ in short, major actors that factor into the asymmetries between social responsibility and global impact.
Second, we distribute one-third of our revenue to fund CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives. We want to model impactful change in the financial industry.
Built for mainstream adoption, our mobile app makes blockchain seamless ‒ neither users nor merchants necessarily even need to know that we use DLT. And all this is built on Fantom Opera.
2. How do you introduce Retreeb to a novice, or someone who knows relatively little about crypto payments in general?
Our idea is simple: to make finance more ethical and solidarity-based through payments applications.
Imagine a world where each digital payment transaction would contribute to supporting global clauses or local projects ‒ protecting biodiversity, combatting inequalities, building social infrastructure, etc.
Retreeb makes this possible. Whenever you pay with Retreeb, 33% of the transaction fee borne by merchants is donated to a selected social project chosen by the consumer in the App.
This means that you can help build a better and more sustainable world without changing your daily habits or paying a penny more than you normally would for goods and services. Even the cost of FTM gas is supported by Retreeb.
3. How did you come up with ReTreeb/what inspired you?
Retreeb is the story of two friends in Bordeaux (France) who, in early 2019, go out for a pizza. On the way, they discuss global economies, how our societies have become completely financialized, and the fact that no lessons seem to have been learned from the great subprime crisis of 2008.
Although people are aware of this predatory finance, the issue is too complex and opaque for citizens to act.
When they arrive at the pizzeria, the merchant refuses to accept a credit card payment because the total amount due of 14€ was under the minimum for this type of payment, 15€.
At that moment, they understand two things: firstly, that payments systems are at the root of our relationship with finance and they affect us all, poor or rich. Secondly, transaction fees lie behind the merchant's refusal.
Payments is a huge and growing rentier market. We are talking about 1093+ billion digital transactions by 2023.
A market where all players, old and new, want a piece of the cake. But none of them is ready to change the recipe of this cake to make it more sustainable and equitable.
That is why we founded Retreeb.
4. Tell us about your background?
CEO and Co-founder Jérémi is a serial entrepreneur, who founded two Web2.0 companies between 2010-2018.
The first was a social media agency that established him as a French expert in that space. He then extended his knowledge into Big Data and the technical aspects of social media by designing, producing, and refining an industry-level business intelligence solution.
Over the last 10 years, Jérémi has accumulated additional experience by consulting with firms seeking digital transformation.
Since 2011, Jérémi has taught courses at several universities and business schools. His areas of teaching expertise include Community Management, Digital Business Development, and, since 2020, Applied Blockchain and Marketing (Master’s level).
5. Why did you decide to build on Fantom?
We compared multiple protocols before making a decision ‒ Solana, Polkadot, Tezos, Elrond, etc.
Fantom was the obvious choice since its DAG mechanism (Directed Acyclic Graph) supports an infrastructure that is perfectly adapted to the needs of a scalable payments system.
Fantom also offers one of the most secure, reliable, fast, and scalable infrastructures.
Knowing that there will be around 1093 Billion digital transactions made in 2022, you can imagine that these are all critical factors to consider when building a payments system.
Low-transaction costs are obviously also very important, as is the fact that Fantom is built on sustainable technology.
These are all factors that will allow us to compete with players such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, etc.
6. How did you learn about Fantom?
It has been two years since my friend, the Head of Blockchain at Retreeb, Adam Boudjema (@adamboudj) introduced me to Fantom.
He was formerly a developer for the Foundation. So I invested early in $FTM and HOLD ‒ to my great pleasure!
This did not prevent us, obviously, from completing our due diligence before choosing Fantom.
7. What has your experience been like building on Fantom?
The experience with Fantom is facilitated by Adam's knowledge of the protocol and the quality of the documentation.
Our technical teams are passionate about blockchain and enjoy working with Fantom.
8. Can you explain to us how the multi-local stable coin works?
Retreeb is an ecosystem with two assets, the $TREEB is our governance token which was launched in September 2021, and the stable TREEB or (s)TREEB used for payments.
This latter is a multi-local coin (distributed by currency zone) backed by the user’s currency, therefore 1 FIAT = 1 stable TREEB.
Stable TREEB is the currency that circulates, within the Retreeb ecosystem, between users and merchants.
When a payment is made, the merchant receives and stakes the stable TREEB for a few days. These stable TREEB are then burned and the corresponding FIAT balance, minus low Retreeb fees, is then sent to the retailer via bank transfer.
As mentioned, 33% of all fees are distributed to chosen CSR projects. The system works like a light chain on top of a bank transfer protocol.
9. How did the community receive the idea and your vision?
This past year we’ve had steady growth and the feedback from the community was very encouraging.
An important part of our community is comprised of Fantom fans and users. They are strong believers and have faith in the future of Retreeb because they know the technology is there.
Being recognized by the Fantom Foundation has also been critical for us. Attending the Fantom Developer Conference gave us the opportunity to spread the word about our vision and to grow the project.
Retreeb’s recent performance, both in terms of token price and adoption, reflects our ongoing work. We have a great responsibility to deliver on the roadmap, but we have an even greater drive to succeed.
The support we have received so far is clear evidence that the project is popular.
10. What’s coming up for 2022? Free alpha!
It will be an exciting and challenging year!
Key partnerships with large international companies and global NGOs will be announced, new listings will be scheduled, financial approvals will be obtained, new valuation mechanisms for TREEB holders will be proposed and, of course (probably the most awaited of all), our applications will be launched in the market.
The consumer application is and will always be free.
11. What would you like to say to fellow developers who haven’t yet started building on Fantom?
We would tell them that to build on Fantom is to develop on an infrastructure rooted in reality.
It is to embark on a technically solid path. With Retreeb, we hope to help make Fantom even more mainstream and we will support the projects that join the ecosystem.
Alone we go faster, but together we go further.
12. Can you tell us more about the types of community/social projects to which Retreeb will contribute?
The service is not live as of yet. But there will be projects of various kinds (social equity, charitable, ecological).
These projects will include both community- and NGO-driven initiatives; they will be both local and international. We’ll soon announce our first major partnership.
Other projects will be selected by $TREEB holders once we have launched the CSR Launchpad.
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