There is no way the team has the capability to pull off a fraction of what they want to do with REQ and there is no way the project will reach sufficient adoption (outside of crypto speculators) to elevate it to the status of a footnote in world trade, let alone become the backbone of it (which is their stated ambition).

The founders have already got rich off this and so will some speculators over the next 12 months. That's fine but if you're buying make sure you lock some profits in at some point otherwise I think you're going to be left holding some very heavy bags.

Some red flags:

1. AFAIK, REQ was never in the YC W17 batch (which is what they claim every time they reference yclist.com, a non YC affiliated site). For proof, see: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/20/yc-demo-day-winter-2017/ and https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/21/demo-day-y-combinator/ Their failed startup Moneytis was in an earlier batch but ask yourself: if they couldn't make a simple currency exchange aggregator work, what chance have they got with REQ (which, if the pitch is to be believed, is a thousand times more ambitious).

2. Similar to the above, they misappropriated ING's endorsement, The team seem to have gone through an ING startup accelerator in the early days of Moneytis and were just re-using the logo on the REQ homepage without permission.

3. Shady blog posts seem to be everywhere. A perfect example is this: https://medium.com/@drewosherow/a-typical-day-using-request-network-ios-app-662fcc01fbb2 No github source code, every other line breathlessly expounds the virtues of REQ (in carefully written paragraphs to point out every possible use case) and the "incredible" team. One has to ask why a blockchain/token is needed in relation to: "With Request, employees at any company could easily input all of their business expenses in whatever currency they were paid for in and get refunded by their employers with the click of a button. Depending on where the expenses took place, the Request Network can automatically input the correct tax’s to the payments based on specific countries/states applicable laws. Right now when dealing with business expenses, it may take till the end of the month to get refunded, but with Request you can get refunded for your business expenses whenever your higher up receives the request. The expenses can then easily be added to your companies book by adding visibility to whoever is in charge of accounting at your company so they can track all of the incoming business expenses in real time.". I think there are already app(s) for that :)

4. Even if by magic REQ actually turns out to be something other than a well polished ICO vehicle, how many normal small/mid-size businesses would use it? Answer: almost none. Most of the time they don't want a traceable ledger of payments, they don't want to escape from their banks (who offer things like credit lines and overdrafts), they don't want payment terms set in stone via a smart contract and they sure as hell don't want to completely re-architect their accounting department and procedures around blockchain tech. It doesn't offer 99% of SMEs any business advantages and screaming "but.. but... ERC20, dAPPs, take back control!" at them isn't going to make them change their mind.

REQ looks exactly like what you'd expect to see if a few MBA guys with finance/accounting experience and the ability to name check YCombinator decided to dream up a project that could get them on the blockchain bandwagon and give them a way to make a killing off an ICO.

Would love to be wrong but I remain extremely skeptical that anything meaningful or long term will come of REQ (other than the founders getting rich together with a few lucky speculators).

Edit: I'm saying all this as someone who was interested in the ICO but eventually decided to walk away after doing some due diligence. Take that for what it's worth. Maybe I'm just bitter lol