Everdues (formerly Metadues), a recurring payments protocol and subscription marketplace, is one of Everscale’s grantees. We talked to Everdues co-founder Sam @samo3l about the project itself, its prospects and plans, and the team.
Sam, tell us about Everdues — about the project itself, and how you came up with the name.
I’ll start with the name Metadues. We approved that eight months ago after a lot of discussions and arguments, and now we are changing it to Everdues.
The “Meta” part is now present in the names of a lot of companies. As a simple example, we were at a conference recently where about 50% of the participants were called Meta.
So, we decided we should get rid of this part of the name as soon as possible, so that we wouldn’t get lost among all the other similar companies.
So feel free to call our project Everdues!
The “Ever” part is clear. In English, “dues” means mandatory payments, or duties, which fits quite well in the context of recurring payments.
That’s how the name came up.
Now more about the project. We will now call it Everdues.
The Everdues project has two entities. On the one hand, Everdues is a protocol for recurring payments. But we’re talking about pull payments, not push payments, where you get an invoice, and you accept it, pay it, and so on.
In the case of pull payments, you need to add money to the deposit account, then agree to the terms that the money can be withdrawn at a certain time in a certain amount and deploy the contract, and then the payments proceed on their own. In other words, you send tokens to be deposited, and they are withdrawn according to the terms written in the contract.
The other entity of Everdues is a marketplace that runs on top of the protocol. Service providers can register their service and the terms on which they want to operate on the marketplace.
Users and subscribers visit the marketplace, see the services listed in the catalog by category, and can select and subscribe to whichever ones they like.
So, in a nutshell, Everdues is a protocol and a marketplace.
Tell us, is there anything similar to your idea in other blockchains, ecosystems?
I would say that there is no working solution to this idea in other blockchains.
Before implementing this idea, our team made a list by studying our competitors. We found about ten, and on closer examination, we found that only two of them were active competitors. Currently, there is only one team left that implements a solution similar to ours.
We’re talking about Eight Pay, which is a couple of steps ahead of us. Of course, this isn’t yet at the production stage; there are still a lot of pitfalls in their product. They initially built the project in one network, then they started to move it to another, and it is only now that they have integrations.
We consider them to be our only competitors to focus on, even though we have slightly different specifics as a marketplace.
Eight Pay is an integration provider. It is a platform for registering or even integrating businesses. The businesses then each have a widget on the platform that users can click to enter and subscribe.
Users registered on Eight Pay see all their active subscriptions when they visit the platform.
We would like to implement this kind of functionality as well, but Eight Pay has no marketplace, so users cannot see all the services in one place where they are easy to search for.
We want our marketplace to be something between the App Store and DappRadar, while allowing absolutely any business to work with the protocol and marketplace, not necessarily mobile applications, or dApps, as well as small services right up to food delivery.
Now we will look at what customers come to the platform, and based on this we will keep moving in the right direction.
Does your team have a marketing department for this, people who do it, or is it just in the planning stage?
It’s more in the planning stage.
Can you introduce your Everdues project team?
Our main team, the core team, consists of three people: me, Renat, and Anton. We are all close friends; I’ve known one of them for eight years, and we’ve been working together for about five years.
The other one is my friend as well. I once chatted with him at a job interview for the same company, and then we became friends and found that we agreed about a lot of life principles.
Our team first heard about Free TON in May 2020. At that point, we saw that the Free TON community was in motion, and there were contests and a lot of activities on our part, namely on DevOps. We took part in the first Magister Ludi validator game and became network validators.
We started to participate in various contests related to infrastructure. After that, we became even more deeply involved in blockchain development by creating a DevOps subgovernance. After that, we took part in some development contests.
The Everdues project was created as a result of one of these contests, where we took third place. After a couple of years of active participation in the life of Free TON, we realized that we wanted to make something of our own — high-quality and useful. As a result, we started to promote subscriptions as our own product.
Right now, we have four people on the team: three developers and one UI/UX designer. Most of us dedicate all of our work time to the project.
At what stage is the development?
Not so long ago, we worked with the Broxus team members. One of them was Alexander, who developed the DEX and many other things. He gave us some advice, based on which we completely redesigned our smart contracts.
Our contracts are currently 90% ready.
I expect that within a couple of weeks we will get them up to 100%, which is a big part of the project’s implementation. At that point, we will come to the end of the alpha version.
After that, we’ll need a project audit. Of course, this isn’t critical, because all funds are stored either on users’ MultiSigs or in TIP-3 wallets which have already been audited.
I’ll say this: because we don’t have our own wallet, we don’t have a strong or urgent need for an audit. That’s to say that there will be an audit, but a little later.
Currently, we’ve come to the understanding that we need a gateway to connect MetaMask, and we are working on this. We also realized that we need to launch, relatively speaking, today, without waiting for the perfect technical “picture.”
We can see one part of our project that needs to be audited: the contract that accumulates protocol fees and then swaps them to our token.
For that reason, the fee will be accumulated and stored until we set up a DAO. Only after that will the fee start to be sent to swap.
Tell us more about the DAO.
The DAO will take full control of the protocol. It is decentralized, and we are just core developers in it.
We want to create a DAO to make everything work in the future without us, including all the legal aspects. We will do it with all the features like transparency, distribution, security, etc.
Again, let me remind everyone that all funds are stored in the wallets of users. A user deploys MultiSig, or it is deployed to them automatically on deposit. Only the user has the keys, and we don’t store that kind of information.
All further updates will be decided by the DAO in the future. At first, this will be handled by our team.
The DAO will include early investors and partners, i.e. those who have tokens.
Tell us about tokens. Have you come up with a name for one? Have you decided what kind of utility the token will have?
Yes, we’ve already come up with a token name. Now we are facing the challenge of where to get more liquidity for it and how to get people interested in it. The tokenomics haven’t been worked out in detail yet.
We’re finalizing the technical stuff regarding the token right now and what I’ve mentioned will be the next step.
The model looks like this: someone pays for a subscription, the fee accumulates on the contract, and then it is swapped to our token periodically — these decisions will be made by the DAO.
So, each subscription results in a token purchase. This is the core mechanism.
We haven’t yet considered this token I’m talking about as a means of payment — it’s strictly a DAO token. If you stake our token, you will take part in the protocol’s governance and the income that the protocol generates will be distributed proportionally among all stakeholders.
In addition, partnership decisions will be voted on in the DAO. If there is a real service with a lot of subscribers, through voting, it will be able to get a stake to compensate for the fee.
Tell us: do you already have any ideas about how the project will work cross-chain?
The protocol’s core function will always work on Everscale, but at the same time, we have already integrated MetaMask. This means that it is already possible to deposit with Ethereum, Polygon, BNB, and Fantom. So basically anything that supports Octus Bridge, because we do everything via the Bridge contract. In the future, everything that supports Bridge will also work for us. So you could say that we’re already cross-chain.
However, the withdrawal function doesn’t work on the platform yet, because it has to work for the user’s convenience. We will solve this soon, though. For now, if you want to withdraw your tokens from the platform, you first need to send them to a wallet on Everscale, then switch to Bridge, and swap them manually.
The task of implementing a user-friendly withdrawal system is one of our priorities.
Does the Everscale architecture have any advantages for implementing a payment solution compared to a sequential blockchain like Ethereum?
There is a very big advantage to distributed programming here because we store everything on the blockchain. We don’t have any information stored elsewhere.
All our information is a little smart contract searched by code. It’s beautiful.
If we did it on a different blockchain, we would have to at least use rollups, and possibly oracles. Security immediately suffers from things like that.
That’s why we use Everscale.
There is another reason too. We’re interested in developing the Everscale ecosystem because we are holders of a decent amount of tokens and have invested a lot of our resources. We are an Everscale validator. We can say that we will benefit personally from the successful growth of the network.
Our product couldn’t look more beautiful on any blockchain other than Everscale. We tried and carried out research on other networks, and it turned out to be completely different: either much more complicated, or several times more expensive, and without scalability.
Our scalability on Everscale is equal to the scalability of the network, and no one is paying for it: neither us, nor the users.
We have miscalculated a little in the same things that everyone else has. For example, there are not enough tools in the working testnet. On the other hand, there are enough knowledgeable people in the community who will always help and come to the rescue, and give tips.
You acquired a person in your team who is responsible for UI. The question immediately arises of whether you already have a test version website.
Yes, we have a website. You can visit it and study the whitepaper. By the way, we’ll update it soon.
There’s also an “Apply for testing” button on the site. By clicking it, you can write the business case you potentially want to run on the protocol. For example, you are interested in regular payments, or you have them but are interested in crypto. Those who help in testing will be considered potential partners and have the opportunity to get a stake in our tokens.
We created a form: https://forms.gle/NMm1w4dBxq1fNnL68, and we ask anyone who thinks they would benefit from the platform to fill it.
We will also perform private tests of our UI to understand what our potential customers might be missing on our platform and what its weaknesses are.
In my opinion, our UI needs a lot of work, but I’m confident in our contracts. I like the way everything works there, and I can say that the contracts are 90% ready.
I think that in a month we will have a UI that works and fits the user-friendly style. By the way, recently, some guys from the community contacted us and offered to help with UI. So after the announcement of testing, we will work with these guys to improve the UI.
The next big part of the work is integration. We have a decentralized API that is implemented entirely on DeBots. This is the entry point for those who want to work with the protocol.
So far in the API, we have implemented the minimum we require and have not thought seriously about the task of implementing the full functionality.
I will describe a situation that we had recently so that people can understand better. We have a client who has a mini cloud service. He positions himself as a cloud provider for startups and wants to receive payments in crypto, which should be regularly withdrawn from the accounts of his subscribers.
This isn’t an easy case for us because it has different tariff plans: standard, pro, etc. Also, the client has different services. We don’t want to force the provider to register 10–20 similar services in the protocol.
That’s why we are now working on integrations like these, and that will be the main focus for the future. That way, we will have a lot more clients. We are going to work on the variability of subscriptions with regard to one client.
We will work on searching for such integrations, on the development of API, and various libraries for integrations with the protocol. This isn’t work with the marketplace yet, but integration with the protocol.
I’ll tell you about one more area. We created a Telegram bot that works with our protocol. With the bot, we expect to get a lot of users to make our platform work the way we planned in terms of economy.
Our team wanted to make the widest product possible from the very beginning: Telegram bot, integration, marketplace — we want to attract a lot of users who won’t care what blockchain the product runs on. We want them to care only about the quality of the service.
We believe that our case will be in demand., and it will create additional motion in the community.
Thanks to the written DeBots, will your case be possible to integrate into Surf?
Yes, it is possible. Right now, our product’s DeBot is only available as an API. That is, it can’t be used in Surf, but can be called via the DeBot browser. We do plan to make an interactive DeBot.
You have a big, interesting infrastructure project that is attracting a lot of users from outside. As a final question, what do you think Everscale lacks to be one of the top 50 blockchains?
I often think about it, probably like everyone who has EVER tokens.
I think it needs games. But blockchain games are complicated. It’s unclear what kind of network will handle them. Even a simple mobile game has millions of users, which leads to a huge number of microtransactions.
I find this case exciting, though. It’s intriguing to see how games on Everscale will work. Look at Solana, for example. There are a couple of games there, and the network can’t handle more.
Sam, good luck! You have a great idea, which is exactly what the community and users need right now.
