Populous released the Alpha version of their invoice financing platform August 18th. I've been anticipating this later in the month and was surprised it was released ahead of schedule and so I jumped on the opportunity and began Alpha testing the platform for about 2 days.

Conclusion

For the tl;dr readers (if you're still here) I want to give you my conclusion first. Overall I feel super positive about the Alpha testing experience. I set my expectations to match that of Alpha software as I'm a Software developer myself. It started out a little shaky in terms of obtaining PPT tokens on the Ropsten network, but after getting these tokens I was easily able to convert them to Pokens and begin participating in Invoice auctions. This is where it got fun, and I think the platform is very straight forward and easy to use. There's no doubt the website will get the beauty makeover but in this alpha test the focus was more on the backend and smart contracts. Everything worked pretty quickly and smoothly.

The other thing I'd like to mention is the major support and openness of the Populous folks to guide people even through an Alpha. It was as if the product had launched and people called in for tech support. I was glued to the Slack channel (bitpopulous.slack.com) and everyone was so very helpful. I look at this type of thing from projects that are launching as a testament to the support of the company.

I'm super confident in this project and I believe they will deliver. They have a proven business model for which they are already successful and are now extending to blockchain tech. The folks at Populous are also pleased with the Alpha so much they've bumped up their Beta testing schedule as well:

Jump on this now folks while the price is significantly undervalued. $3.79 USD at the time of this writing!!

What is Populous?

Quick note if you've never heard of populous. Populous is an invoice and trade finance platform built on blockchain technology.

The flow of funds within the platform uses stable currency tokens (Pokens) pegged 1 to 1 with worldwide government’s currencies. Pokens are backed by the funds of investors who deposit funds on the platform to finance invoices.

Once invoices are financed by investors, Pokens are sent to invoice sellers also known as the borrowers. Pokens can either be exchanged for fiat currency or transferred to an external Ethereum wallet. An investor can purchase the PPT tokens and exchange them out for the more stable Pokens. PPT tokens are available for buy/sell on the exchange such as EtherDelta.

My Experience

Steven "Nico" Williams, CEO of Populous posted in the slack channel:

I didn't have any issues creating accounts and logging into the system. You can login either as an Invoice Seller (the borrower) or login as an Investor (most of you and me lending Pokens to the borrowers). However, getting PPT tokes from the Etherwallet test network Ropsten was a different story. You had to use a special smart contract provided by Populous to first faucet drip tokens to your address. And then you had to use the smart contract again to generate and transfer PPT tokens to your account. The two functions use were "faucet" and "transferToAddress" on myetherwallet.com

This step took a while for me to figure out, but with the help of the Slack group and little experimentation I was able to figure out. Converting PPT tokens to Pokens was as simple as a click of a button from the Populous website.

Here you see I have $95,680 based on GB. :) You can also see there are a number of Invoices below, some of which are "Open" for bidding.

This is an example Invoice looking for GBP 108 but is closed and the auction is over. You can also see a "Download Signed Contract" button which takes you to a downloadable PDF showing the contract signed by the borrower.

I "Billy Jean" created a Bidding group "Billy Group" and Bid the entire amount of this contract, GBP 2000, and won the contract!

Here's a screen (excuse the UI as it's since been updated) that shows the various contracts I'm a part of, interest rates, profits, etc. And yes folks I got a lil greedy and now have almost $9 million GBP Pokens! :D

Overall my experience was great and even better with the support of the slack Group. Even some of my items got pinned while helping others.

Shout-Outs!!

I'd like to shout out a few folks who've been very helpful to me personally but also to everyone in general who joined the slack and participated in the Alpha release.