This is great. Was waiting for such a service for quite some time. Good job!!
Regarding the worker proposal, I'd like to know what the benefits for BTS shareholders are?
* Is the gateway code open source?
* Since you are asking for a fee to cover your costs, will you pay back some of your profits to the BitShares shareholders?
* Are you merely asking for more liquidity? If so, why not proof that this is profitable and a) borrow the money or b) run a crowdfund for a fraction of your profits?
* Why have you started with BTS? wouldn't it make more sense to have a gateway for bitCNY and other bitAssets?
* We use node.js and call the rpc provided by the cli_wallet. We could make the bitshares part open source.
* The pay could not cover the whole cost. We did not make the develop plan based on the worker. Actually, we plan to use most of the pay injecting to the market. I believe this is benefit to all the BitShares shareholders. There will be more user hold BTS (some of them hold in Ripple wallet). All ripple users around the world would know BTS and they could have BTS. After they know BTS, they may try BitShares by themselves.
* Yes. We wish to have more liquidity. We would also use some of them to do giveaway for new BTS users. To be honest, I do not think the BTS market maker fund could be profitable. It could be profitable, but it also have great risk. We have over two years' experience running FMM fund in Ripple. Let me share more first. FMM is a market maker fund in Ripple, and we pay all shareolders XRP using the profit.
1. FMM is based on CNY, not XRP.
2. FMM trade in lots of markets, USD, JPY, CNY, EUR, BTC. Most of them are fiat currencies.
3. The transfer fee in Ripple is very low, 0.000012 XRP. So we can distribute the dividend on working days, even the dividend is a small amount.
BTS does not have so many markets nor the liquidity. If the price drop a lot, the market making fund would lose money. That is why we do not set a fund to do this. We may consider to include BTS in FMM fund, but not now.
* My team just studied BitShares since April. Your suggestion make sense. I think we will consider it. I think BTS is just the first step.
RippleFox want to build a bitshares market in Ripple to make more people know BitShares and hold BTS (in their BitShares wallet or Ripple wallet). We would introduce BitShares in Ripple community. We do not expect the BTS market could be profitable in a short time (we charge no trade fee in Ripple). We do it because it is the right way to attract more people to know both BitShares and Ripple. This is the first step we use bitshares. In future, we wish we could also be a gateway in BitShares.