Summary: Request Finance is best understood as a finance-operations control plane built on top of Request Network rather than as a standalone payments protocol. Its official docs position the product as an API and application layer for issuing invoices, accepting crypto and fiat payments, tracking invoice status without directly polling chains or bank accounts, and creating payroll flows for teams paying contributors in crypto and fiat. The most important architectural clue is explicit in the docs: Request Finance invoices are an implementation of Request Network payment requests with a predefined schema, created off-chain first and then converted into onchain requests. That makes Request Finance a useful catalog entry as operational AP/AR and payroll infrastructure sitting on top of a separate decentralized request-and-reconciliation protocol.
What it does:
Provides an API for issuing invoices, accepting crypto and fiat payments, and tracking invoice lifecycle state for businesses
Lets integrators create salary, bonus, and token-vesting payroll payments through the same invoice/request framework
Converts off-chain invoices and payroll objects into onchain Request Network payment requests with predefined schemas
Exposes related operational surfaces like organizations, clients, webhooks, document downloads, and a CLI for interacting with the API
Inherits its protocol substrate from Request Network, whose docs and GitHub org describe a broader request, payment, and automated-reconciliation protocol on Ethereum
Key claims:
The Request Finance docs say the API lets users issue invoices, accept payments in crypto and fiat, track invoice status without polling blockchains or bank accounts, and create salary payments for employees in crypto and fiat
The invoices docs say invoices are created off-chain first and then converted into onchain requests, and explicitly frame invoices as an implementation of Request Network requests with a predefined schema
The payroll docs say salaries, bonuses, and token vestings are handled as another invoice type using rnf_salary, reinforcing that Request Finance is a finance-operations layer rather than a distinct payment rail
The Request Network docs say developers can build invoicing, crypto payments, and invoice/payment reconciliation, while the API supports request creation, payment facilitation, webhook notifications, fee collection, and partial payments
The verified RequestNetwork GitHub org describes itself as “The protocol for requests, payments, and 100% automated reconciliation,” with pinned repos for docs, a request JS library, request scan, and an invoice demo app
The RequestFinance GitHub org is much thinner and mostly docs / tooling oriented, which fits the reading that Request Finance is the operational application/API surface layered atop the deeper Request Network protocol stack
Whitepaper: No canonical standalone Request Finance whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass. The clearest current source of truth is the Request Finance docs plus the Request Network docs and GitHub org for the underlying protocol; see ../whitepapers/request-finance-primary-sources-2026-04-29.md.