You don't touch it until 2020. Sky is the limit.
REQ is currently working on adding ERC20 tokens and Bitcoin support. Fiat is after that.
The point of Request Network is that you can demand payment in whatever you want (for example USD). And the payer can pay in whatever they want (crypto,erc20,other fiat) and through 0x and kyber they will get exchanged in real time with the lowest fees possible (an order of magnitude lower than the exchange rates of credit cards).
>I'm selling my anal virginity on Ebay
>It's priced in USD, but Ebay has embedded the REQ payment system
>You get to pay with cryptos, ERC20 or fiat, and no matter what you pay with, I still receive USD as requested.
Put simply, REQ tokens are what fuels the network. The REQ tokens are not currency.
Buyers and merchants will never interact with the tokens at all. They will simply use the payment system and experience it as an instant purchase/currency swap.
Aside from its intended usage, which is what everyone is basing their valuation estimates on, it will tap directly into a $750 billion crypto-market in which it's currently hard to cash out of, and expensive to buy into.
And as for competition, YCombinator, which has a high stake in Coinbase, also have a high stake in REQ. Since REQ's very functionality will pose a threat to Coinbase's entire business model, it is only logical to assume that REQ will eventually be implemented in Coinbase to ensure that both platforms survive and thrive. Owners never let one business kill the other when it is logical to merge the two.
See picture. If REQ handles just 0.1% of the global transactions, it means $5B worth of DAILY transactions. And $912M worth of REQ being burnt annually, which increases the price of remaining REQ. With a 10% marketshare, that number increases to $500B of DAILY transactions, and $91.3B worth of REQ being burnt annually.
READ THIS REPORT: docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/6f7ca2_96ffee2e91f14af3bbbcecdbc7aee3b1.pdf