• 

  Tricemix

Tricemix: Decentralized Referral Marketing Solution

Imagine you're a budding entrepreneur with an amazing product and you want to launch and go live. Now, of course, you'll need to market it and one of the ways is to create a referral marketing campaign, a marketing tactic that makes use of recommendations and word of mouth to grow a business's customer base through the networks of its existing customers.

Before you say, "Oh cool! I'll set up one right away!" and runoff, here are some of the things we noticed about the current infrastructure for creating a decent referral program,

• Initial build and customization fee for creating referral programs generally costs around $15,000-$40,000, plus the ongoing license and support fees (approximately $2000+ per month) if hiring a marketing agency.
• Inventory management is not a piece of cake.
• Building and especially maintaining payment systems is hard as hell.

That's where we come in. We're trying to become a decentralized referral marketing solution for modern marketers and creators.

Inspiration

Upon stumbling an idea found in the DigitalBits "Things to build" which was basically "send digitalbits to any email address", we were inspired to incorporate it in our project, Tricemix (formerly known as XDB-NS: XDB Naming system).

What it does

We present Tricemix, a one-click platform for building customer referral programs. Creating one and handing out rewards is unbelievably simple with Tricemix: customers can receive digitalbits without creating a single account or giving out personal information, for example, your bank details. All one needs is the customer's email address. Not only that but the rewards can be shared among users, allowing users to send digitalbits to anyone, regardless of if they have an account or not.

Using Tricemix dApp is straightforward. It only takes three steps to create and run a referral program of your taste by providing an interface to: create an account, setting up a referral program, let users receive and share digitalbits (XDB tokens) in return seamlessly.

At its core, the Tricemix service runs a federation server, federates payment addresses with an email prefix like [email protected]*tricemix.com. If the recipient doesn't have a valid email address, one will be created for them and they will get an email notifying them that they have received rewards from the sender.

The marketing industry can potentially benefit from Tricemix by allowing users to leverage Digitalbits technologies to build better marketing campaigns and much more.

Challenges we ran into

We faced many challenges over the course of development, primarily due to our relative newness to programming and blockchain development. A few were based on setting up the websites such as configuring DNS servers, others were neck-deep and we would go on and on if we start listing them!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This has been our first hackathon submission, and I worked in conjunction with the ideas set out by Piyush. I developed my technical skills and reached out to the Digitalbits rich documentation when clarification was needed. We are proud to have made these web apps together.

What we learned

We learned a lot about product development, deployment and how the Digitalbits federation server works and what sets it apart from other blockchains.

Unfortunately, we were not able to host the federation server (it was hooked via proxy during the demo) and also, we developed a fully-featured referral system from scratch but couldn't connect everything in time.

During all this, we learnt a lot about DigitalBits SDK (JavaScript), read the codebase and its documentation thoroughly. We thought of developing a set of useful methods (such as, creating test accounts, processing dummy payments and more) which come in handy while doing development in the testnet. We forked the project and will be adding all our contributions on @0x48piraj/js-sdk-devkit.

What's next for Tricemix

If it's recommended, we would love to work more on Tricemix to get it out and open it to the public, allowing companies to create their referral programs letting users earn XDB tokens. It would serve as a massive utility for users, as well as a smooth way to onboard their friends and family on the Digitalbits network. We hope to build on Digitalbits in future developments and help proliferate the Digitalbits network.

Built With

• api
• flask
• node.js
• python
• svelte