Inspiration
I took a hiking/camping trip to the mountains of Appalachia. I had no cell phone coverage. I drove around town a little and still had no cell phone coverage. I decide to drive to the other side of the town where I managed to get one bar of service. I asked my self “How is anyone going to be able to use crypto here?” How would I solve this problem?
I had been working on signing raw transactions. With this knowledge in hand, I thought wouldn't it be awesome to make crypto debit cards. I had the skills and knowledge so I set off on the journey to building them. Since there is a whole generation that was raised using credit cards, it would be amazing to have a way for them to enter the crypto space and learn about Theta.
What it does
SmartBux is a crypto debit card solution. It uses the Theta blockchain to process the transaction. Thus removing any middle man and making the whole system permission-less. Attach an ACS or HID smart card reader to an Android phone and you can create your own SmartBux card or accept payments.
To use SmartBux the customer will create a card, then send some Tfuel, Theta or other tokens to the card. Next they will find a merchant that accepts SmartBux and pay with a similar process as a current debit card transaction. SmartBux bridges the gap between conventional banking and crypto currency. It allows you to transact in areas where there is no cell phone coverage using the business's internet connection. It gives you a backup option if you leave your phone at home or it gets stolen. Just pull out your SmartBux card and make a payment. You can use SmartBux as a gift card to give someone crypto for their special occasion. There is no need to invest time and effort in developing a reward card program, use SmartBux to reward your customers with TNT-20 tokens. In addition to reaching a entire generation of people who have used credit and debit cards to make most of their purchases.
The current alpha release on GitHub has two APKs, one for the app SmartBux Create and one for the app SmartBux Payments. You can donwload them at https://github.com/bpht6/SmartBux/releases/tag/v0.0.2-alpha To learn more about SmartBux Create visit https://www.smartbux.io/info/create/ To learn more about SmartBux Payments visit https://www.smartbux.io/info/payments/
Next, it has an online BackOffice system that lets the business owner build real time daily and weekly sales reports that can facilitate instant business decisions. The BackOffice system lets the business customize the reports for different time zones and start times. So no matter where you live, New York, Paris, Bangkok, Tokyo or Tijuana the report will work for your business. You can view and test out the reports at https://www.smartbux.io/backoffice/
Last, I have included and open sourced under a MIT license a JavaScript class to sign raw transactions. It includes several examples of how to build and sign a send transaction, a smart contract transaction, a staking transaction, and a withdraw from staking transaction. Along with a wallet example. This is incredibly useful since it makes Theta much easier to use. It also allows a user to create offline transactions on a computer not connected to the internet then take the signed transaction and broadcast it to the Theta blockchain.
How we built it
It started as a small pile of different smart cards. I wrote and read from them till I found one that I liked. The card I choose was the SLE4428 card. Then I drew up a flow chart of how it would work. Next I build a kiosk version of SmartBux in Visual Basic .NET to create the cards. After that a terminal version to take payments. Finally a Simple POS version to interact with the terminal version. That is when I had my first working prototype.
Then I introduced SmartBux to the world at ThetaEuroCon. After getting a ton of invaluable feedback, I worked on creating SmartBux Create and SmartBux Payments for Android. This will let anyone with an Android phone create a SmartBux card and take a payment. After that I built out SmartBux BackOffice which was a direct result of feedback I received at ThetaEuroCon.
Challenges we ran into
The single biggest challenge was smart card readers. They are not all built the same. I bought several different brands and tried to connect to them. Some I had success with. Some used their own unique code (not a standard protocol). There was even one brand that I had no success with. In the end I used the CCID protocol to read and write to the smart card. The card reader must be CCID compatible. Both HID and ACS have CCID compatible smart card readers. Even with the CCID protocol established different brands may or may not support a command.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I am proud of being able to reverse engineer raw Theta transactions. It was incredibly long tedious work to build thetatx-v1.js. I am incredibly grateful for all the questions, feedback and excitement around the project at ThetaEuroCon. The project would not be where it is today without it. Because of this excitement there is now an Android app built that you can create a SmartBux card and accept a payment, on your phone.
What's next for SmartBux
- Expand and redesign the UI of the app to include tablets and not look like a calculator.
- Expand SmartBux BackOffice to have customize-able reports where the user can save a custom report type, and add the ability to run reports on multiple addresses.
- I plan to add a QR code option to the app so not only can you pay with a SmartBux card but also scan a QR code and pay with the Theta wallet making it a 360 degree solution.
- Build a easy way to reward customers with a custom TNT-20 token, allowing businesses to use SmartBux and the Theta blockchain as their reward card program.
- Add support for custom TNT-20 tokens that could be used to build a local economy on Theta.
- Add support for split payments, for example paying 50% in Lavita and 50% in TNT token.
- Build out redundant back end infrastructure, so if a server goes offline in one country there is a redundant server in another country that can pickup and process SmartBux transactions on the blockchain.
- Advocate to get Theta on Chainlink's CCIP, Circles CCTP, or any other multi chain protocols, so it is easy for users to swap on to the Theta blockchain, massively expanding SmartBux's reach to a much larger community. Cross chain protocols would also make it easier for businesses to go into another crypto currency or stable coin per their needs. Thus winning over and on-boarding new users to buy and use Theta and Tfuel, all while growing the Theta ecosystem.
- Finally release the app to the Google play store.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.