When I heard about the BCH DevCon being held, I thought maybe it's a good place to start implementing the project idea I had in my mind for a while. It was kinda last minute that I decided to get in but I thought it'll be fun, and I tell you, I was not wrong.
So what was the project?
It's called SLPEscrowCash, An all included, user-friendly noncustodial escrow service. Making it the easiest possible to onboard new users to Bitcoin Cash.
The project tackles a few problems that I've faced myself.
One is while doing consultation and contract work and stuff that involves money, I try to onboard new people that I work with to the crypto world. But they find it so hard and complicated. They have to deal with new software, know about coins, what tokens are, what is gas, what's the relation between all these etc etc, The whole package you are familiar with.
Another thing is you can't really put Bitcoin Cash into escrow for a long period of time because of risks of the price volatility which is bad for long-term or even short term contracts. So the project is built on top of SLP to be able to leverage stable SLP tokens.
So I'm creating this service to make it as easy as possible for newcomers to adopt crypto in their day to day life as P2P electronic cash. To make their first step an easy and smooth one.
What is it built on?
SLPEscrowCash it is built on top of the following technologies:
SLP
SLP Postage Protocol, to solve the gas issue providing users a pure token experience.
An Escrow smart contract to hold the funds without the website being in possession of it in any way whatsoever. The website can only say which of the two parties gets the funds in case of dispute.
Bitcoin.com's Link library to integrate with the Badger wallet to send assets and to get addresses to withdraw funds to.
To handle most of the CRUD I use Django, a really great, feature rich python web framework, and since there are not nearly as many Pythonic tools as JavaScript ones, I use js to do the SLP and BCH parts.
You can take a look at the code at the DevCon's github organization.
Issues I faced during the DevCon:
There were two main issues. One of them was with Badger wallet. Since I wanted to use bitcoin.com's Link library, I couldn't use EC.
I implemented BIP70 to take a 1% fee out of contracts but found out Badger doesn't allow self signed certs to make payment requests. Knowing that other teams got the same issue, I forked Badger and fixed it only to find out it also has an issue with calculating fees properly when using BIP70. So I disabled the BIP70 all together for now.
Another thing was I was planning to use the PSF's open source repository for post office server software but I figured it does only support the few common transaction types and can't work with my smart contract. So I moved to using cointext.io's proprietary postage server which works fine with smart contracts too.
You can watch a summery of above post and see a demo in this video:
What's next?
It is not a project for the DevCon only, a beta release with more features is coming soon and it needs lots of improvements on the GUI part for sure.
What that was great 👍