Firmament continues [Week 3/Halfway Update]

I made a lot of progress on Firmament, my employee reward system for Slack that uses a branded token powered by ost.com. But before I get started check out what happened in week 2.

Oh the awesomeness… I have experienced production APIs that are less consistent and harder to use. OST really rocks in alpha. Moving from my own database to the OST ledger API took about an hour (including fixes to some problems with my development tools). I originally stored all transaction data in my own database using the exact structure returned from OST Kit 1.0 and was able to reuse all code for the ledger API of v1.1. I deleted a lot of code and just added three lines.

I have been playing around with the idea for Firmament for a while now and there were two versions before I discovered OST. The first version used just a database that stored the balance for each user. It was pretty simple and was very fragile. There was no protection for integrity of the ledger and there was no real history, making recovery impossible after a hack or a bug.

I then started working on a version that used a token on the ethereum network. The blockchain promised trustable transactions. But transactions took long, it cost a lot of gas and the code was complicated and hard to understand.

When I found out about OST, I immediately stopped working and awaited public access. OST promised to fix all the issues I had. A simple API, a trusted blockchain and low transaction cost.

After joining OST Kit in Alpha Phase I (which was pretty much about hammering the OST API with a lot of requests) I knew I wanted to use OST for Firmament and I implemented a working prototype in Phase II. The community and support from OST was awesome and there was no question I would also participate in Phase III. And here we are, the API has matured and it’s a joy to work with OST Kit.

Today, Firmament already uses the new Alpha Phase III APIs and the first transactions went through. All transactions are visible in the dashboard and the tiny bugs (see the 41.00000000000001 RWD in the screenshot?) will be fixed in no time. I am working on Firmament a side project and the simplicity of the API is a major advantage without which I would not be able to continue the project at the moment.

Firmament even allows to buy RWD (my token) with a credit card. Implementation with OST, the price oracle and the Stripe API was so simple that I am a little bit afraid of being proud of it, but I believe it’s a pretty cool feature.