Bots, POAP, and Outcomes
“It’s just like learning how to use Metamask for the first time”
Hey! Let me ask you a couple of questions
- If you have a loan out on Maker, what is your current Maker CDP ratio?
- What’s the price of your token on Uniswap right now?
- Did you forget when your ENS name was going to expire?
Without writing any code, these questions can be answered from your Telegram or Discord app, from any of your devices, using BUIDLHub’s bots and automations.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been hard at work. COVID and the subsequent economic downturn affected our product launch plans. Before it hit, we were focused on fundraising, accelerators, and adding features to the platform; but the impact of the market’s uncertainty on early-stage fundraising was substantial. Accelerators were significantly delayed, grant opportunities were withdrawn, and investors were bearish.
While all of this presented obstacles for our team, we stayed committed to our vision of bridging blockchain and traditional apps. Fortunately, others saw as much promise in what we were doing. These folks provided great feedback and encouragement to stay the course. Their time, kind words, and opportunities have given us greater confidence that the product we are creating will have a significant impact on even the most novice blockchain enthusiast.
Now we have an even better, badder, platform — and for those that remember Run DMC, it’s not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good!
Bots: the next frontier for Crypto
The crypto community loves their chat platforms. The most popular are Telegram and Discord. Telegram chats became cumbersome and are frequently subject to bot attacks. Discord provided more management features for admins and better channel options. Slack exists as an alternative for permissioned events and local chat groups. Other web3 focused options, like Keybase, present other alternatives.
Moreover, it’s rumored that Reddit and Twitter may support native Ethereum integrations. This has, of course, created a buzz about automating interactions within social media apps.
Just as it’s commonplace to have a brand representation on Twitter, it’s an industry standard for lean products and services to own and manage a Discord server or a Telegram group to interact with its community members. So with much of the community using these apps already to interact and stay engaged, it makes sense that enhancing the features for these communities is inline with expanding adoption and app usability.
We believe that automating interactions from other interfaces will have a significant impact with onboarding and maintaining user engagement. To bridge the UX chasm of onboarding new crypto and blockchain users, we need only make our blockchain resources accessible to these platforms.
This is why BUIDLHub has devoted the last few months to create a no-code solution to this challenge: let people use the platforms that have already drawn their attention while providing them access to the benefits of blockchain (sovereignty, transparency, authenticity, etc.)
Telegram and Discord bots
BUIDLHub is making strides toward realizing a dream of making on-chain resources more widely accessible, from anywhere, and from any app. To this end, we wanted to start with web2.0 apps that most of the blockchain community already use: Telegram and Discord.
These apps offer a chatbot capability: a means to automate responses to commonly asked questions or requests. The user never leaves the chat platform making the interaction a simple, seamless experience. But, as easy as these platforms intend bot creation to be, the entire process is anything but simple — at least not for the novice weekend coder. What’s more, Telegram and Discord, being the most popular within the crypto community, have very different processes for setting up bots. This creates obstacles for small, emerging blockchain projects to devote resources to learning how to write bots for their users. To quote one engineer:
“For most dapps, chat is not their core business…”
BUIDLHub’s BotBuilder makes building these bots really easy. Instead of having to write complex code for writing your contracts, determining the state of the chain, writing the rules to those interactions, linking it to Telegram, and then hosting that code in a data center somewhere, BotBuilder lets you focus on your contracts. Use BUIDLHub now for a no-code, fully managed solution that makes it very easy to automate responses to custom “commands”.
In short, without writing a single line of code, anyone can create a Telegram or Discord bot that will interact with other resources like smart contracts or REST endpoints and have the results sent back to requesting users in a chat group. In addition, individuals can create their own personal bots, and wire those bots up to custom commands that execute some automated response.
POAP Integration:
As an example of the evolving relationship between chatbots and blockchain, consider the Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP). POAP badges are issued to conference or event attendees. These physical badges have a QR code attached that when scanned allows the user to claim that they were at the event; and that claim is recorded on Ethereum using the ERC-721 standard (a.k.a. Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs).
The beauty of using NFTs is that anyone claiming a POAP badge on-chain could actually use that “fact” to access benefits attached to the badge. Perhaps that badge gets them a free drink at a pub near the event. Maybe the badge gets them a discount at all future events. Or maybe there is a VIP chat channel that only badge holders can access. The imaginations are endless and this is why POAP approached BUIDLHub to help automate the verification and access management for channels in a Discord server.
The process is simple:
- In BUIDLHub, a POAP admin configures the relationship between the badge ID, event ID, and Discord server roles so that badges imply some relationship to some point of access.
- A badge holder goes through a verification process on a utility hosted at poap.chat, so that they can access a permissioned Discord channel.
- During this verification, the user signs a random nonce with their wallet, so that they can indicate their valid ownership of the badge.
- BUIDLHub uses that signature to verify that they own a particular badge ID and creates a single-use access code.
- The user accesses the Discord server, sends a direct message (DM) to the BUIDLHub bot with the access code, and the bot checks that access code.
- The server bot assigns the appropriate roles to the user — granting new permissions and channel access.
You can see a a demo of this here.
This is an outstanding use of non-Defi public blockchain enablers. We’re using blockchain as a “fact-of” data source to influence permissions or features for a traditional app.
Another example of this use case is the Unlock-Protocol project. It makes it possible to use blockchain for access controls without a central authority. What’s missing is the infrastructure to make the blockchain “facts” easily accessible to the non-blockchain platforms. This connection infrastructure is precisely what BUIDLHub offers. And when that app is a chat platform, automated chatbots hosted on BUIDLHub makes this easily accessible for anyone.
For a detailed walk through, checkout our Telegram and Discord bot tutorial videos.
Looking forward to what these next few months hold in store for us. Share us some of your love ❤️ in our chats to give us new ideas or reach out to us by email to suggest new integrations!
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