30 days of Cryptonium — The Journey

Cryptonium is a beautifully designed new tab browser extension for crypto-currency enthusiast and traders.

It was started a week back before the official Product Hackathon began. My friend messaged me that he has recently learnt React JS and wants to build something with it. I was learning about crypto currencies & studying blockchain technology and told him — Lets build a simple browser extension for crypto traders which shows live prices and information for coins, simply because there was no such extension available.

So it was pretty simple problem — Build a new tab extension for the crypto community.

We quickly brainstorm the features that it should have :

• Live rates for crypto currencies.
• Description of currencies and social media links.
• Graphs of price change over time. 📈
• Calculator for currency conversion.➗
• Notification and alerts on price change. ⚠️

And most important it should look Beautiful

And eventually we came to know about the Product Hackathon and registered for it. So now this was not just a casual side project but we wanted to solve some real problems faced by the community.

One of the big problems that runs in crypto space is of scams. As more money is being invested in cryptos, the scams are also increasing proportionally. Every other day there is some scam conning people millions of dollars.

A cryptocurrency start-up disappeared with $375,000 from an ICO and nobody can find them

Indian Police Label $12 Million OneCoin Operation a 'Clear Ponzi Scheme' - CryptoCoinsNews

Most of the scams fall into 3 categories :

1. Investment Scams/ Ponzi Schemes
2. Phishing Sites of wallets and exchanges
3. Fake Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)

The problem is that there is no listing of these scams, so they are difficult to detect. I have discussed about it here.

So the solution we thought was to make a database of all these scams and whenever user visit such Fake ICO or a phishing site, the extension will show up a warning message thereby preventing it from opening.

User can report the sites which they are skeptical about and we will review it.

Reporting and checking of scams page.

That was it and we started building.

We created an upcoming page with Ship and another simple landing page on our custom domain.

For live prices of cryptocurrencies we are using : CoinMarketCap API

For information and social media links we are using : Crypto Compare API

The frontend is written using ReactJS and Redux Combo. Build on top of antd framework.

We needed a server for the scam database and reducing load on third party APIs. For that, we are using AWS (Grateful for $1000 credits) and our code relies on nodejs and for our scam database we are using MySQL.

The community building part was a challenge. We started with making a twitter account for the extension. We have made a publication here on Medium on which we will be regularly be writing.

I used Discord channels to interact with traders and investors, getting feedback on the development and features. There are lot of crypto channels on Discord with each having 1k — 10k members.

We have very few subscribers on Product Hunt but they have provided a valuable feedback and insights throughout.

This hackathon gave us a good start to what we are making. It was great learning experience and we had a lot of fun building it during weekends. But we don’t plan to stop here, we will be adding more features before the end of the year. That will include :

• Glossary / Dictionary of Crypto Jargons for newbies
• Upcoming ICO WatchList
• News Feed from twitter personalities, crypto blogs etc.

Cryptonium — Swiss army knife for crypto community

So what are you waiting for, download the beta now from here : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cryptonium/peggfcjjphgocikcklhclokmnhceigfh

Thank you for reading and we hope you ❤ Cryptonium.

Stay Tuned !!