Set up IOTA payment gateway with a few lines of code

Published in

delion.io

5 min readFeb 4, 2019

IOTA payments via API (application programming interface)

The major purpose of a cryptocurrency is to serve as a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange for people and machines around the world. While traditional cross-border financial transactions incur high transaction fees and take up to several days to be processed, cryptocurrencies solve this main problems by using decentralized distributed ledger technologies.

Since the creation of the first well-known cryptocurrency bitcoin back in 2009, cryptocurrencies are being adopted more and more by different companies across several industries. Not only companies start to follow the development of cryptocurrencies closely, but also one out of ten consumers own at least one digital currency, a survey among 15,000 people from different countries found out.[1]

Cryptocurrencies have therefore gained a lot of attention, however to achieve its primarily purpose it is still a long way to go until being selected as a preferred payment method. Still many transactions happen in traditional fiat currencies despite the fact that the advantages of using cryptocurrencies are evident.

In fact, the payment of goods and services with crypto currencies as payment method is not always reasonable and practicable. In some cases, however, for example in the processing of micro transactions, cryptocurrencies open up new market segments.

In order to tap this market segment for suppliers of goods and services with low financial value, payments must be easy to process. This creates a natural incentive to actually use cryptocurrencies for payments. delion sees this as a good opportunity to offer sellers and buyers of goods and services an easy way to process transactions.

delionPay — a brief introduction

delionPay is another product feature of the already well known delionAPI, which uses the IOTA Tangle as underlying Distributed Ledger technology. delionAPI was first introduced in August 2018 as “Tangle-as-a-Service”. It was built for companies, startups as well as developers to get a hassle-free access to IOTA Tangle.

delionPay is based on the existing delionAPI, which gives merchants an easy way to integrate IOTA payments into their own platform. delionPay is not only intended for payments through human interaction, but can also be used by machines to pay each other for services by assigning individual accounts to devices.

delionPay connects the customer directly to the merchant with the use of distributed ledger technology of IOTA. Merchants can integrate delionPay as a payment gateway on their platform with a few lines of code (read more in last chapter).

delionPay features:

P2P (Peer-to-Peer) transactions: Users can use the delionPay payment solution to securely transfer IOTA back and forth. See also our article covering how to send IOTA via E-Mail between users.

P2M (Peer to merchant) transactions: Merchants around the world can integrate delionPay as a payment method on their platform by using delionPay. SDKs will also be provided in the near future.

M2M (Machine to Machine) Transactions: Machines or IoT devices can be given an individual account with which they can buy or sell services. This contributes to a potential data marketplace also.

Easily accept payments from your customers with just username and password
Higher conversion rate by using standard authorization methods
Flexible integration into webshops with few lines of copy & paste code
Seamless integration into merchants’ sites
No installation of plugins or other software needed
Fully automated IOTA address management
No setup fee and no subscription plans

Use cases for delionPay:

In-App payments
In-Game payments
Merchants accepting IOTA: https://www.iotashops.com
General List of IOTA use cases: https://thinktangle.com
Donations

How it works

The delionPay Client is based on the zoid framework, which was introduced as PayPal’s open-source cross-domain javascript suite back in October 2017. It is a javascript suite, which allows merchants to easily embed the PayPal Button on the website and provide a seamless checkout experience for buyers.

The main functions of the delionPay Client:

Render a popup on a different domain, and pass down properties, including objects and functions
Call callbacks natively from the child window without worrying about post-messaging or cross-domain restrictions
Create and expose components to share functionality from your site to delion

Integration of delionPay

For testing purposes, we provide a Sandbox environment where the transactions are not actually processed on the Tangle, but still the API returns comprehensible response codes. Funds are not moved between accounts.

Once finished testing, simply switching to production mode and the normal transaction processing happens. Just change the environment property from sandbox to production.

Every transaction can be tracked on the Tangle main net. Whenever a purchase was made, the merchant can check if the funds arrived on their account before delivering. Once the funds are credited to the merchant’s account, it cannot be reversed anymore on behalf of the buyer.

Refunds

The merchant is responsible for refunds. Given the fact that the merchant has the username of the buyer, refunds can be processed easily without requiring the buyer to send a new receiving address. This approach significantly reduces administration costs.

Demo screenshots (Step-by-Step)

Example of webshop checkout with product description price and delionPay button.

Popup to authorize purchase with username and password

After successful authorization a payment confirmation summary appears.

Transaction processing result after approving transaction. Here: Successful with Payment-ID

Outlook:

After having a stable version of delion up and running, we now focus on developing a proper usecase based on delionAPI. Therefore any kind of help is highly appreciated. You can easily get in touch with us on our Discord server here.

Be sure to subscribe to our news to be on the edge of new information as we develop this API. For more information visit our website, follow us on Twitter or simply send us an email to: info@delion.io

We thank you very much for your support and we hope you find our contributions helpful.

Disclaimer: delion is not affiliated or part of the IOTA Foundation. We are focused on establishing a useful service for the IOTA community to increase IOTA’s adoption.