The official launch of crypto payments via intimate.io
By Nathan Smale, Chief Operations Officer, intimate.io
As of 10:30am local Philippines time on 31 January 2019, the intimate.io crypto checkout went live and serviced its first consumer payments at the Crypto Smiles microsite — a collaboration with our partners at Smile Makers.
At that same moment, our Chief Impact Officer Leah Callon-Butler was doing the world’s first live tech demo of the intimate.io crypto payments platform for attendees at Women in Blockchain Seattle. As home to some of the world’s greatest technology giants, including the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, Seattle was an ambitious location to launch our first working products.
And with the major US-based blockchain trading platform Bittrex sponsoring the event… The pressure was on.
As part of the launch, three distinct crypto payments products were released:
- A checkout plugin (in this case, a WooCommerce solution on Wordpress);
- The API that the plugin uses to interact with intimate.io; and
- The Partner Portal where merchants can login to view their transactions and manage their account.
The intimate.io transactional API is a set of documented functions that allows merchants to accept cryptocurrency payments without having to manage or monitor any aspect of the cryptocurrency transaction. This API is only available to approved merchants who have signed the intimate.io Merchant Terms of Service.
The simplified API payment transaction operates as follows:
- Merchant is ready to complete a transaction on their website.
- Merchant requests a transactional wallet address from the intimate.io API by sending through a transaction ID and transactional value in fiat.
- API returns a wallet address, QR code and transaction value in available cryptocurrencies.
- Merchant displays the wallet address, QR code and transaction value in the desired cryptocurrency.
- API notifies merchant when the transaction has been verified.
The API is a RESTful API which uses Node.JS to interact with the Mongo database where the transactional data is stored. The database contains information about transactions that has been read from the blockchain. In doing so, the intimate.io database stores a record of the merchant transaction for efficiency in presenting historical transactional data, but is still able to be verified against the blockchain as the immutable source of truth.
The transactional API is the core method by which any service interacts with intimate.io. This includes our eCommerce plugins and Partner Portal, as well as direct consumption by merchants. Most importantly, this is the API that will be extended to facilitate the trust and reputation functions.
The WooCommerce plugin was built as the first incarnation of eCommerce plugins so that we could show the easiest use case for the transactional API. There are over 2.7M WooCommerce websites that exist today and WooCommerce has proven very popular with enterprising platforms in the adult industry looking to monetise their offering.
Once a merchant is signed up with intimate.io they can get access to the API. Then, all they need to do is: Download the plugin; enter their credentials into WooCommerce; put their WooCommerce API credentials into the intimate.io Partner Portal… And they are ready to transact.
The intimate.io Partner Portal is the merchants’ account where they can update account details and monitor transactions as they happen. Full transaction details are fed back into WooCommerce but the Partner Portal allows the merchants a more granular look at each transaction without needing to use Etherscan.
Our team in the Philippines worked tirelessly on this project for months, earning a huge amount of respect from the intimate.io Executive Team thanks to their professionalism and dedication to achieving our company goals.
I’d like to call out three key people who were critical in delivering this project:
Chrisnel led the team through 15 sprints running multiple concurrent projects to ensure everything was ready on time. Nel has managed in the vicinity of 475 Jira tickets, whilst maintaining her cool calm exterior and keeping every member of the team on track.
Allanaire has shown incredible vision and commitment to architect this project from the start. Not only has he been an amazing leader to his team but a real workhorse when it comes to closing tickets especially when he gets into GOD MODE, as he puts it.
Alfred our Senior QA really found his time to shine in this deployment. Alfred has such a well-run process to ensure that any bugs are isolated on staging, way ahead of them ever reaching pre-prod.
Whilst it has a been a real team effort and every member of the intimate.io team contributed to the success of this launch, there are two other developers who I wanted to call out specifically. In the final days pre-launch, Bret and Justin each worked 36 hours straight to see this through. The only breaks they took were: A staggered 1.5 hour nap in the Cloudstaff VIP room plus a few short breathers to let me beat them at table tennis.
A massive thank you to everyone who was involved in our launch. For everyone else, if you are interested in a demo of the system or you would like to let me beat you in table tennis, please do not hesitate to reach out partners@intimate.io
