JoyPass #OSTa3 — Challenge Completed

Daniel Pham
joypass
Published in
6 min readAug 9, 2018
Photo by Simon Connellan on Unsplash

Finally, we finished the journey with #OSTa3 challenge. In this article we will share our thoughts after the great trip to blockchain world.

Journey To The Blockchain World

Well, we can say, this is a great journey to the blockchain world. Yes, it is. At JoyPass team, we have Zero knowledge about blockchain before joining the OST Alpha Series. We and other teams had great opportunity to learn about Blockchain and how to use Blockchain to solve the problem of the traditional system. OSTa3 is really helpful for us, we finally found the way to secure our transaction system by using ostWallet & Ledger.

JoyPass is Trying to Solve Problem of Traditional Loyalty Platform

We’re trying to change the way people consume voucher and loyalty points. Instead of receiving paper vouchers, customers can opt to receive JOY points insteads, which can be redeemed at participating stores, restaurants and communities. With help from blockchain, we can build a trusted loyalty system and user can also take ownership of their earned loyalty points (token).

There are two main kind of users in JoyPass:

  • Merchant owner: Merchant owner in JoyPass system will be provided a completed customer relationship & loyalty management platform that allow them to manage loyalty member. They can also reward to user by using JOY token.
  • End users: End users are people who using JoyPass to earn points by check-in at restaurant/stores and redeem JOY token to giftcard or gadgets.

The Key Goal Behind Doing The Challenge

In the OSTa2, we successfully applied blockchain to solve the problem of traditional loyalty platform. In the OSTa3, we wanted to replace our traditional wallet which bases on the relational database by using decentralized wallet. So we expected the new wallet will be more secure and on user own. The fears of system hacked will go away and users will also own their earned token and do what they want.

How Did We Integrated ostWallet Into Our System

Every user in JoyPass will own a wallet. The first step, when a new user registered their account on JoyPass, we will request to ostKit and create new wallet (user) and map the wallet id to the user in our database. When a user wants to see their balance, a request will be sent to Balance API and retrieve available balance of given user. We also use a combination of Balance API and Token Details API to convert user’s balance to USD, so users can easily see how much they are earned.

Above is the screenshot of our Bank Screen which will show user’s wallet information and transaction history.

The second scenario is showing the user’s transactions. To show user’s transaction history, we can make use of OST Ledger API to retrieve the list of user’s transactions. But there is not enough information because we can’t put the additional data onto OST transaction. So after retrieved the list of transactions by using Ledger API, we will load additional data in our database (such as memo, mapping with sender and recipient name) and return the data to front-end then display on user’s Bank screen.

Please check out this article for more technical spots

What We Like About Using New APIs

We think OST Wallet API and Ledger API are the perfect puzzles for us to build a decentralized application. In alpha II, we already have a blockchain-base transaction system but lack of secured wallet. These new APIs helped us to have a completed solution for user’s wallet and transaction system.

Beside that, following are our suggestion on these new APIs that we think they need to be improved:

  1. Currently, we don’t have any API that returns the number of total transactions for a certain wallet. That’s necessary for us to analysis or making reports and we may also need for pagination in some cases.
  2. We also should be able to filter transactions on Ledger API. For now, the API only allows us to filter by status, but I think it would be nice if we can do filtering by more criteria such as by date range, by sender or recipient,…
  3. It would be nice if we can have more informations when request to /token API such as the number of total transactions, total token of our BT economy,…
  4. Balance API should return total number of earned token and spent token as in ostKit dashboard, see below screenshot

What We Have Learned After OSTa3

Thank you OST team for this challenge. We have gained many experiences during this challenge. Before doing this challenge, we got a lot of pains when looked for solutions to secure user’s wallet and deal with fraudulent. We have learned more benefits using ostWallet instead of tradition wallet. One of them is users can take ownership of their earned token which is a great concept for customers to believe in a decentralized loyalty platform.

What we have done during OSTa3

  1. Integrated ostWallet and Ledger API to current system

We finished integrating ostWallet into our current system and replace for the legacy wallet system. Users on JoyPass will own blockchain wallets instead of a traditional wallet that base on the relational database.

2. Released First Version of Gift Redemption Feature

We also finished the first version of Gift card redemption. JoyPass’s users will be able to redeem their JOY token to get E-Gift Card.

3. Improve UX
By using the combination of Balance API and Token Info api, JoyPass’s users will be able to see the value of their balance in USD.

Some Screenshots

Merchant dashboard
live logs when user access bank screen
live logs of api requests when user access bank screen

Bellow are two screenshots that we triggered the event from our app and the link between actions on our app and action on OST Chain.

Log in database when user redeem token to giftcard
Log on ostView when user redeem token to giftcard

Final Demostration Video

Recap

You may want to check out our previous articles regarding our progress and updates here

About JoyPass

Joy Pass aims to change the way people consume vouchers. Most of the vouchers we receive from restaurants and stores are just collecting dust in our drawers. Instead of receiving paper vouchers, customers can opt to receive JOY points insteads, which can be redeemed at participating stores, restaurants and communities.

About OST

OST is building the complete blockchain toolkit for business.
Our ambition is to be the blockchain technology partner of choice for businesses of all sizes and levels of technical sophistication, enabling any business to create, launch, and manage their own branded digital token economy powered by OpenST protocols and OST blockchain management software. The OpenST protocol enables companies to launch branded token economies on highly scalable, open, cryptographically auditable side blockchains. OST is actively investing in an ecosystem of developers and apps built on OST, to help drive requirements from actual use cases.

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