Phase III Week #1: Switching to the official SDK
Welcome to our first blog update of our participation on OST Kit Alpha Phase III. In the last days we did some basic steps to integrate the wallet and ledger API into kwanda.
What is kwanda?
First of all we would like to explain kwanda to you. Maybe you didn’t follow OST Kit Alpha Phase II and so you never heard of our concept. We wanted to build a Q&A platform where users can reward other users with our token. So we think better answers will be generated because community members have a valuable reason to answer and not only earn some “worthless internet points”. Sometimes you may have a question which you don’t want to post on common platforms because you need a quick answer or you want to ask an expert. This will be worth some cents for you and so it’s a perfect use case for microtransactions. On the other side you can also earn tokens by interacting with the community. We had the idea for a service like kwanda for quite some time and this challenge was a good reason for us to try building a concept.
We also have a short explanation video for our demo concept. Check it out:
Minting our token KWA
If you followed our progress in Phase II closely you know that we changed our token symbol from QRO to KWA. Since updating the name of the token in the blockchain isn’t possible we had to mint some new tokens. So we tried once again how easy it is to create our own tokens. All you need are some OST, Google Chrome and the MetaMask Plugin. In the first step we had to decide how much 1 KWA is worth. Right now we decided that 1 KWA = 0.02$ (so 0.32322 OST at the moment of minting). We think it should be a microtransaction for a good answer and so the user can give 100 KWA (2.00$) if its an important question or even just 5 KWA (0.10$) if it’s just a common question.
Minting is really easy. You just have to get OST into your wallet connected to MetaMask. Then you have to send the amount of OST you want to mint into your own token to another address. This is not complicated because OST Kit is connected to MetaMask which handles all the requests. So for example if we want to mint 25000 KWA we have to use 8080.5 OST (0.32322 OST * 25000 KWA). You should also have some OST reserved for gas but even here OST Kit is helping by selecting the right amount.
After that the minting takes place. This takes maybe 2–3 minutes and then the tokens are freshly stored in the company wallet and you can see your own token on OST View. You can check out kwanda Token here.
Implementing the official SDK
In Phase II kwanda was already “shippable” which means all basic core features were functional. We built our app using PHP with the framework Laravel. But some months ago there was no official SDK for OST API. So we had to build our own implementation. With Phase III now there are official SDKs for PHP, Ruby, JavaScript and Java. So we have the possibility to integrate the official SDK into kwanda. This brings many benefits. We don’t have to write the implementation on our own and when there are new functions we can update the SDK.
So we got rid of our old code and with just some lines of code the SDK was integrated. You can see in the Quick Start Guides how simple it is to create a new blockchain user or even send a transaction. With this little part of code you can trigger an action in “your own” sidechain and the transaction gets mined and the tokens are transferred. There is really no developer blockchain knowledge needed. We don’t have any knowledge in this field therefore we never made our own ERC20-Token or something like that. But with OST we could create a token in minutes and the integration in an (existing) app with the official SDK is really simple and should not be a hassle for any developer.
If you want to know more about our token actions in kwanda stay tuned till next week! There we will give you an introduction to our new wallet page and also show you what kind of token actions we chose.
tl;dr
What progress did you make on your Alpha III PoC this week?
We minted a new token (KWA) and integrated the official PHP SDK in our code. So we don’t have to write all API functions on our own.
What did you learn/issues you had to overcome?
We didn’t have any issues. Minting only took some minutes and the API functions work as expected. With the official SDK we even saved time.
What are you planning for the next week?
We try to integrate the new functions for wallet and transaction history and rewrite our wallet page.
About kwanda
Kwanda is a Proof of Concept built for OST Kit Alpha Phase. It demonstrates how easy it is to integrate a token economy into a (existing) website or app powered by OST. If you want to learn more visit our website or follow us on Twitter.
You can find more informations about OST Kit Alpha Phase III in the following blogpost.
