Well, if it’s a name of a cryptocurrency wallet… quite a lot of letters and numbers that don’t amount to anything, and are specifically generated to be unguessable. Which is great, because security, anonymity, all that good stuff.
I couldn’t agree more — in principle, anyway.
In reality, I find it nearly impossible to use, and in fact whenever faced with having to send funds to a wallet, my OCD raises its neatly combed head, rubs its manicured paws in anticipation, and makes me check, recheck, and then check…oh, another hundred times or so, before I finally bite the bullet on the whole thing.
Because, and that’s another nifty feature of a blockchain transaction — it’s immutable, and so, once the funds are sent… somewhere… there they will stay.
But what if I mess up?
It’s for the folks like me — and quite a few customers we polled that are in that sweet Venn diagram space of being cryptocurrency-aware and also proficient e-shoppers and and emailers — that we have decided to implement a way to tie our names / nicks / handles to our wallets, and thus simplify the transaction process in terms of being able to send money to not a randomized strings of letters and numbers, but also to the sort of addresses folks have no trouble remembering (and that doesn’t trigger their latent OCD).
And we didn’t stop there. In the spirit of offering our users what we wish we had, we’ve chosen to incorporate a functionality for sending tokens (Knish and otherwise) to people that don’t yet have a wallet — or whose wallet we simply may not know.
For situations like these, we’re making sending Knish or Emoji Tokens (a topic for a whole ‘nother post) a snap. If the recipient already uses WishKnish, the idea is to select them via a live search dropdown, enter how many of each token flavor we’re sending from our wallet, hit confirm, and the transaction is complete.
But the real magic happens if the user does NOT use WishKnish (or if I don’t know their WishKnish account name). In this case, I can simply enter their email address, or even an SMS-ready mobile phone number. If the email address is registered on WishKnish, they’ll get the token(s) automatically. Otherwise, a message will be dispatched with a link the recipient can click to claim their token with a WishKnish account right from their automatically created “on-demand” wallet that lies dormant until it’s claimed.
And yes, if you’re thinking it’s our sneaky way to further expand our reach by relying on the users already in our ecosystem spreading us around like a bacterial infection (or dare I say, inducing a natural viral growth)… well, yes, you’d be right.
But things benefitting WishKnish can only do so if they are a community win. So… what do you say? Is this thing a go?
PS. We know it’s not something that’s everyone’s kettle of fish — there’s something to be said for anonymity, of course, especially in the context of a deliberately decentralized marketplace — and so, this is a feature that’s very much an opt in.
PS 2. For me, yes, I’ll be the first to opt in. Because those number and letter sequences shrivel my soul.
