Wuabit, a year in development
A peek behind the curtains of brand new software development and other startup stuff.
Tempus fugit since I decided to start a solopreneur endeavor to build a new project, vision and startup…
I’d been putting this off as a series of updates for all this project’s dear followers, but better later than never.
It all started with a post here in medium, maybe a lot naive in timings as many new paths with dragons inside arise.
Here be dragons
In software engineering there are many ways to encounter those little (or monster) creatures. Some of them are always expected beforehand, and easy solved. The unexpected hard to beat are the dangerous ones. They eat us sofware-warriors literally as blackholes of Time and Energy (T&E later on).
Let there be enumerated they then and if some have pros…
🐲#1 - Solopreneurship
That means to start a new entrepreneurship on your own, solo, alone. At least in the software side. We are finally now a team of six: two lawyers, two fintech, business development and me as core developer, architect & one-man band :-). We have stablished two registered business companies in UK, WuaBit LTD and WuaLabs LTD, being the later as the root company.
Pros: Being focused as the king of your island/cave/hill where you hide from the world to design/think a new one, or at least a new piece of work. This is great for creative processes, specially new ones.
Cons: As computers, as many cores you have the many tasks can achieve, so adding more people is adding more views to the project and enriching its foundations. Bringing people to a project its easy if you can move the right ones from whatever they are doing to jump in it.Specialized tech people are the hardest to find. Add also some little human management, some chatty noise, and more T&E.
🐲#2 - Reinventing the wheel
This is really not an unknown dragon, in software (and in many other disciplines) we say not to reinvent the wheel, as there are (sure! just DYOR) at least one other person int this world who did the piece you need for your project. In our case, this is our Achiles’s heel, as we have opted in for breaking this golden rule and fight this dragon up.
What is this wheel to be reinvented here? Here begins a little techie-crypto story…
First of all, what is the problem Wuabit aims to solve? In one sentence could be:
“Wuabit is your easiest way to access the crypto world”
The crypto world means the world of crypto-currencies, tokens and financial services. We are in the so-called crypto-fintech category.
Easiest way, because this new tech, is lacking in usability, at least in a broad spectrum of users, and that only is one of the biggest problems in this new industry.
We want to build a new window of opportunities via human friendly dialogues. That’s how this journey started: as a chatbot. And thus another of our mottos:
“Bitcoin et al. within your favourite IM”
Bitcoin and others/more within your fav instant messaging (IM) app such as WhatsApp, Telegram …
Bitcoin because it’s the biggest and most secured crypto (although we planned other cryptos/tokens too).
And the core of all Wuabit re-inventing-the-wheel-thing here: make apps over IM, or chatbots its already solved.
But instead, a brand new chatbot-dialogue engine was born from scratch: WuaDE (Internal name for WuaLabs’s Dialog Engine :-)
Why then? The existing solutions did not match the milestones for our vision in where the user is the center and sovereign in the end. Also, anything crypto-related should help the scrutiny by means of as many eyeballs as possible.
So here the keywords needed are: open-source and open-license.
Some solutions than could have fitted in:
- Google: DialogFlow
- Amazon: Lex
- Apple: Business Chat
- Facebook: Wit
- Microsoft: QnA Maker
- IBM: Watson
Pros: Ready to market, plenty of languages, documentation etc.
Cons: Closed, proprietary, cloud-based (no offline support). Personal and financial data sharing & ownership.
A couple of open-source solutions exists but lacking:
- Dialogue state: Keep state within an outgoing chat session.
- Language coding: Should allow break from the platform language: i.e -> allow non programmers to develop dialogues.
- Multiplatform: Should run independently of underlying platform/OS.
- Extensibility: Allow the dialog to be augmented easily with new terms/operations and/or logical constructs.
- Multi-language: Allow to express a dialog independently of target language as much as possible. So called internationalization or I18N.
WuaDE:
Pros: In a nutshell, our engine fill the gaps listed above for keeping and maintain dialogues with users and allowing us to customize it at will. We’d open-source it later on, and serves for more purposes than Wuabit’s. It also can make earn us some consultancy money to keep us growing.
Cons: Most consuming task ever, that prevented us from being market ready many quarters ago. But R&D&I is an investment, not an expense.
We also have developed an in-house crypto-wallet service, that took more time to develop, although there are online wallet service providers that can be used in some extent. This faces similar problem case as the dialog systems, being the most valuable data instead, the digital assets, in third party silos.
Nonetheless, there are some approaches to benefit from their services that could be used to launch us faster.
🐲 #3 WhatsApp business API
Our main target is to give easy access to crypto, and thus we wanted to use the most available IM app in the world as the main entry to our services, albeit being a hard bet. There are many ways to open your chat service over WhatsApp, but their commercial and approved one is via a third party messaging provider. If you get approved, then you get your international phone number ready to your users.
We received business approval for Wualabs after more than six months initial request! Weeks later we got it for Wuabit (end of June 2019). We worked with up to three messaging providers, even asked again for it directly to WhatsApp Inc (refused again).
Pros: Goal reached of being verified and technically operable using Twillio’s services.
Cons: Not ready to market being in the middle of WuaDE development. The cost are something to take seriously into account even at 0.005$ per user session, one competitor launched a wallet before us and closed the service in two days after two million of requests! (That’s with Twillio WA pricing about 5,000$/day!)
We are self-founded although we will need more liquidity for such expectation, that for sure will happen again once we could finally open our services via WhatsApp!
🐲 #4 Think big
One easily to understand mantra is the KISS principle, that means Keep It Simple Stop. So it’s faster to make one thing better always, than make many not as good. It’s common sense, unless you have some destination goals to achieve that makes KISS non-practical, at least in essence. As usual, life is not black or white, so KISS principle is a desired good practice that can be reached with another principle: Divide & Conquer.
Stop being rhetorical! KISS!
An image is worth… so here it is Wuabit’s vision as a big picture:
Its like our roadmap but all the pieces interconnected in a mindmap scheme.
Unrolled in time will be like these steps:
- Wuabit as a central online hub: Connecting IM services (Messaging) to the online Assistant (Our WuaDE + AI) and providing access to all shown above. Wuabit for any kind of user. A convenient custodian service.
- App Wuabit Pro: Standalone app (mobile/desktop) that can decentralize the sensitive data (balances, keys, identity). Could run the assistant locally (even offline!). A handy non-custodian service. It may receive even input from the hub (eg: route messages to/from WhatsApp)
- Wuabit on Hardware (IoT): To decentralize and secure the user’s data even more, a cheap HW device can manage cold keys and identity keys, all within a local network area via WiFi or even remote via LoraWAN. All with new security guidelines and procedures. OSH+open-source at its finest!
- Hardware Pro: If we could reach here (time + energy + economy), we can have a dedicated voice assistant running our system offline (nearly of course). A low-cost device such as a Raspberry PI can make it happen, as well as other open-source platforms that are developing right now and then!
― J.R.R. Tolkien . Photo by Ali Müftüoğulları on Unsplash
We will be releasing more updates for Wuabit development soon in preparation of our final launch!
And maybe you could not see the forest beyond the trees, there are other applications that don´t have something to do strictly within the crypto world! So keep calm and be patient!
For now, follow our blog, twitter and linkedin accounts to stay on top of our latest posts or subscribe to our waiting list!
