Zippie Product Update — February 2019
February was an interesting month for Zippie. Our R&D team focused working on the content we demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress, the largest global smartphone event held annually in Barcelona. It was also an important month to test a concept that has been on a paper for a long time.
ZipCam showing the power of Zippie wallet
Zippie aims to provide features like digital identity, white label wallet, payment links, easy value sharing, rewards and a bunch of APIs for 3rd party applications. Our partner AirImpact, a crowd donation platform utilizing blockhain, is a good example of one of those projects. Besides AirImpact, we wanted to introduce a new concept at the Mobile World Congress with one of our potential partners.
We created a ZipCam application which uses the partner’s backend to upload captured images to their cloud and rewards users for taking photos. ZipCam uses the Zippie signup, wallet and reward system which are nicely integrated under the hood. In addition to all this, ZipCam users can spend their reward tokens to purchase real airtime by using the Buy Airtime application which accepts Zippie reward tokens as a payment. When a user has purchased airtime with the rewards in their wallet, an SMS is sent to the recipient phone indicating how much the phone was topped-up with airtime.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of airtime, it’s basically a pre-paid data bundle which users can use with their mobile phones to make phone calls, send SMS and use mobile data. Out of the 7 billion people on earth, 6 billion live in a country where pre-paid mobile plans are the primary method for paying one’s mobile plan!
The purpose of the ZipCam app was to showcase what Zippie can offer and how 3rd party applications can utilise the Zippie platform and harness the power of the blockchain. The demo worked great and initiated a massive amount of promising partnership discussions which we will follow-up in the coming months.
Security Audit proceeding
Security audit has proceeded nicely and the phase 2 is close to be completed. We have received some amount of feedback and the Zippie platform documentation has been improved during the audit. We have started to build an open portal for all Zippie documentation which we can hopefully share with all of you soon.
Plasma prototype
It’s not a secret that Ethereum network is not the fastest network on earth. At Zippie, we have a nice workaround to the scaling problem by using payment links, but it doesn’t make the underlying problem go away. If you follow the blockchain space, Plasma is considered as one the options to improve Ethereum scalability by enabling fast and cheap transactions by offloading these transactions off the main Ethereum blockchain into a “child” chain.
We have been experimenting how Zippie can utilize more scalable solutions like Plasma and our team has built a prototype (based on the Plasma group implementation) which you can see in this cool demo video.
So far we have been able to deploy our own plasma chain on Kovan testnet, run a plasma client in Zippie Home (in browser), send and redeem plasma blank checks in Zippie Home (burner wallet style, no multisig yet since lack of support for smart contracts). All this is in experimental state but it looks promising.
Zippie API improvements
Zippie 3rd party API provides application interface to the Zippie platform features. These include sign up, wallet, ID and later on a reward API to mention a few. We are constantly working to improve the API offering to make it easier for applications to integrate with Zippie.
During February, we have improved existing APIs and also introduced some new ones. For example, now an application can use Zippie ID information such as name, phone number, email address and profile image and also edit that information. That’s quite nice feature and helps applications to utilize Zippie ID instead of reinventing the wheel.
If you got interested, you can check out our latest documentation here. It’s still work in progress but worth a look.
I hope you like what we have been up to this past month. In the meantime, why not follow our project’s progress and join our community on Telegram, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube. See you there!
