Zippie Product Update — March 2019
Another month has passed and a lot of good stuff got done by the Zippie product team. Let’s get right into it.
Massive improvements in data usage and loading times
In March, we mainly focused on productizing and polishing Zippie wallet’s core features and user experience. A key undertaking was to improve data management by doing major restructuring in the code and porting everything over to React hooks.
Along with this, we modularized the code and optimised what is loaded for each page to decrease loading times. The wallet now also has code splitting enabled, which means that only the parts of the page are loaded which the user needs, while the rest of the content loads in the background.
The results are outstanding: wallet page loading times have more than halved, and data usage for active users are estimated to decrease even more.
What’s more, we’re looking into enabling brotli compression on our backend to further decrease loading times and data usage roughly by additional 20%.
These are important improvements to help Zippie in its mission to democratise opportunity and bring digital life services to everyone. Minimising loading times and data usage will be critical competitive advantages for the Zippie wallet in developing markets such as Kenya, India and Brazil. Globally, over 70% of people with phones use pre-paid mobile airtime, many of them in challenging network conditions and with limited data and electricity. Every saved megabyte and second matters.
Improved airtime purchase experience
Talking about mobile airtime, we did some major improvements in the Zippie wallet’s end-to-end experience of converting mobile airtime tokens to real airtime. These included adding features such as offering receipts, enabling refunds, supporting various region-specific airtime tokens, and improving the overall UX.
As we mentioned in the previous Zippie monthly product update, we’ll soon launch the airtime reward functionality with our partners. This means that through the Zippie wallet:
- Any internet business or application can reward their users with mobile airtime — in real-time, without users needing bank accounts, credit cards or app downloads
- Users can convert the (tokenized) airtime into actual airtime and get it topped-up to their pre-paid mobile subscription within seconds
- In the future, we aim to empower users to be able use the airtime coupons also for other uses in their in daily lives, such as paying utility bills or getting meals from local restaurants
Shareable airtime makes it super-easy for any internet service to start giving their users micro-rewards for example for signing up, referring the service to their friends, or for active use. What’s more, airtime has a real and stable underlying value for these users as mobile data is more or less an essential commodity — while it can be also used to redeem other products and services, or for peer-to-peer value exchange.
We’ll continue to fine-tune the airtime experience during the coming sprints and will share more teasers in due course.
Created Create2 versions of smart contracts
After the recent Ethereum Constantinople upgrade, we created Create2 versions of the Zippie platform’s smart contracts. This update enabled us to take Constantinople’s new features into use for a better personal multisig implementation.
API improvements
We also continued work with the Zippie wallet and reward APIs. These will make it easy for our partners to utilize the Zippie wallet in their own digital services and share rewards or other value to their users. For more info on how the APIs work and how to start utilizing them, check the Zippie Documentation Portal.
Security audit finished
After a throughout process, we’ve finally finished Zippie platform’s security audit. The auditor didn’t find any critical issues, while notifying us of some minor items which we have already fixed. We’ll receive the final report during this month and can then wrap up the audit for good.
French translator wanted
French will be among the first supported languages in the Zippie wallet. If you’re interested in being our French community translator, please contact us in Telegram or via our website.
And that’s a wrap for the month of March, hope you enjoyed the read. As always, you can follow Zippie’s progress and continue discussion on our Telegram, Twitter and Youtube. See you there!
