Zippie Product Update — September 2018
Hello Zippies! It’s been another busy month here at Zippie HQ. Since our last product update, you’ve hopefully got your hands on the brand new Alpha 4 release. As mentioned in the previous product update post, we’ve been focusing on card features. Currently, that’s still the case. So, let’s take a closer look at what we’ve been doing.
Zippie card features
We’ve now shipped the first Zippie cards so people will soon be able to use them. It’s good to remember that the Zippie card is only supported by NFC capable Android devices.
In the Alpha 4 release, we’ve supported adding a card, confirming a payment with the card and recovery using the card.
Adding a card is simple, all you need to do is read the NFC tag from the card using your phone and register the card either to your existing Zippie ID or to create a new Zippie ID. After successful addition, you can see your card in the security tab.
Once your card has been linked to your Zippie ID, you need the card for payment confirmation. In the future, we’ll add a confirmation limit which defines the amount of tokens you can send without using a card for confirmation. Alternatively, you’ll be able to disable confirmation and use the card simply for recovery.
Unfortunately, revoking a card is a feature that we decided to postpone to the next release after Alpha 4. In practise, that means that when the card is linked to your Zippie ID, it can’t be removed. It also means that you need to confirm all your transactions with the card.
As you probably know, Zippie is a web-browser based solution. Web applications have certain limitations and, therefore, recovering Zippie ID using the card needs a ‘helper application’. The helper application communicates with the Zippie card via NFC and initiates a recovery process to restore the Zippie ID, Wallet and all your data. The application will be available in the Google Play store eventually but before that we’ll provide instructions where to get the app, how to install and start recovery.
Known card issues
There are certain issues which you might see when you try to use the card. Depending on your phone model, it might be difficult to read the card via NFC. Your phone may indicate that there’s an NFC error or there’s no registered app for the NFC tag. If this occurs on your device you can get around it by finding the ‘sweet spot’ for your device and the card. Place your Zippie card on a table and try to read it with your phone by keeping your phone still for 2 seconds. Hopefully, it will then manage to read the card. If this fails, try another spot until it works.
Zippie Home Improvements
We’re aware the Zippie home has some issues and our team has worked hard to address them. In the next release many blocking operations will be moved to the background and some of the operations such as creating multisig accounts are now created on demand only. This change means that an asset specific wallet is dynamically created when the tokens are received. For example, when you request test tokens.
You’ll be pleased to hear that receive functionality has also been added to the wallet and it’s now possible to receive ERC20 based tokens from other wallets too. Send functionality to other than Zippie wallets will be added in later releases.
What’s next?
Next we’ll implement card revoke functionality which is needed in case you lose your card. Once revoke is in place, we can start the security audit phase 2 and hopefully transition to the main net.
What’s more, the old Zippie style has now pretty much been converted to the new design. Consequently, we can finally start to try out our theming system and provide nicer look and feel to the Zippie experience.
That’s all for now. But remember, if you’ve got any questions, be sure to get in touch via our Telegram channel. You can also follow our progress and join our community on Twitter, Reddit and YouTube.
