Blockchain Ecosystem with Banking Platform, Crypto Wallet, NFT Marketplace

Business Overview

The client is a Fintech company providing blockchain-based products incorporating traditional and digital finances via tokenization and trading of digital assets. As newcomers, the client needed to establish and strengthen their positions in the competitive market. Developing disparate products was not enough for expanding exposure, attracting new users and investors, and significant revenue growth. For this purpose, the client required development of a fully-fledged ecosystem with a set of connected, robust, and high-demand products based on their fork of the Stellar blockchain.

The company had certain groundwork laid within a range of projects after cooperation with a previous software development company. The vendor did not cover the client’s needs in expertise for running large-scale projects, which had a negative impact on the delivery process and company growth in general. The client entrusted the ecosystem development to NIX as a vendor with solid blockchain expertise and capacities to efficiently run multiple projects in parallel and at a rapid pace.

Project Scope

Building the ecosystem included developing many blockchain projects in parallel: a banking app, an NFT production studio and marketplace, a decentralized exchange (DEX) portal, and a cryptocurrency wallet. The client’s focus was on gaming, sports, and entertainment, thus products needed to be engaging and customizable.

Some products needed refining and tech enhancements—we needed to assess the state of existing solutions, find workflow inefficiencies, restructure internal development processes, and expand software functionality for its smooth and efficient operation. Some products had to be developed from scratch based on extensive market research to stand out from the competition. To build a robust and demanded ecosystem, it was crucial to make all the products, existing and newly built, work seamlessly with each other as a single entity.

Solution

All products were based on a fork of the Stellar blockchain. At the same time, they all had the microservice architecture for increased modularity and scalability of the systems and hosted on AWS.

Below are the details of how we developed each particular project.

Digital Banking App

NIX experts developed a robust digital banking product—the web application and mobile native applications on iOS and Android. Besides common banking services like leveraging debit, credit, investment accounts and making P2P payments, customers can make cryptocurrency donations, get cryptocurrency rewards, and use branded cards and custom esports skins in the apps. A complete digital banking experience and expanded configurability and flexibility of the apps were provided through integration with the I2C service.

The following features are implemented into the platform:

Linked financial accounts

The ability to easily transfer funds between users’ accounts from different banks was provided through integration with Plaid.

Highly-secured environment

We used encryption keys, two-factor identification by phone number or email, and address verification via SmartyStreets. The implementation of Know Your Customer (KYC) standards protects the app from fraud and money laundering.

Children’s accounts linked with parental ones

Parental control implies the ability for parents to control their children’s transactions—accounts of children aged 6-13 years old are under complete parental control, while accounts of 14-18 years old teenagers are controlled just partially. Parents can also assign chores for their children and pay them for completion.

Crypto rewards

The system checks users’ spending in fiat money, determines the size of cryptocurrency cashback, and sends this amount to users’ accounts.

A fully-fledged notification service

This conveys real-time updates, transactional messages, notification filtering, and reminders based on broad business logic.

Admin panel as a separate web application

The service was designed for user management and support—configuring user streams, feature flags, skin design and validation, and early access to a certain range of users.

NFT Production Studio
Cryptocurrency Wallet
NFT Marketplace for Digital Collectibles
DEX Portal

NFT Production Studio

We created an NFT production studio from scratch—a web application for creating custom assets based on the client’s blockchain. The client’s blockchain ecosystem does not have built-in smart contracts regulating the relationships between buyers and sellers of digital assets. After making a comprehensive business logic analysis, our experts implemented the required NFT functionality based on metadata standards.

The web app allows you to do the following:

Create custom tokens, fungible and non-fungible, in seconds, uploading digital assets based on photos, art, collectibles, or music to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) automatically. To overcome the time limits for data storage imposed by the IPFL, we integrated the app with the hosting service Pinata.
Create multiple NFTs by minting a single NFT as a set of identical copies of the required quantity, such as 500 event tickets in one click.
Create NFTs in bulk by implementing a script that replicates the website logic and automatically delivers unique tokens for each NFT in a matter of seconds.
Sell, buy, and manage your portfolio of digital assets instantly with the help of the integrated cryptocurrency wallet from the ecosystem.
Royalties can be paid to creators of digital assets —this feature was based on implementing complicated algorithms and substituting smart contracts.

Cryptocurrency Wallet

NIX experts worked on enhancement of a cryptocurrency wallet accessed via web and cross-platform mobile applications, to increase performance, security, account management flexibility, and extend functionality. The wallet stores, sends, and receives tokens, collects crypto donations, and provides a QR code scanner for convenient crypto transactions.

In the context of working on the project, we completed the following:

We added an ability to sell and buy NFT tickets for sports events, which attendees can retain as digital collectibles with options for further reselling. We tied the wallet with the admin portal, providing ticket scanning during events as a pass system for attendees.
We integrated KYC service through Onfido with two-factor login, automated logout, encrypted keys, and address check for enhanced security to provide transparency and non-anonymity in executing donations.
Our experts created an admin portal to manage ticket processing—it contains the imported NFT tickets and information about their availability, prices, sales reports, event attendance, etc.

NFT Marketplace for Digital Collectibles

The NIX team enhanced a web application designed to buy, swap, and hold auctions related to digital collectibles. Users can make NFT collections—including exclusive ones provided by various brands—pay by credit card, and get points in the loyalty system, which can later be exchanged for NFTs.

The challenge was to join the AWS platform with web sockets to achieve real-time data display. AWS did not link with web sockets through existing tools in the box; thus, we developed a web socket analog using existing AWS tools and specific business logic for auction bid processing.

The app covered the following features:

Users can create digital assets and trade with them in 3 ways—auction, fixed price, and trading between owners.
Integrated Wyre service enabled users to deposit and withdraw money directly by exchanging fiat money for cryptocurrency.
Integration with CoinMarketCap was used to check real-time cryptocurrency rates.
Users can claim promo codes enabling them to get a certain amount of digital art for free—this helped involve more users in the ecosystem.
An admin portal provides user, NFT, multitenancy, and claim management along with promo code generation and current promo campaigns running.

DEX Portal

We built a decentralized exchange (DEX) portal—a space for peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading, where transactions are conducted directly without intermediaries and custodians.

The portal provides the following solutions:

Leveraging the Order Book ensures records maintaining and matching open orders for purchasing and selling assets for a particular price for a certain item.
Intelligent asset pricing was provided by the automated market maker (AMM) service.
Usage of liquidity pools helps maintain network liquidity and encourages users to deposit digital assets to pools by rewarding them with trading commissions and fees.
The backend service collects transaction data through the blockchain, GraphQL, and custom APIs, then caches, indexes, and aggregates information about asset exchanges.

Outcome

The NIX team helped the client build a fully-fledged and secure blockchain ecosystem at the required pace. The restructuring of internal processes provided by our business analysts and developers was game-changing. As a result, the client significantly reduced costs while accelerating the quality and speed of the projects’ launch.

A pool of robust and highly-demanded apps established a strong community around the client’s ecosystem, expanded its blockchain and cryptocurrency awareness, and increased its liquidity. Almost immediately, the company attracted the attention of brands, bringing in several major contracts with football associations, and won new investors, which positively impacted further development of the client’s company.

Team:

38 Experts (3 Project Managers, 3 Business Analysts, 5 Java Engineers, 2 PHP Developers, 3 JS Developers, 11 QA Manual and Automation Engineers, 2 iOS Developers, 3 Android Developers, 3 DevOps Engineers, GO/JS Engineer, Security Engineer)