Besides being very attractive for several major industries, Blockchain technology also has the potential of powering prosperity on a global scale. The fact that it is now possible to securely transfer value directly between two parties, without a middle man and without the need of a bank account could have a vast impact on how we think about money and trade. Smart contracts (small pieces of code that run on the Blockchain) enable completely new decentralized business models and everyone — ourselves included — is just pretty much hyped of what to come.
In case you haven’t followed our progress in the last months, we are developing a mobile platform on Android that covers a broad set of use cases for the Ethereum blockchain. Possible stakeholders are not only the end user who wants to send and receive Ether with the wallet part of the platform, but also Android developers who can use our API to make their app send transactions and access smart contracts on behalf of the user (read more).
Since our platform went into public beta people from all over the world began using it and giving us feedback of what to improve and what to add next. We decided that the best way to show how people can benefit from blockchain technology in a mobile context is to build a product based on our platform.
ethPay — a decentralized payment framework
ethPay is a dApp which makes it very easy for you to sell your products and services just by using your mobile phone. But before going a bit more into detail let us jump into an example right away.
I absolutely love to play guitar and a lot of people say that I am talented, so I thought I’d give it a shot and recorded my first song. People liked the song and told me I could even make money with it. However, I don’t want to put too much effort into monetizing it so I use ethPay to create a store and generate a link which can be used to buy my song.
I start off by creating a new store:
Creating a new store
As you can see, I already own three stores, I could also use one of these to sell my song but I prefer keeping my business separated so I create one just for my music.
Once the store is created, I generate a new offer with the title of my product, its price and optionally an identifier (this helps me categorize my purchases).
Generating a new offer
The app generated a link which I can share anywhere I want to make it possible for people to purchase my song. I could for instance set up a facebook fanpage and upload a sample of my song together with this link or I could also generate a QR Code of the link, print it out, and post it anywhere I want for people to scan.
A customer then just needs to open the link or scan the code with the app and sees the details:
Making a purchase
That’s it! I just sold my first song in a matter of minutes!
The preview of ethPay is already part of the latest release of our wallet app. At the time it only runs on our private testchain so it is not possible yet to make purchases on the main network. As you could see in the screenshots there is a lot more to be done in terms of UI and meta data, e.g. store naming and communication channels between customer and merchant. We wanted to show you our progress and invite you to participate in the testing phase.