The Interledger Community 🌱: Adelya Latifulina

ILF Summit Appreciation

Adelya Latifulina — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 01:28:05 +0000

One of the most enriching aspects of the summit was the opportunity to connect with a diverse array of individuals. Having been a part of this global community for a few years, my interactions were previously bound to virtual screens. The experience of finally meeting fellow community members in person was both gratifying and inspiring.

I extend my heartfelt thanks to the ILF team, including Ayesha, Julaire, Chris, and the numerous others who diligently contribute to the seamless functioning of ILF on its impressive scale. Special recognition is due to Briana, Flo, and Ginny for their exceptional contributions. My apologies for any oversights, as this marked my inaugural conference attendance.

Beyond the remarkable efforts of the staff, I was captivated by the chance to engage with other ILF grantees and gain insights into their impactful work. Witnessing the pace and scale at which companies operate, in this (relatively) nascent fintech domain, was truly awe-inspiring and a testament to their resilience.

Meeting professionals involved in regulatory efforts, government initiatives, and groundbreaking developments was equally beneficial. I am eager to contribute and collaborate on these fronts to make meaningful contributions.

The Future Money Open Studio arts exhibit was a personal highlight for me. As someone who appreciates the arts, the inclusion of a gallery featuring contemporary artists interpreting the theme was a delightful addition to the event. To all the talented artists who presented their work, your unique perspectives were truly appreciated, and I am grateful for the inspiration you provided.

Once again, thank you for orchestrating such a remarkable summit. I look forward to continued engagement with the ILF community and contributing to its mission in any way I can.

Gib (Round 2) — Final Grant Report

Adelya Latifulina — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 21:40:00 +0000

Project Update

After six exciting months, we are proud to present our work from this grant cycle! We were able to end on a great note, by showing our work to our local community (pic above). Along with technical development, it's important to us to be able to communicate our idea to everyone. So we invited a group of friends, family, co-workers, and the general public, all from different backgrounds, to share their first impressions of our project in our first ever public screening and demo!

Progress on objectives

In broad strokes, our intentions were to work with legal counsel and technical talent to carefully and correctly implement a working demo of our project, Gib - a gift card for the Internet. We were also very interested in Rafiki (an open source tool for building Interledger-powered applications), so we set a goal for ourselves to submit at least one pull request to their GitHub repository. Last, but not least, we wanted to create public facing media. Initially, we also intended develop technical blogs. In the end, however, our technical writing was mostly for commenting out code and our inspiration for public facing media became more playful. We decided instead to create a concise 90 second explainer video. It is with a deep sigh of relief that we share in this update that we were able to fulfill each of our goals!

Key activities

Money Transmitter License

We quickly became aware of the significance of acquiring a money transmitter license for our product. We were fortunate enough to have a few leads on securing specialized counsel to guide us - the most promising of which was a professional Adelya met a few years ago at a NYC panel about blockchain technology. Through this connection, and a few months of meetings, we were able to secure a contractual relationship with Kimberly Monty Holzel, a partner at Goodwin Procter LLP. She has been instrumental in helping us understand how our product will trigger various compliance needs as it matures.

For reference, we are currently based in NYC and while we aim to make a product that is compliant globally, we figured we should focus on local compliance first, then nationwide and so-forth. As an interesting side note, we previously had web monetization enabled on our company website, astar.app, by way of an Uphold wallet. It has since been disabled as Uphold works with the Department of Financial Services (DFS) in the State of New York to obtain a BitLicense (most recent date of notice 7.11.22).

Kim helped us understand how we can plan the growth of our business with respect to various compliance triggers. The advice helped us understand how to grow strategically, beginning with a closed loop (vendor specific) card that also includes (initially) daily transaction limits per user. We consider this to be a “walk before you run” growth path.

Hiring Techs

We were very excited to expand our technical team with a new hire! We learned an important lesson on how difficult it can be to hire the right fit and how valuable a good working relationship is. After a lot of searching, we were lucky to find a full-stack developer, Tyler Altenhofen. Tyler saw our post on the Recurse Center's network. If you are not familiar with the Recurse Center, it is a revolutionary programming retreat/residency in Brooklyn, NY (link), and a program which our team member Alex was also a part of.

In hindsight, we really appreciated Tyler’s agility and flexibility navigating a nascent technical environment. While we originally hired him as a TypeScript developer, we decided our initial build will be a JavaScript implementation.

Working Through Various Implementations of ILP

It was very important for us to be adaptable when building this project. We initially set out to build a TypeScript-based payment manager using Interledger’s Rafiki package. However, we realized that the development infrastructure necessary for our project’s success would be better off built from an even lower level. Tangential to this, the PR we submitted to Rafiki arose from a snag we had setting up the early-stage package on our own hardware.

We ultimately decided that we would set up a JavaScript and Rust based implementation, hosted on Linode, that would allow users to easily interact with the product. We developed a Docker image of our Gib backend using interledger-rs, which allows us to set up a Gib Interledger connector on any Docker-enabled host. This is a critical step in the open sourcing of this Gib build because it should allow any developer to spin up an ILP connector with Gib for their own closed-loop gift card.

Communications and Marketing

Our communication and marketing efforts are our website deliverable, gib.gives, which has our interactive demo and our explainer video aimed at the general public.

What’s Next?

Next we will slightly shift gears from tech to economics and legal due diligence. We want to focus on implementing a contractual relationship with a vendor for a closed-loop Gib deployment. This will involve working with our lawyers, as well as bringing on resources for market research.

What Community Support Would Benefit Your Project?

We would really appreciate it if folks would try out our demo and leave feedback!

Relevant links/resources

Gib.gives.

Gib Screening Invite! 8.12 BK

Adelya Latifulina — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 22:45:00 +0000

Hi folks!

We would like to invite you to join us for the screening of our first explainer video that summarizes the work our team has done to build "the giftcard for the Internet" aka monetized link sharing.

During the event, we will also showcase a demo of our product and host a Q&A session.

We would love your attendance for a few reasons, first of all, we want to meet you all IRL (time-space permitting). Also, with your intimate knowledge of the subject matter, we would love to hear your feedback. This is a breathing project and it is constantly refined and updated.

Event: Gib Vid Screening
Where: Stuart Cinema & Cafe
79 West St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
When: Friday, August 12th, 7pm-9pm
Bonus: Free entry + drinks & snacks provided
How: RSVP!

If you are interested but are unable to attend, we will be sharing the video + our demo website here for our final grant report.

As always, you are also welcome to reach out to us at hello@astar.app.

Thank you + hope to see you there ;)
Adelya

Gib (Round 1) — Grant Report #1

Adelya Latifulina — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 22:23:39 +0000

Project Update

Our project, Gib, was inspired by the financial inclusivity that is core to the Web Monetization philosophy and its revolutionary architecture. Gib is designed to use the Web Monetization standard and the Interledger Protocol in a simple component - facilitating the sharing of premium web content. Think of Gib like a gift card for the monetized web.

One of the first items on our agenda was a Product Roadmap (pictured above). Our roadmap includes an itemization of our deliverables, including:

Personas
Epics
Research documentation
Architecture documentation and diagrams
Functional, qualitative, and design specifications
Blogs
Initial and revised product build

Progress on Objectives

Aside from the Product Roadmap, we've created our Personas and fleshed them out with User Stories. We care deeply about empathizing with future users, so a design-thinking, human-centered approach is important to us.

We have also completed functional specs, a data flow diagram, and laid out our testing schedule.

Like all good virtual teams, we've set up a project management system to track our progress (GitHub project boards, in our case). Here we've begun to list our upstream requirements, as well as noting the various UML diagrams that will help us build.

All of our project assets are currently hosted privately, but in the near future we will move all assets to a public location and will share links.

Key Activities

We're currently finishing up our Architecture and Design Phase. In the coming weeks we will share all of the assets we're created!

Communications and Marketing

We plan to use our website, astar.app to share the good word of Web Monetization, and Gib, with the public.

What’s Next?

Once we've completed Architecture and Design Phase we're on to test driven development!

What Community Support Would Benefit Your Project?

We look forward to collaborating with members of this community to help us test Gib in coming phases of production. :)

Respectfully,
Adelya & Alex