The Interledger Community 🌱: Mike Huggins

Donation Stream — Grant Report #2(final report)

Mike Huggins — Mon, 03 May 2021 10:50:03 +0000

Final Report

It has felt like an incredibly quick 6 months since we were lucky enough to win a grant to make Donation Stream a reality, as you can see from the number of commits in the image it has been a busy time!

We will continue to issue updates through this forum and our social media channels but this will be our final grant report document.

We set off with a dream to try and connect the physical world with the virtual world (more on that later...).

It has been a steep but enjoyable learning curve, from where we started as developers (in terms of web monetisation and streaming payments), to where we have ended up. This is something we are very proud of.

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would certainly recommend any future grant applicants who are interested in web monetisation, ILP or the internet 2.0, to put forward a strong proposal. We would be happy to offer any advice we can and hope that you will get the opportunity to build something yourself which could make a real difference.

What is Donation Stream?

Donation Stream leverages web monetisation and the XRP ledger to allow donors to use cryptocurrency in the real world. Examples include, donating to a cultural location as you spend time on their site or streaming to a local musician as you listen to their music. The possibilities for connecting the physical with the virtual are endless.

You can find out more about us here: Donation Stream

Progress on objectives

• Provide charities, free museums, art galleries another revenue stream in an increasingly cashless society - we have a charity partner who is receiving streaming payments from beta donors. We are working with their team to develop understanding of cryptocurrency and its various processes. The relationship is at an early stage but they are delighted to be onboard.

• Link the physical with the virtual in order to increase the reach of web monetisation - We have achieved this with the use of QR codes. Users can scan the QR code of a donee and send them payments. The intention being that you arrive on site, scan the code and continue your day from there. Best explained here:

• Increase the amount of content available to people who support streaming payments in all their forms - by having a real world partner who payments can be streamed to this opens up a whole new use case for web monetisation/ILP. Why should monetisation be confined to the virtual world? The content of the real world can now be accessed too.

We originally highlighted that success on our 6 month project was that we should have a minimum viable product to be able to take to possible partners and provide the opportunity for them to achieve additional revenue streams(particularly via web monetisation and originally via interledger). We did limit ourselves geographically to the Manchester, UK area to start with.

With regards to donors/donees, our aim was to save transaction fees whilst also turning donations into something more international and experience rich.

Key activities

Front end GUI for donors/donees to interact with(auth, news, on-site partners, notification of streaming events, streaming partners) - This has all been achieved. The feedback received confirms that this service feels slick and polished.
Integrations with existing XRP payment service providers(Xumm, Coil, Uphold etc) - We have integrated everything in our initial plan(aside from Interledger of which we only have a prototype). Donors can utilise Coil to stream payments to donee's payment pointers(usually generated by Uphold). In addition donors can also settle invoices via Xumm.
Back-end services (databases for recording usage - privacy compliant, delivering payments to on-site partners, login auth) - This has all been achieved.
Integration with on-site partner/partners - We currently have one integrated partner.

Views from the website

It is much easier to understand what we have been working on if you take a look around the site, we would love to see you there. Here are a few images to whet your appetite. Feel free to ask any questions.

Profile Page - donors/donees can assign their own payment pointers to this page:

A quote from the landing page and Coil counter in operation:

Statistics for a donor/donee's streams:

A view of account settings that can be changed/updated:

Xumm token expiry information

The donation page a donor is taken to when scanning a QR code:

Dark mode on the main donor dashboard page:

Oauth signup and login options:

A payment stream in operation:

A stream in operation from the dashboard view:

Communications and marketing

We have stepped up our marketing activity in the last month, opting to spend our communication budget on an animated video, logos and banners, social media images and a Hootsuite account to schedule our communication and plan ahead. We have also taken careful consideration of target groups and timings.

All of the marketing elements are completely new to us so we are learning as we go. It is certainly much more involved and time consuming than we initially thought, which has proved a challenge in our small team of two. We’ve found it has drawn us away from development so have had to budget our time carefully.

We have been able to release coil blogs, blogs on this web monetisation site and also create our own blog space on the website to try and retain traffic and add more value. Our plan is to expand this functionality to our donors/donees.

We are particularly proud of our animated video and think it captures the essence of our product well.

We appreciate that building a brand is a slow process and we are keen to learn and adapt. We hope our efforts so far will continue to gain traction and we have also kept some powder dry to reach out to further partners in the future.

What’s next?

Our timeline was for a 6 month project and our intention is to continue to talk to potential partners with the aim of testing at on-site cultural locations.

The webapp is designed to be used in a physical location and we want to conduct those experiments. We're hoping that venues will begin to open in the next few months as lockdown restrictions begin to lift.

We are keen on implementing Interledger in more areas of the application rather than just around payment pointers on users profile pages. We currently use Xumm as a means of transferring streaming payments as we felt it would allow us to achieve a slick MVP more quickly. Setting up Interledger here would be a great next step for us.

We already have a means of adding blogs to our site (in an mdx format), so could consider giving donors/donees the ability to add blogs about events and web monetization. We also want to consider more features to increase time on site and thereby increase revenues to our donors/donees.

Having built a strong knowledge around streaming payments and web monetisation, we are keen to explore other user cases and possible areas of expansion (eg. music gigs etc).

Lessons identified

Donation Stream is a virtual to on-site payment stream service. To allow the service to reach its full potential, we need physical locations to be open to the public.

Although venues are really interested in our digital proposal, many of the museums we have been in touch with are currently closed or suffering financially (or in terms of staffing) in order to be able to support nascent technology.

We maintain good links and hope to be able to re-approach them in the near future once their immediate crises are over. We have been able to onboard one partner in order for beta users to practice streaming payments to.

For Interledger Protocol our initial intent was to implement this as a method of payment (inclusive of storing wallet secrets of our donors), however we did find the landscape and documentation a bit confusing and contradictory. A lot of the gateway tutorials and general documentation didn't seem to work and it was difficult to tell which best practices did apply.

However, we did eventually manage to breakthrough and setup an interledger payment flow. After some deliberation, we felt it was over complex for our MVP and the time we would need to invest in terms of setup would be better spent creating a slick flow within the bounds of Xumm and web monetisation via payment pointers.

As mentioned above we are not ruling out revisiting this idea in the future as we are still excited by the technology and it could really complement the service we provide. In addition, we would like to add in stream receipts as a trust-based verification of our service and users.

What community support would benefit your project?

We will always needs business partners to enable Donation Stream at their sites and we will always need donors/donees to fuel those donations. The more the merrier! If you have any questions for us then get in touch and we can talk further about how you can get involved.

You can find out more about us here: Donation Stream Beta

Donation Stream — Grant Report #1

Mike Huggins — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 15:40:07 +0000

Project Update

Welcome to Donation Stream! A real time streaming platform to bring creators in the physical world together with donors who attend their locations (think about us as allowing donations to museums or art galleries that are free to enter).

Hello 👋

Wow what a rush, first the surprise and delight of being awarded a mid-level grant by the Grant For Web team, followed by the trepidation of knowing we had to come up with the goods! Then came realism - trying to understand the Interledger protocols, navigate a global pandemic and carefully begin to progress towards an MVP using Xumm...it has been an interesting time since we officially began the project on the 1st of November 2020.

Pictures paint a thousand words so here is a small selection of our nascent user interface featuring some very happy grant winners (Mike and Luke)! Some of it is on the site and some is still in development.

The journey so far...

We are 12 weeks into our project and it can best be broken into two 6 week phases.

Phase 1 - All things Interledger

The first 6 weeks we spent grappling with the nuances of Interledger and online web monetisation documentation. We built a limited connector, used SPSP to connect a sender and receiver and pass payment details, utilised a STREAM via a BTP connection, then at some point...it felt a bit too complex. The time taken to build out a suitable Interledger solution would have used a large chunk of our project time and the rest of the project would have suffered as a result.

Post MVP we thought it would be a really nice feature for users to be able to add different wallets and for us to take the pressure of storing cryptographic secrets(😅). Using the rust Interledger connector in containers to stream payments(which we currently have working locally but not deployed), we even discussed keeping everything just on the Interledger testnet and running a pseudo streaming system. In the end we deemed that unnecessary. Again for an MVP that needs to be slick and feel good to retail users and charities, we were over-engineering our product.

Phase 2 - The Pivot

The next 6 weeks were very different. Being aware of Xumm and the Xumm api it struck us that with the number of users who have downloaded the app and already store their payment details within Xumm, we could send XRP payments via streams from our webapp. A side note here is that given we are UK based, any action from the SEC is not applicable in the UK(our regulations for cryptocurrencies are very clear).

Xumm is an ideal system to allow us to build out our application, make it slick in terms of a working MVP and add other payment solutions in the future. Albeit Xumm is used more as a way of settling a total receipt than streaming in the truest sense.

From this start point we built out an application in Next.js and tailwindcss. The gui can create accounts, change account details, store public xrp account details, send donations using a users unique donate url, show a dashboard of streams sent and received, process transactions using serverless functions and verify transactions on the XRP ledger. Not to mention dark mode support in the pipeline! After just 6 weeks of development we are very pleased with the overall 'look' and now have a JIRA board full of exciting new features to implement.

Progress on objectives

Overall objective

Provide charities, free museums, art galleries and other organisations an alternative revenue stream in an increasingly cashless society

We are on track to provide the MVP to support our overall objective. We have reached out to some charities but have not contacted any major museums in the Manchester area, partly because we know they aren't open at the moment(given the pandemic!) and partly because we would like to show them a slick system for receiving streaming payments. We want to be in a position to spring into action the moment they are but we need to close the gap with our product first. In addition they will need support with setting up web monetisation on their sites(getting a payment pointer and updating the head script etc), which we are not quite yet in a position to provide.

Key activities

Front end GUI/Back end services - it is happening and changing on a daily basis, indeed 382 commits right now! We are using Firebase/Firestore for users, auth, databases and serverless functions.
Integrations with existing XRP payment service providers(Xumm, Coil, Uphold etc) - We have our site web monetised using our Uphold payment pointer for coil subscribers and our main payment method is now via Xumm
Integration with on-site partner - all physical locations are closed in the UK and we would like to be able to show a slick product. As soon as we our comfortable with our output we will start to approach Manchester Museums prior to them opening.
Increased social media activity in the web monetisation sphere - We always said at the half way point would begin our social media activity, Twitter, XRPChat, Web monetisation forum etc. This will be uplifted shortly (having said that we are geeky devs and so will have to try to appear normal!😆)

Communications and marketing

If we are honest with ourselves we are both devs who love to build things but we know that this project needs us to be more than that, much more!

It was always our plan to begin engaging with a wider audience from month 4 onwards - via Twitter, Reddit, Xrp Chat, Coil blogs - to build interest in the specific community.

To begin with, this will be a regionally focused and real world project with broader reach, we need to find a way to make it accessible and fun....any ideas then please help!

In terms of marketing budget, it is all reserved for on-boarding partners and conducting a social media plan.

If we get really desperate in drumming up attention then we will just have Luke do a 24 hour sing a long for charity!

What’s next?

The remainder of our time (3 months) will be spent making a slick user experience and adding new features. Alongside this we aim to bring onboard a physical location partner, show them the web monetisation future of their business and drum up an army of streamers/users to make any events a success.

We need to think about beta users in the near future both in terms of donees and donors to trial out our system and help find bugs.

We are really excited by the prospect of working with a museum, art gallery or charity to refine our product and demo where we have got to so far. We will also highlight where we are planning on going. We're keen to impress but know it is going to be an intense few months.

The fly in the ointment to all this of course is that our product was always connecting the physical with the virtual i.e someone attending a museum and donation streaming payments. At the moment Covid-19 is preventing this but with a fantastic vaccination programme well underway in the UK, we hope for a window of opportunity towards the end of our project.
If the situation starts to look bleak then we will have to pivot our plan again....

What community support would benefit your project?

We would really benefit from someone helping us on the social media side of life. If we can't find people in the community then we will likely look to employ someone on a freelance basis to come up with a solid and reliable plan to draw engagement for us in the right areas.

Goodbye 👋

Thank you for taking the time to read and we hope to speak to you soon.