BitcoffeeCoin

Our mission is to make the usage of cryptocurrencies as simple as buying coffee.

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What's Bitcoffee

Bitcoffee is a new generation cafe where technology blends harmoniously with tradition. Envisioned by software engineers, Bitcoffee pioneered in the usage of cryptocurrencies, digital menus, and smart inventory software.

Inspiration

Bitcoffee became a success between technology enthusiasts mainly thanks to its open policy towards cryptocurrencies. However, we noticed many potential early adopters reluctant to commit to the technology. We aim to lower the barriers to entry for our non-technical customers in order to allow them to experiment the benefits of the blockchain.

What it does

We developed a loyalty program based on an Ethereum token in order to simplify token acquisition and exchange for the general public. On every sale a customer is rewarded with real cryptocurrency, which can be easily exchanged at Bitcoffee for our products.

How we built it

At the core of our solution we have a novel smart contract called Bounded Trust Multi-party Payment Channel (or Bout Channel for short), which manages ERC20 tokens. The exchange of tokens is performed off-chain in order to reduce network fees. We based our design on well-known payment channel proposals such as Raiden Network, but we tried to avoid to lock collateral for each individual client.

We developed a DApp to be run on Toshi, and a backend in Java which we use to serve the requests that occur off-chain. We aim at helping our customers dowload and understan wallet software and DApps, thus upon redeeming off-chain points through our DApp, users will need to keep track of their BitcoffeeTokens on chain by a standard ERC20 compatible wallet.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first project with integrating traditional systems with smart-contracts. We found integration and interoperability to be extremely challenging. The lack of documentation and the mismatch with types required us to put a lot of time in reverse-engineer the APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe that deploying a migratable DApp on testnet powered by zeppelin-os the day of its release as a first project is a great achievement. We are very happy with the Bout Channel contract and the subtle security concerns we handled.

What we learned

We learned so much, but specially about the great things that these intense group efforts can get done in such a short time. We received help and advise from many experienced blockchain developers and we realized that the community is full of warm and open people. All in all we would love attend another hackaton, but not before sleeping for a week.

What's next for BitcoffeeCoin

We want to polish the UX and then release this to the customers of Bitcoffee. We will air-drop tokens and create a marketing campaign that rewards our customers for being a part of our community. Referring a friend, following us on facebook or twitter will earn them free points!

As the demand for cryptocurrencies grows we may even offer support to launch other similar loyalty programs.

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