Cardinal

Inspiration

The team works in Págala, a Salvadorean B2B payment platform. We are aware of SMB problems regarding Bitcoin and after discussing what is the biggest problem for end-users, it happens to be one of biggest problem for SMBs too.

The biggest problem for end-users: Adoption of Bitcoin because of lack of education in new concepts. One of the biggest problems for SMB: Mix personal and company money, because entrepreneurs need to use a personal card for online payments because banks rarely provide debit cards to small companies. For medium companies, using a wallet is kind of difficult, because these companies require approval flows and wallets are managed for one person.

The common solution for these problems? A smart virtual debit card funded with Bitcoin. For end-users: Use Bitcoin in a regular fashion, free of a learning curve For small companies: Pay with company funds, not with personal ones, this means healthier accounting For medium companies: Provide rules for spending with the smart card, so expenses are controlled

What it does

Cardinal connects with banks using OBP to provide a virtual debit card to its clients, the transactions with the card are funded with a Bitcoin wallet from the client and transferred to the bank, so the bank can act as a liquidity pool for card networks.

How we built it

In cardinal you can create cards, each card creates a virtual account in the bank and a smart contract. So the user can fund the smart contract and every time a card network requests a payment, a webhook will call the smart contract to check if there are enough funds to complete the transaction or deny it. If the transaction is completed, the equivalent Bitcoin amount is transferred to the bank and the bank can act as a liquidity pool for the card network to approve the transaction.

Challenges we ran into

As a team, we are really good at developing prototypes, but this is our first time approaching smart contracts, and they are a bit hard because of the configuration of multiple platforms and all the new concepts involved.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

At Págala we have the mission to provide financial solutions for SMBs, we already had 3 concepts in mind over Bitcoin / Blockchain, Cardinal was somehow one of the raw ideas, but with the motivation of the hackathon, we accelerate the development of the idea and prototype. We are really happy to get something real to share with allies and possible investors.

What we learned

To build a real product over Blockchain

What's next for Cardinal

Win the Bankathon and go from idea to reality 😎 Also we would like to have a near business relation with Banco Hipotecario for developing new products using OBP.

Built With

• api3
• express.js
• ganache
• hardhat
• opb
• react-native
• rsk
• solidity