Coinnect

About the project

We built Coinnect at this hackathon because we kept running into the same problem, crypto payments look simple until you actually try to ship them. Merchants want “tap to pay” speed, customers want a dead simple flow, and nobody wants to trust a third party with keys or deal with chargebacks.

What inspired us

Watching teams pitch “payments” and then realize they were really building a wallet, a compliance workflow, and a checkout UI all at once. We wanted one clean layer that makes crypto feel like normal checkout, but still stays self custodial.

What we built

Coinnect is a self custodial crypto payments system that lets a business accept payments without ever handing custody to Coinnect. We focused on the happiest path, generate an invoice, present it as a link or QR, receive confirmation, and notify the merchant app instantly.

At a high level the flow is:

Create Invoice → Customer Pays → Confirm On Chain → Webhook → Fulfill Order Create Invoice→Customer Pays→Confirm On Chain→Webhook→Fulfill Order How we built it

We kept the architecture tight and hackathon friendly:

A lightweight backend that creates payment intents, tracks status, and exposes a simple API

A checkout page that shows invoice details, QR code, and live status updates

A listener that watches for payment confirmations and updates the intent

Webhooks so any app can react instantly when an invoice is paid

We built it to be plug and play, if you can call an API you can accept crypto.

Challenges we faced

Reliability, confirming payments quickly without false positives or missing edge cases

UX, making the checkout obvious and fast, no wallet address copy paste pain

Time, keeping scope under control so we could demo something real before the deadline

What we learned

Payments are mostly about trust and simplicity. The biggest win was narrowing the product down to one promise, accept crypto like a normal payment flow, but keep it self custodial end to end.

Built With

• python