Envelope

Inspiration

A few days before the hackathon we brainstormed on what to build. Our focus was on adoption of blockchain technology and what could be done to improve the process. We started to think about the idea of tipping people with cryptocurrency. There we got the main issue, the complex steps on creating a wallet, with no incentive to do so in the first place. This needs to be done before people can be tipped. But why should people create a wallet if they have nothing to gain, on the other hand, how can I send them money if they have no wallet. Kind of like the Hen and egg problem. Our idea is to enable crypto users to send tokens, without the need of a wallet on the recipients end.

What it does

Our Platform allows crypto users to send funds to people who don't use crypto yet.

Users connect their wallet with our Website. There they fill out a field, entering the recipients email and the amount. Once they hit sent, our site automatically creates a wallet for the beneficiary and pastes the address into the senders Metamask.

The recipient receives an email with a unique link to our website, that allows him to retrieve the seed phrase. The seed phrase is only stored locally, not viewable by us or anyone other than the recipient. From now on his email is linked to this wallet, meaning he can receive multiple inputs without needing a new wallet every time.

After the transaction is confirmed, the recipient receives another email, containing information about the amount that was sent. This is to ensure, that people can not "spam" anyone with fake sends, they cancel immediately. Now he has an incentive to use the wallet, since there is already a balance on it.

Envelope supports every EVM compatible chain.

How we built it / Build with

We first set up a server with express. There we generate wallets for recipients securely. The seedphrase gets encrypted with AES and stored in a local database. We also can not see this information. The next step was to set up a website with react and integrate etherjs. Etherjs allows users to connect their wallet with our website. We also designed a rough sketch out with figma and then implemented the code, following the proposed design.

Challenges we ran into

What to include and what not. We only got 26 hours to code and that means we have to cut back on potential ideas and make sure our proof of concept is ready. The second main challenge, is web security since we are storing seed phrases, the most sensitive data out there.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy that we still found a good and important concept right before the hackathon, to focus on something that really interest us. Even thought there are many choices on how to realize our idea, we managed to include what was essential.

What we learned

We learned about AES, a secure algorithm to encrypt data. It is used by the US government. It was also the first time we worked with automatic e-mail sending from our website.