stream.gift - crypto donations on Twitch

Inspiration

Many streaming platforms and creators depend on crowdsourced or crowdfunded support from their audiences. However, most crowdfunding solutions involve traditional payments, leading to challenges such as fraudulent donations & chargebacks, high fees from streaming platforms, and complications with international banking payments for different regions. Despite these major problems for nearly a decade, livestream crowdfunding & fundraising is still largely successful & encouraged. Some effort in has been made to PoC crypto payments for streamers, but are generally a low TRL score, and a market ready product to solve these problems for streamers is yet to arrive.

What it does

Introducing stream.gift, a crypto donation platform for streamers we've started building in September. You can send a streamer a donation easily on Solana, (and now SUI on alpha.stream.gift (ex. twitch.gift/nickmura2) and a streamer can listen for these donation alerts on their livestream via OBS, which can be announced & notified live. Users can also customize their alerts TTS, and color/gradient to be displayed. Donations are handled via a custodial HD wallet (hierarchical wallet) and non-custodial withdrawals to enable both Web3 wallet transactions (Phantom, Glow) and mobile/external transactions sent from an exchange or external wallet.

How we built it

We started building stream.gift in mid September, and by the beginning of October we launched stream.gift on Solana Devnet. At the end of October, we launched stream.gift on another chain we've had the opportunity to work with, Sui.

The custody management system for accepting donation payments uses a hierarchical wallet (HD wallet) via ED25519 This ensures we can use multiple addresses derived from a single public private key pair so we can validate multiple donations at once as well as donations from multiple devices.

We also utilize Twitch OAuth for authenticating users / accounts on our platform

We used

Challenges we ran into

During the beginning of October, we participated in Build Station Toronto from Superteam Canada at Solana and we did not win the pitch competition. We traveled from Alberta to Toronto to pitch to Superteam Caanada Despite this setback, this only made us more forward with our approach to possible opportunities & connections. We've been builidng our product since mid September and started in May 2024 with our concept. This deadline also overlapped stream.gift's commute to Devcon, from Canada to Thailand. a blockchain conference where we are meeting with friends and the handful of people who helped build stream.gift to this point.

We also experimented with Twitch Extensions, however we did not have enough time to submit or apply for approval for our extension for donation / sub leaderboards.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Won Sui Overflow 2nd Place back in may for a proof of concept
Since September, completely refactored our application with a new look, backend, and user experience (with onboarding)
Launched on two different networks (Solana x Sui)
Providing a reliable and clean UX to streamers
Connecting / collaborating with all of our direct integrations & services (Solana, Sui, & QuickNode, & now Twitch)

What's next for stream.gift - crypto donations on Twitch

As stated, stream.gift Team is currently on it's way to Devcon in Thailand, to meet up with the companies and people that have worked with us since the beginning.

We will continue to be as resourceful & market our product as possible with our upcoming opportunities, & strive to build strong connections networks, empowering both stream.gift the networks and tools we utilize. Let's start building the next generation of crowdfunding tools for streamers & content creators.