Woop Pay

All right, we're live. GM, GA, GE everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you don't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they are passionate about or have been working on in Web3. This could be an awesome project they've been working on, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the Web3 community. And today I'm ecstatic to have Alessandro from Woop Pay, who will be giving us an overview of said product. Welcome, Alessandro. Happy to have you on, man.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Narb. I mean, thanks, thanks for the opportunity. As I was saying, like this is great for us to showcase the product, hopefully get some feedback. So, really happy to be here.

Awesome. Yeah, and happy to have you. I guess, before we get into it, maybe you can give a little background about yourself, how you got started in Web3 software development, and how you found yourself in Developer DAO.

Yeah, sure. Awesome. So, my background is actually in product management. So today I'm a product manager in a staking service company. But during my free time, I act as co-founder of Woop Pay, which is actually like an important project also for Developer DAO since it was built within Agency. My experience in Web3 started... I even forgot the exact year, but it was like the last Bitcoin halving. Beginning mostly like an investment opportunity and then slowly entered like in a rabbit hole for Ethereum, I got some skills, some dev skills to kind of build some prototypes, and yeah, today I'm here building Woop Pay and hopefully adding value to the community.

100% you are, yes. And that's interesting. You say you're a product manager, but I guess did you learn software development as you were doing product management, or you were learning that kind of like in the after hours?

Yeah, exactly. So indeed, I had my day-to-day job indeed, product owner, product manager, and stuff. And then I mean, Web3 is kind of like this new space, there is like a lot of innovation happening. And in general, like as a product person, like you have all these ideas, but you always need to rely on others to build them. And that's fine if you work in an organization, but if you are just by yourself, it's a bit more complicated. So at some point I was like, yeah, let me learn something by myself so I can, you know, build some ideas, build some prototypes and stuff. So I started joining like a lot of hackathons. In the meantime, watching a lot of YouTube tutorials on YouTube. And yeah, here I am, building stuff together with other people, so everything is possible.

Exactly. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, it's amazing when you apply yourself, you get these superpowers, especially with software development. But yeah, I'd love to hear that. Yeah, let's get into it. What do you have in store for us today?

Yeah, yeah. So I will share my screen. So for me, the agenda, I want to kind of give a short intro about Woop Pay, and then I would really like to do a live demo because the product is live. So I think it will be amazing, you know, to kind of show how the product works end-to-end and, yeah, hopefully get some feedback, get some questions and stuff. So, I will share my screen, Narb.

Can you see the slides, Narb?

Yes, yeah. Slides are visible.

Awesome. Awesome, awesome. So, indeed, this presentation is about Woop Pay. Woop Pay, in short, is a web application to create cryptocurrency payment requests. As I mentioned, this is a special project within Developer DAO, because it was built within Agency. Agency is this subgroup of Developer DAO, made of committed people, you know, that want to build new applications in the ecosystem. And we started, as always, from a problem, or I should say probably like an opportunity out there, which was that we kind of saw, very often, when it comes to creating cryptocurrency payment requests using Web3 tokens, what we often notice is that people are sharing like their wallet address via Discord and then adding a bunch of information, for example like the specific token they wanted, like the specific amount, and stuff. And this process, as it was, especially if you think about like copy-pasting the wallet address, it's very easy to make mistakes. So we thought, okay, here is an opportunity for us to kind of simplify the flow, and this is what brought us to the idea for Woop Pay. Which is not an original idea in itself, like it's quite common in Web2. So for us, it was like, okay, how do we kind of transition something that already exists in Web2 and we make it compatible for Web3. So that's the short story behind it. So how does it work? If you go to our website, wooppay.xyz, there you will have a screen where basically you can connect your wallet, you can select the exact amount that you want to receive, you can select the token, and by creating what we call a Woop, the application will generate a link. This is basically the payment link. The payment link can also be visualized as a QR code. You can share it with another person, and the other person, by clicking the link, by accessing the link, will essentially have the ability to simply connect the wallet and pay the amount that was requested. So it doesn't require any other step. It's simply as simple as sharing a link and having the other person clicking on the link and paying. So that's the kind of experience we want to offer around payments, try to simplify the flow as much as possible.

Of course, like this is the core of how Woop Pay works. And then, for us, it was important, you know, trying to think, okay, how can we add even more value to this core concept. That's why we started like looking, for example, at other products in Web3, how can we integrate them, how can we add value to our users. Push was one of the first. In this, the use case here is quite simple. So once you send a payment request to someone, of course as a requester, you want to be notified when the payment is done. Now you have two options. You can either have your wallet open and wait for the balance to be updated, or, as we show here, you can also just basically wait for the notification to happen directly on Woop Pay. So Woop Pay basically will allow you to see all the transactions, all the payments successful that you have received using our application. And this way, again, we want to simplify, improve the whole experience for the user.

In that direction, we also started thinking, okay, for some users, for example, the fact of accessing like a separate website and clicking a bunch of links might add, let's say, some relative complexity to that. So again, we were trying to keep looking for opportunities to improve the flow, to improve the experience. And when we were actually pitching the product to some of our early users, we received like this feedback of why not using Telegram for that. So this is how the idea came for creating a Telegram bot, which is live since, I think, like two or three weeks right now. So directly from Telegram, you can enter again a bunch of information about the payment that you want to request, and the bot essentially will guide you through the creation of the payment link. And then it's simple as sharing the link, have the person click on the link and then paying the amount that was requested. We also created a community on Telegram. I will actually share the link at the end of the presentation. So if you want to share feedback, if you want to know product updates that we might have in the future, feel free to join and help us to grow even further.

Of course, Woop Pay is a very simple flow. It is an application that allows you to create a payment request that you can share and have the person executing the payment that you wanted. So there are, I'm sure, there are many use cases out there that could be enabled by Woop Pay. And here, I just listed a few, but of course, the range of use cases is huge. We start from, yeah, this is more like a meme kind of thing, like pizza payments. Imagine like you go out for dinner, you paid the entire bill, and you want to send like your friends a payment request using cryptocurrency instead of another currency, for example. That just requires you again to either use the Telegram bot or go to our website, enter the amount that you want to request, and send it to your friends essentially. We are also looking into the freelancer use case, so the ability for the freelancer to basically request a specific amount to their clients once the job is done. Or donation again, simplify the flow for NGOs or charities that might want to attract, for example, also assets in the cryptocurrency space, in the Web3 space, and indeed are looking for an application that simplifies the flow as much as possible. But as I mentioned, the range of use cases is really big. I think it's really huge, especially when it comes to payments. So for us, right now, the priority is try to find like a specific kind of use case that we want to develop, and focus on that. And again, our priority is really like improving the user experience as much as possible.

Now, enough with the slides. Actually, I wanted to show a real demo of how the product works. As I said, the product is live. It's actually live since December. I think we launched during Christmas, so it was a special gift for us. So this is the application. We tried to reuse some of the design concepts kind of familiar in Web3, so you might find some similarities with Uniswap, for example. As I say, so let me connect my wallet. Choose among several networks. We support mostly EVM chains here, so you have Ethereum, some testnet networks, and then some Layer 2 networks. And then it's a matter of simply selecting, okay, which token do you want to receive? For example, I want to use like a stablecoin, selecting the amount, can be as little as, I don't know, just five DAI. And create a Woop. As you see, so the system will generate a link for you. If you right now scan this QR code, it will simply redirect you to the payment page which I'll show you. You also have the ability to immediately share the link using some of these social media channels, for example, Twitter.

So let me take the link. So basically, this is the link that was just generated. Now imagine you're sharing with someone, this person now will receive the link, will access the link, and will see this interface. So we'll see who is basically requesting this payment, how much is he asking, he will be asked to connect his wallet. So for example, let me, let me right now change the wallet, otherwise I'm just going to pay myself. And let me initiate a payment request. In Woop Pay, we are really leveraging other Web3 products, other Web3 libraries to make the flow possible. Like we are not reinventing anything here. We are simply like reusing some of the existing products and libraries. For example, here we are using a lot like wagmi under the hood to generate the transactions and to also track the status of the transaction. So once you basically select to continue with the payment, you have the ability to, of course, sort of see the review on MetaMask. Actually, I'm not sure if you guys can see it because I think it doesn't show MetaMask here. But basically, right now, I've just confirmed the transaction on MetaMask. And as soon as the transaction is added in a block, it's confirmed, then you will see a payment success notification. Again, the time here doesn't really depend on Woop Pay, it depends more on the network activity. So here we can see that the payment has been sent. If you click here, you basically get redirected to Etherscan.

But right now, I want to show you for the requester how does it look like. So let me change the wallet back to the requester here. So the requester basically, by clicking here, he will have the ability to see that a transaction has been sent to him. If you click, you can also verify that directly on Etherscan. And yeah, it's simple as that. So I also want to mention that we also have the ability for the requester to say that the payer will basically decide the amount to transfer, since this also was mentioned as a potential use case.

Narb, I'm not sure how much time more I have. But if I have still some time before the QA, I can also show you how the Telegram bot works. What do you think?

Yeah, yeah, you have time.

Okay, perfect. So, let me just copy the address. Let me stop sharing one second so I can use the other screen. Okay. Okay, perfect. So, you should see a Telegram page right now. Funny story, yesterday I was testing the flow and discovered there was a bug. So I was like, in all panic mode yesterday trying to fix it. So right now, it should work. And yeah, so once you connect to our bot, it's simply called Woop Pay Bot. You can't really miss it. Basically, first thing it asks you is to basically paste your wallet address. So, for example, here we are using this one. Yeah, so that's... what I want to mention is there is sometimes some lag between the request and the response. The reason is that we are still in an experimental phase here, so we are also leveraging a service, of course, which is not let's say at the top of the performance in that sense. After passing the wallet, by the way, the address, we kind of also make a check that the address is valid, is a real EVM address. Then the next step is to basically pass the command. Simply create, and then it asks you to essentially select in which network do you want to receive the payment, which token do you want to use, DAI for example, enter the amount in the chat, and then generate the payment link, fingers crossed it works. And here we have the link. By clicking on this link, you get redirected to the payment page where basically the users or whoever it is can access, can connect his wallet and execute the payment.

So, yeah, so this is how the Telegram bot works. And this is also actually the end of the presentation, so I don't know if there are any questions from anyone.

Yeah, this was awesome. In terms of questions I have, I have a few. But again, if you have any questions, please post them in the comment section of YouTube, and I'll ask on your behalf. But I guess, first question off the top of my head is, where did you come up with the name Woop? Like, what was the inspiration behind that?

That's also a funny story, you know. That's the beauty when you work in a group and stuff. So our original name was actually Web3 Pay. And then, say, when we were working on the initial design, Web3 Pay was like kind of somehow too obvious to some extent. And then, one of the major contributors in the project, called Gordo, he came with this idea, I don't remember exactly what was the thing, but it was like, okay, like whoop, whooping and stuff. And then, say, just Woop Pay. Then he brought it to us, and we don't really mean... I'm not a native English speaker, but somehow the sound, I like it, and then we said, okay, let's go with it. So, mix of coincidence, a mix of, yeah, we both like it. Yeah, that's how the name was created.

Awesome. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, sometimes it's just like the spur of the moment you come up with some of the coolest stuff. And are there any plans to have this as a mobile app? Because it kind of seems similar to like a Venmo or something like that. So I think you could totally expand the user base behind that if you have it as a mobile app.

Yeah. It's in our bucket list or bucket ideas of something that we want to explore. The reality is that right now we are very careful on how we are spending our capacity in terms of development. There are many things we can do at this stage. Creating a mobile application for us might take like a lot of the available capacity, and for us, the priority at this moment is really trying to kind of understand okay where we can add value with this product in the community, talk with users, get feedback, understand how Woop Pay can really solve a problem in the Web3 space. Once that is clear for us, I think, yes, we will be definitely more focus on the development, for example, like a mobile application, which is something that I really want to bring because, as I say, we want to improve user experience, and I believe indeed a mobile application goes in that direction. So, so yes, it's something we are thinking about.

Awesome. And I guess on the flip side, what about something like introducing an SDK or API to allow other people to integrate Woop Pay into their applications?

Yeah. We have an API, so there is indeed the ability for other platforms to integrate our product, so to immediately basically pass some values that are the same that you enter when you generate the payment request, and receive as a response, as an API response, the payment link. If you go to our GitHub, by the way, our project is open source. You can see literally everything about this project, except of course the .env file. But, yeah, there you'll also see the instruction how to use our API. We also have a collection in Postman, so it's kind of easy for other developers to play around with it.

Awesome. Yeah, that's great to hear. Yeah, definitely making this kind of thing more accessible for folks to integrate like one library or API versus all the multiple ones that you had to do to get this to work is like developer enhancement, right? So that's awesome that you guys made that available.

I guess another question would be, what was kind of like the biggest challenge or hurdle you and Gordo had to overcome as you were developing Woop Pay?

Yeah. I can think of too many, too many challenges. I think for us, the biggest challenge today is really getting that, that traction, that user traction for people to try our product, to share feedback, tell us if it adds any value or not. I mean, we are in a bear market. We understand that indeed, cryptocurrency is not yet in a stage where everyday payments are done using Web3 tokens. So this application itself might be more useful in the future where cryptocurrency really like that financial backbone infrastructure in place. So for us, we are kind of using a bit our gut feeling in how the product should evolve. But without that user validation, we are guessing there. And for me, that's the biggest hurdle today, is really understanding okay how people will use it, if they will use it, and how to kind of build our roadmap to make it a product for the community. In the end, that's what I want to build, that's what we want to build.

And I guess on that point, how can people reach out to you if they do have feedback, want to give you a feature request, is there a form or open channel people can contact you?

Yeah, we have multiple ways. So there is a Telegram community. There, it's kind of straightforward, easy to share your feedback and tell us what you think, what you like, what you don't like. We have also like a Twitter page. You can also reach out directly to my Twitter handle. Some people have sent me DMs with some feature requests, and then in a matter of weeks, they were in place. For example, this is the story of... we also have basically an integration with ENS, so once you get to the payment page, you also have the ability to see the person who is requesting payment through their ENS. So Twitter DMs, Telegram, I think indeed they are the easiest way for that.

Excellent. Yeah, folks, if you have any feedback for Alessandro or Gordo on Woop Pay, your feedback will be much appreciated. And plus, we're DD, DD gotta support DD, right? So...

Yes, please.

That's right, that's right. And I guess final question for me, you mentioned that Woop Pay is open source. Is there opportunities for other folks in DD to help continue to build out features? If so, how can they get started?

Yeah, that's a good question. So indeed, that's also how I want to kind of continue this project to be, is like open source as much as possible, have indeed like a community coming together and building this product together, let's say. I think again, as I say, like Twitter and Telegram are the main channels that we have to talk with people, to receive feedback, but also maybe to receive indeed, to hear from people that might be interested in joining. As I mentioned at the beginning, like this project is created within Agency. Agency is like this team of committed builders that want to build applications. So I think also through Developer DAO Discord, you can check indeed like the dedicated Agency space, and from there, you can apply to join the group or you can contact directly me, and then I can guide you through that. So, more than happy to have more people on board on this project. Yeah, that would be amazing.

Awesome. Yeah, folks, get on that Woop train, if you aren't already. Thank you so much, Alessandro, for coming on and giving us this wonderful demo and overview. Really excited to see Woop Pay continue to grow and always looking to support DD projects here on DevNTell. So, you're welcome to come back on any time if you've got a new version or new features you want to show to the gang.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again for the opportunity, Narb. So it's amazing indeed. I hope a lot of people will reach out, share ideas, and help us to build Woop Pay for the future.

Yeah, 100%. And just to leave things off with some administration stuff, so if you don't know, Developer DAO and Press Start Capital have this awesome fellowship program going on. So if you're someone like Alessandro who's built an awesome project and you want to get your first check, definitely look to apply to the fellowship program. I will drop the link in the chat here, but you have until Sunday, I believe, midnight. Don't quote me on that, but definitely, it is Sunday to fill out that form. And at the very least, if you're one of the first 100 people to fill out that form, you'll get 400 POAP tokens, and the team at Press Start Capital will give you feedback on your app even if you don't end up getting accepted into the fellowship program. So you literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain, so definitely check that out if you haven't already. And as a send-off here, I want to share with you the QR code to claim your mint kudos for attending DevNTell today. So what you'll want to do is grab your QR code scanner, your regular QR code scanner from your phone, scan that code, and you will have one hour, at the top of this hour, to claim your mint kudos for being an attendee. So again, pull out your QR code scanner, scan that code, and claim your kudos for the next one hour.

And with that, I would like to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend, and that we'll see you back here next week. All right, gang. All the best.

Thank you, guys. See you.

See you. Bye.