Wallet List

Or where should I send you that cryptocurrency?

Yesterday marked the start of the Product Hunt Global Hackathon. Today Seth and I are launching our (the first?) entry.

Yes I know it’s a 30 day hackathon, but hackathons are meant for making fast, like really fast. I’ve done 54, 48 and 24 hour hackathons. I’ve taken idea’s to functioning websites in hours, and with Seth’s help they look great too! So what did we make?

The Idea

Cryptocurrency is all the rage, every day there seems to be a new ICO. People are participating more and more in the new distributed economy.

Sending and receiving funds is still a cumbersome process. Right from the start the process of exchanging addresses is painful, especially with so many currencies, and so many places to store your wallets and people trying new services all the time.

If you’re going to help solve the problem, why not start at the beginning.

Wallet List is a web application that allows you to build a list of your cryptocurrency wallets. The list is easy to share, and easy to update when you start dabbling in new currencies, or decide to try a new place to trade your Bitcoin.

The Design

We wanted to keep things simple and lightweight, speed is of the essence. Cryptocurrencies may well take hold in remotes parts of the world before so called more advanced countries, places where Internet service can be unreliable and slow. We wanted Wallet List to work everywhere.

Seth Louey did a live stream on Twitch as he designed the website, you can watch the recording here.

The Build

I used my preferred stack for building Wallet List.

LaravelPHP is a pleasure to work with, especially for these kind of rapid builds. I took a look at the new TailwindCSS framework for the front end, but decided to stick with Bootstrap. TailwindCSS looks really great, but I didn’t feel it was mature enough and my lack of experience with it would have slowed me down unnecessarily. I will be using Tailwind in a future project.

I used the CoinMarketCap API to generate a list of cryptocurrencies, and wrote a command to update the list on a daily basis. This command will likely be run more frequently later, as it also includes the latest pricing on the currencies, which I’d like to display on the website.

I then worked on the basic flow the application… A user can register to join the website, they can add and remove wallets, and they can share their wallet list on Twitter and Facebook.

A few hours later and I was ready to deploy the website.

Hosting

I considered hosting the service on Heroku, scaling in case of traffic spikes would be a little easier on Heroku, but I like the total control I get with hosting my sites on Digital Ocean. The packages required for the custom sharing image generation can be tricky on some hosting services. No problem with Digital Ocean.

The server is provisioned and managed with Laravel’s Forge. The code for the website is stored in GitLab repository, all hooked together nicely to make deploying updates a breeze.

The Launch

Here we are. I just submitted the project to Product Hunt, for the hackathon. I was only supposed to submit the upcoming page, but who’s got time for that, when you have a fully functioning website to maintain?!?

Big thanks go to Seth for jumping on the design so quickly and doing a fantastic job.

This is just the beginning. It’s nice to launch the MVP, but there a list of additional features I’d like to add to the website, so maybe we’re not really done for the hackathon.

Checkout Wallet List, I hope you like it!

Thank you

I’d like to thank Product Hunt for putting on the hackathon, and special thanks go to the anonymous person that sent me some Ethereum, I will use the funds wisely!