[Part II] - Halfway Update - Integrating a Token Economy into my App using the Simple Token Platform - OST ALPHA III

 Fellow Steemians!

This is the second part (Halfway Status Update) of our weekly blog, showcasing our progress at integrating our own branded Token named "Social Coin" into our Web-App using the Simple Token Platform. This is part of the  OST KIT Alpha Phase 

What is Simple Token(www.ost.com)?:

" At OST, we are building essential blockchain infrastructure and developer toolkits to enable any business — no matter their size or level of technical sophistication — to benefit from having their own Branded Token economy without the hassle, costs, and risks of an ICO. Tokenization will help businesses increase customer engagement, growth, and monetization, allowing them to invest more in their community ecosystem and reduce reliance on third-party acquisition and re-engagement from the likes of Facebook and Google. " 

 We already participated in the Developer Alpha Phase II where we successfully integrated our own Token und achieved Transactions between various Users of the App. See the final Video of our Proof of Concept here: 

1) Why did we decide to register for OST Alpha Phase III? 

In our previous OST Alpha II Challenge we successfully connected our Web-App to the OST APIs and created Users and made succesful transactions on the OST Sidechain, which could be confirmed on the OST View. Users earned Tokens within our App and Advertisers could buy Advertising Credit( the backend gave them the corresponding amount of OST/Social Coin) and spend this Credit on Ad Campaigns. The User watches those ADs and earns Social Coin, which can be donated to charities within the App.

The Alpha III Phase is the next logical step to integrating a complete branded token economy into our Web-App. This Alpha Phase gives us the possibility to learn and try different ways of integration and experiment with the idea of a branded token economy. 

2) What is the goal of our project/business’s use of blockchain? 

We experiment with the OST APIs and branded token economy in order to find out if this makes sense for our Web-App. In case of a successful integration, we would use the OST platform and sidechains to implement a branded token economy. Our token would funtion as a reward token, which will incentivise our users to use the App more frequently. With the upcoming OST wallet and the possibilty to use branded tokens across platforms, our users would be able to earn Social Coin in our App and spend those earned Social Coin in any platform they want. So far we had no feasible way to reward our Users and give them the possibility to spend their rewards. The implementation of a Fiat reward system was too expensive and too complicated for our small start-up and thus did not fit into our concept.

Thanks to OST and our branded token economy this could change dramatically.

Our Users will have thousands of possibilities to spend the tokens in a vast ecosystem. As a User you could buy your coffee or upvote your favorite foto or donate the coins to your favorite influencer. 

3) Our Progress: Halfway Status Update:

With the new API funktions, given to us in the OST ALPHA III, we can now integrate the transaction history and show User balances within the App. Implementing these new API Calls successfully into our App and creating the User Interface (UI) is the main goal for this Alpha III Challenge.

 

Our Web-App "Social Heartbeat" as well as our test-environment are running on CodeIgniter (PHP Framework). The test-environment is detached from the Web-App so that the communication with the OST APIs is running on a basic and smooth level.

First we integrate all API calls with this test-environment. Once everything runs smoothly and without bugs, we integrate and connect the environment  to social heartbeat and create the User Interface in order to show the User-Token-Balance and transaction history (this step will come next).

So far we achieved the folloing steps:

The images and source code prove the successful communication with the OST platform:

1)  request User Balance:  https://dev.ost.com/docs/api_balance.html 

Result:  http://localhost:8888/socialcoin/coin/get_balance/2580ea38-f42b-4c9c-990f-6069ab23cf37

example: User-ID: 2580ea38-f42b-4c9c-990f-6069ab23cf37

2)  request Ledger:  https://dev.ost.com/docs/api_ledger.html

result:   http://localhost:8888/socialcoin/coin/get_balance/2580ea38-f42b-4c9c-990f-6069ab23cf37

User-ID: 2580ea38-f42b-4c9c-990f-6069ab23cf37

Next Steps: 

in the remaining 2 weeks we will connect our test environment to the Web-App and create the successful interaktion of our App with the OST APIs and platform. The final result will be our POC where we show the succesful integration of the new APIs in a Video. We will create the UI so that our Users can see their Token Balance and Transaction History within the App and find the corresponding transactions on the Blockchain via OST View.

Thanks for reading!

Greetings,

Leon