ANU #17 — Ritchie Release and Gamescom
AppCoins News Update, or ANU for short, is a regular bi-weekly update by the AppCoins team. As usual, we are going to cover dev updates, market reports, team members and upcoming events. This week’s focus is on the Ritchie Release, the development of the BDS Billing System and the new credit card feature to facilitate in-app purchases with AppCoins, and the coverage of team’s presence at the Gamescom.
Quicklinks
Dev Update
APPC Markets Report
Featured Team Member
Gamescom
Another Dev Update is upon us!
We’ll update you on the developments for the Ritchie release that will occur next Sunday.
This release was all about the BDS Billing System and supporting credit card payments in the AppCoins Wallet when users are purchasing in-app items. The latter had the additional constraint of having to maintain one of the key assumptions of the AppCoins Protocol: total verifiability by developers and regarding their transactions.
We decided to build on top of the ASF billing system, which relied solely on Blockchain tech, and develop the BDS Billing System. It already comprises the server-side management of items and purchases but still stores all relevant data in the Blockchain. This extended billing system implements the same interfaces developers already know when they integrate and use Google Play billing system. Hence, migrating from it to ours is as simple as changing a few variables. In addition, instead of relying on the Google Play app, it relies on our AppCoins Wallet to communicate with our API.
At the same time, we’ve been building support in the AppCoins Wallet to purchase in-app items using credit cards. Users can just use their credit cards and pay for in-app items as they are used to. This automatically solves the biggest adoption friction we’ve encountered so far and opens the AppCoins Protocol to a large portion of users. However, by itself, this solution breaks the assumption that developers should be able to validate the interactions between users and their apps without the need to trust any third party because these transactions are done off-chain, i.e. outside the Blockchain.
In order to solve this issue, we started consolidating these off-chain transactions in the Blockchain and have them verifiable by developers. Periodically, for each developer’s wallet, we gather all the transactions and compute a Merkle Tree. Merkle Trees are a nice and affordable way of representing large portions of data and providing a proof that someone holds that data. Once a Merkle Tree is computed for a given developer’s wallet, its root hash is sent to the Blockchain coupled with the developer’s wallet. If the developer wants to validate the transactions they have in his wallet, the developer can either ask our API for all the transactions and compute the Merkle Tree himself. In addition, he can store the transactions himself and use them to compute the Merkle Tree. Then, he can validate that the root hash sent by our system to the Blockchain is correctly computed.
We are able to maintain the verifiability assumption with off-chain transactions, which was a hard constraint while building the support for credit card payments.
As always, you’re invited to follow our work regarding all of the products we’re working on:
Published artefacts:
- ASF Wallet (Aptoide & Google Play)
- AppCoins Wallet (Aptoide & Google Play)
- ASF SDK
- ASF Unity Plugin
- BDS Billing System integration guide
At the time of writing, the current market cap is close to $10.88 M USD, with $468.20 K USD in volume in the last 24 hours across these exchanges: Binance (62.07%), BiteBTC (21.89%), Huobi (15.70%) and HitBTC (0.34%).
During the past two weeks AppCoins has been holding strong around $0.10. Since the last ANU, APPC value has witnessed a high of $0.133 USD on Aug 22nd, and a low of $ 0.0819 USD on Aug 24th. You can see more info about APPC markets at Coinmarketcap.
Name: Mariana Banazol
Role: Monetisation Manager
Bio: With previous experience in affiliate marketing and app monetisation, Mariana has been working on the acquisition of developers for the adoption of the protocol and the optimisation of monetisation strategies.
Last week the AppCoins team was at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. This is one of the biggest events in the gaming industry, where developers, brands and gaming enthusiasts come together to experience an atmosphere of wholly-centred gaming world, with the exhibit of upcoming games, launch of game-related hardware and several gaming stands where anyone passionate for a specific game can come and play it.
Being part of this event was incredibly enriching for the team, not only due to the opportunity to meet so many developers, who have shown interest in our protocol but also to get an understanding of how the gaming industry will grow within the next few years. We had the opportunity to share our value proposition to indie as well as leader developers, from every corner of the world, i.e Japan, Chile. Moreover, we got the change to meet a few of our community followers, which is always an unique experience.
Augmented Reality and Consoles were some of the most prominent trends displayed at the event.
During the event we announced 10 new developers that will be integrating the protocol! The developers are: Triplay, an indie development studio, which creates fun games using the latest technologies and stunning graphics, Ingames, with it’s unique game of questions played in real time, in which you can participate to win prizes, Morgan Apps, which has created a revolutionary way to play and shoot darts, Narcade, from bubble shooting games to block puzzles it offers addicting colourful games, Crypto Labs, which developed an app to give quick and easy access to cryptocurrency prices, details and charts, Loki, with its famous game Ludo Masters, brings back the fun of board games, Inomma, with an app that aims to be the best cryptocurrency research and portfolio tracker, Best 2D Shooting Games, which creates the best arcade games for Android, Indigo, specialised in developing interactive experiences, Astirian, with its app Happy Monster Boom, which consists of a fun matching game featuring lovable monsters.
At last, as requested from our community, and for those who couldn’t attend the event we have prepared a compilation of a few videos that we took during our presence at the event. This will give you a brief showcase of the booths and pavillion scenery in the event, just so that you can experience the Gamescom atmosphere.
Missed one of our previous publications? Not to worry! You can read them right here:
Transfer your APPC from the exchanges to the AppCoins Wallet — Tutorial
