Blockchain-based social ecosystem

Objective:

Develop a unique social ecosystem that combines interconnected modules: an encrypted messenger, a multifunctional blog and a convenient crypto-wallet, plus help the company develop and maintain their own crypto exchange platform.

Main goals were to make it easy and comfortable to use with the help of convenient and comprehensive UI, swift data exchange and high security level.

Business Tasks:

Create a unique mass-market product that will be able to stand among top world-wide messengers;
Create a competitive and reliable exchange platform, that supports many crypto- and fiat currencies;
Develop a strategy for effective and secure data exchange processes;
Create and maintain project documentation through all the stages of development;
Analyze the market and pick the best business solutions and techniques to merge complex independent modules.

Project Technical Tasks:

Customize and modify the open-source messenger Signal to create a brand new product, adapted for LetKnow’s business-objectives;
Develop a consistent application for Android, iOS, Windows and Mac platforms;
Develop 3 multifunctional modules: messenger, blog, and crypto-wallet (via Rubyroid Labs’ API), merge them and provide a smooth integration of business-processes;
Build a scalable, sustained and integral system architecture;
Develop and maintain a secure and intuitive crypto exchange platform: the client and the admin panel.

Project overview:

Duration

9000+ hours, 9 months

Methodology

Agile (Scrum)

Technologies

Android: Java, OkHttp, Gson, Retrofit, Protobuf, SQLite, Glide, ZXing, Crashlytics, FCM
iOS: Swift 3, Swagger Codegen, MBProgressHUD, Alamofire, BetterSegmentedControl, Reachability, Kingfisher, SSZipArchive, Fabric, SQLCipher
Frontend: ElectronJS, TypeScript, NodeJs, BackboneJS, ReactJS, SCSS, Angular 6, HTML, SVG

Project Team

1 PM
2 BA
1 Designer
1 Frontend developer
2 Backend developer
2 iOS developers
3 Android developers
2 QA engineers

Solution

To fulfill long-term strategic objectives our team created a substantial social application, that contains: 1) an encrypted peer-to-peer messenger with the ability to create customized group chats with role differentiation, video conferencing supported by open-source project Jitsi, voice-calls, and customizable profiles; 2) a blogging space made from scratch, where users can share various content and rate it; 3) a multi-currency wallet developed with the help of a third-party’s API, which supports instant crypto-transactions in BTC; The process of development was quite demanding due to the technical structural complexity of the sources that our team needed to use as a core. However, our professionals have managed to bring all the external materials and our internally developed solutions together to create an integrated ecosystem with a unique well-structured backend architecture and user-friendly interface.

Challenges

Project coordination

The project is scalable and complex, it required a precise and well-ordered project guidance and accurate requirements management. Throughout the whole development cycle, we’ve been constantly keeping in touch with the clients in order to let them know that all the key features are defined and prioritized correctly, all requirements are gathered, documented and approved, and the product versions are delivered on time.

Legacy Signal code

Our team was instructed to make a compound multi-functional ecosystem and use an open-source project Signal as the foundation. The project itself is pretty old, so our team had to beat many challenges due to the fact that they had to deal with a lot of Legacy code. In the end, those challenges gave our team a pile of new useful experience.

The app involves the following features

Blogs

Customizable personal blog with privacy settings;
Easy and convenient post creation with the ability to attach any type of content;
Privacy settings for each post, an ability to create drafts and postpone the publications;
Posts sharing, an ability to open and see them online in the web;
An ability to re-post the content, leave comments, upvote/downvote posts and comments;
Easy search engine by categories: an ability to find the needed content in an instant;

Messenger

Encrypted secure messages and calls;
Groups with roles differentiation;
Video-conferencing;
Customizable personal profiles;
Built-in application browser;
Custom contact lists;
QR-code scanner, an ability to add users to your contact list by scanning their QR;
An ability to link your devices with a desktop-client;

Crypto-wallet

Wallet creation;
Easy and fast transactions;
Notifications on funds receipts and transactions’ status updates;
Test-net support;
An ability to send invoices and receive funds from your LetKnow friends;

Admin Panel

User management;
Tools for complaints processing;

Exchange platform

Creating orders to buy and sell crypto;
Market analytics;
Withdrawal and deposit of crypto and fiat;
Intuitive platform management with the admin panel.

Result

We’ve delivered a mobile and desktop app with clear, flexible and scalable architecture, and a perceptive exchange platform. We’ve successfully overcome all the challenges and issues during the development and testing process. Throughout the whole development process, we have maintained high-level project management. Our team is still maintaining and supporting the app development to make the user experience more smooth and comfortable, make the data exchange processes fast and trouble-proof. Now we are planning new functional and structural upgrades, that will fully satisfy the business requirements and target audience’s needs. For the future, we aim to implement ETH and XRP currencies support, an ability to create several blogs for one account, blogs top ratings, brands’ blogs, and also translate the app into more languages!