After months of hard work we are glad to announce that we are live with a massively updated product. We switched from Bitcoin to Stellar, partnered with TEMPO for fiat payouts, won IBTimes and other content partners, and… finally accept credit cards through TransactWorld!
Stellar for the win
Completed only a month after announcing our partnership with Stellar.org, our integration with the Stellar network is now live. You can try it out at any of our content partners’ websites – for example Naftali Music or BTC Echo. Simply open our widget (it’s now blue by the way) in the bottom right of the page, select “Top Up” and add credit using PayPal or directly from your Stellar wallet. Your lumens will arrive to your browser within seconds and you can pay for content straight away.
In the past we used payment channels, which are simple smart contracts that lock funds for a period of time to save transaction fees and gain speed. Because of Stellar’s unique properties of negligible transaction fees of €0.000001 and settlement times of 5s in average, we no longer need payment channels and each payment arrives at the publisher’s wallet straight away – true peer-to-peer payments.
We also found a way to emulate unconfirmed transactions on Stellar, which allows for content to be loaded milliseconds after clicking “Pay” instead of 5 seconds later when the payment is confirmed by the network. This is a crucial gain of speed in user experience and we plan to submit our approach as a Stellar protocol improvement.
WordPress plugin update
Our WordPress plugin is an easy way for publishers to try out our technology, and it represents the reference implementation for our Goods API. Due to the switch to Stellar, a couple of things changed in our API, so we have updated our plugin and v0.9 is now available for download at WordPress. Make sure to upgrade to be able to set content prices in lumen. The update will also convert existing satoshi prices into lumen prices.
