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 User Acquisition flow, the AppCoins BDS Wallet, and a quick summary of what happened at the ASF Blockchain Summit.

Quicklinks

Dev Update

APPC Markets Report

Featured Team Member

ASF Blockchain Summit

Rejoice fellow AppCoiners, for the never-late Dev Update has come before thee!

Last week the main highlight was on the launch of the Ada release, with all the goodness that came with it. After Ritchie, Ada came to shatter another adoption friction point. This friction point was related to the User Acquisition flow. This flow enables users to get rewards given by developers for the time they spend in their apps.

In the past, we’ve proposed that users would provide a proof of the time spent in an app — the Proof-of-Attention (PoA) — which would be validated and, if the validation held, users would receive the corresponding rewards. Moreover, users would only be able to spend these rewards for in-app purchases, thus creating a circular economy.

The Ada release proposes an extension to the AppCoins Protocol. It implements a way of users earning rewards without having to own ETH to submit PoAs. Users can now use our system to validate and submit the proofs. Basically, our system periodically sends a summary of the proofs of each campaign to the blockchain, which is much more efficient costwise. In addition, the proofs of each user, both the ones considered valid but also the ones considered to be invalid are shown in its wallet in the AppCoins BDS Wallet. Furthermore, all the proofs can be verified in appcexplorer.io, both the valid and invalid proofs.

Moreover, the rewards earned by users can only be spent on in-app purchases, or donations which will be better explained below. This creates the circular economy that we’ve been talking about since the white paper was written, which fosters more dynamic in the ecosystem. These rewards are named as APPC Credits, and are visible in the AppCoins BDS Wallet.

AppCoins BDS Wallet with APPC Credits earned

With the Ada release, we’ve also worked on the support for other types of payments using the AppCoins BDS Wallet. Until Ada, the AppCoins BDS Wallet enabled normal transactions between users and in-app purchases in apps that integrated the BDS Billing System.

The AppCoins BDS Wallet supports payments unrelated to in-app purchases but bound to apps inside the BDS platform. These payments can be, for example, donations to developers and can support payment systems that developers want to implement without using the full BDS Billing System. The wallet supports both on-chain and credit card payments for this kind of transactions.

Following last month’s performance table with the KPIs of the protocol performance, on this ANU we have collected the values from October, regarding both flows using AppCoins, IAP and User Acquisition, the number of apps downloaded with the integration of AppCoins as well as indicators from the SDK, as the table shows below.

As always, you’re invited to follow our work regarding all of the products we’re working on:

Published artefacts:

At the time of writing, the current market cap is close to $10.94 M USD, with $628.07 K USD in volume in the last 24 hours across these exchanges: Binance (88,76%), Huobi (11,23%) and HitBTC (0,01%).

Since the last ANU, APPC value has witnessed a high of $0.138 USD on Nov 1st, and a low of $ 0.103 USD on Oct 29th. You can see more info about APPC markets at Coinmarketcap.

Name: João Melo

Role: Front-End Developer

Bio: For the last 8 years João has been studying and working as a Software Engineer on multiple countries, and currently he works for the BDS entity on web applications.

The official launch of the App Store Foundation took place last Monday in the heart of Lisbon, with a full day summit on How can blockchain impact the apps economy? It brought together blockchain enthusiasts from all over the world, and Carolina Marçalo, Executive Director of the Foundation, welcomed the guests and spoke about the amazing possibilities on how Blockchain technology can disrupt the existing ecosystems, and how the App Store Foundation will work to bring a consortium of app stores and app industry members to adopt the technology.

The first part of the day was dedicated to app developers with discussions about how blockchain technology is revolutionizing the gaming industry. Nuno Folhadela from ONTOP kicked off with a talk and demonstrated a real use case of how he’s implementing blockchain in one of his apps and the engagement possibilities with the app’s users.

Chris Jones (Dragonchain Inc.) followed by taking the stage to talk about how a new era for global connectivity and peer-to-peer transactions is taking place, and also moderated a great panel discussion with Ronnie Tan (Gumi Asia), Enric Cabestany (IGG), Caglar Eger (Goodgame) and Pedro Almeida (BDS/Aptoide) to discuss why Fornite and games alike prove that blockchain is the solution. Here topics such as payments solutions, communication and game advertising between western markets vs. Asian markets were addressed.

The afternoon was dedicated to the industry members and to discuss in which ways the app ecosystem can be impacted and altered. Abhilash (Tech in Asia), Tran Quang (Appota) and Ren Tang (Aptoide) talked about how borderless payments on the blockchain lead to app stores new business models, followed by an interesting discussion on how blockchain enabled app stores provide OEMs with promising revenue streams, done between Tiago Alves (Aptoide), Yue Shen (MIUI/Xiaomi), and Randy Tejada (Cherry Mobile).

The last panel of the day brought a group of payment experts to talk about how payment methods can be opened to all people and everywhere around the globe. Jordan French (Block Telegraph) led the discussion, and André Matos (uRaiden/Brainbot Technologies), TN Lee (Kyber Network), Robin O’Connell (Uphold) and Nuno Correia (UTRUST) had really interesting insights about the main obstacles preventing the early adoption of cryptocurrency, and the importance of crypto for countries that don’t yet have easy access to credit card payments and the possible solutions.

The event was wrapped up by the AppCoins team, where, Paulo Trezentos, Co-founder of AppCoins inspired the audience with a brilliant speech about the state of the art of the AppCoins protocol, the technology behind it and the future roadmap. An extremely informative parallel track session given by Diogo Pires regarding the AppCoins Protocol also took place.

Overall, it is clear that the summit could not have been more interesting and enlightening to all those who attended. The App Store Foundation is committed to protect and promote the protocol and to advocate on behalf of the users and the community.

The event had a great turnout and, as such, we would like to give a special thank you to all of the speakers who participated in the ASF Blockchain Summit, and to all of those who attended.

We hope to see you again, next year!