Our mobile dApp ethPay is now running on the mainchain, which means you can use it so sell and purchase products and services with real Ether!

We went into Beta with our platform Ethereum Android last October, so we set ourselves October 2017 as deadline for the MVP of ethPay. MVP meaning that we deliver a slim but fully functioning version of ethPay that runs on the main-network of Ethereum. This goal was challenging and we only managed to reach it through very clear prioritization and focus on those priorities.

The last months were mainly filled with discussions and decisions on how the MVP should look like, which features it should have and have not, how we should manage the trade-off between usability and informational depth, a nice user flow and so on. Our goal was to create a really robust and easy to use product without compromising any of our principles: privacy, security, and decentralization.

The main priority for this release was to make the buying experience as seamless and easy as possible. A customer should be able to buy a product/service just by scanning an offer.

Changes in the UI

The main changes in the UI were made on the merchant’s side. We worked on the store concept to improve its user flow. A store overview was implemented, which is supposed to give the merchant quick access to the most important data like the last purchase and the overall revenue of the store. Also the merchant can now directly create a Quick Offer from the overview of his store.

Entering the store, he sees a chronological list of his sales and by tapping the flash button he creates a Quick Offer.

Use cases for the MVP

There were two major use cases that we’ve set as priorities for the MVP:

street market situations where merchant and customer have direct contact purchase and automated delivery of digital goods.

Use case #1: Quick Offers for street market like situations

Many developing countries exhibit a very rich street market culture while at the same time having a very high share of people that don’t own a bank account.

We designed Quick Offers in a way so that merchants only need to specify a price (title is optional, ‘Quick Offer’ by default) to generate a QR-Code which their customer can scan with his phone to pay for the product. Once the customer has accepted the purchase, the merchant gets instant feedback of it.

You can see an example below of the merchant’s screen flow of using Quick Offers.