Three months ago, we introduced textcoins — a way to send cryptocurrency to email. Today, with the release of version 2.2 of the wallet, we add another method to send crypto to email, which reaffirms our leadership in ease of use among crypto platforms.

We are also launching email attestation bot, which allows to link one’s email and Byteball addresses thus enabling them to receive money via the new method. It also allows to earn some rewards if your email is on one of the whitelisted domains.

First, about the email attestation bot.

Attestation of email address

The email attestation bot is already in the Bot Store and it allows you to proof your email address and have an attestation record linking your email and Byteball addresses posted to the Byteball DAG.

The bot’s operation is quite similar to Real name attestation bot used to verify your identity. The bot takes a small payment (0.5 MB), sends a code to your email, and waits that you confirm its receipt by entering the code in chat with the bot. The payment must be made from the address you are trying to attest and this must be a single-address wallet.

If you choose your attestation to be private, it will be stored in your wallet, nobody will see your email, and later you can disclose it to any peer you like. Third-parties will only know that you had attested some email address.

If you select public attestation, your email will be published to the DAG and linked to your Byteball address. This will allow others to send money to your email address, see below.

The bot also rewards you for successful attestation if your email is on one of the whitelisted domains:

@harvard.edu

@eesti.ee

These domains are whitelisted because issuance of new email addresses on these domains is strictly controlled by Harvard University and the Estonian government, respectively, which minimizes the chances of abuse.

The attestation reward is $10 in Bytes, paid only for the first attestation of each Byteball or email address.

If you attest your email address (not necessarily on a whitelisted domain) and then send Bytes to someone else who later uses these Bytes to pay for attestation of a whitelisted email, then the referred user receives the attestation reward and you receive a referral reward, which is also $10 in Bytes.

Both rewards will be paid from the distribution fund, in accordance with its purpose, which is to encourage the expansion of our community.

Sending money to attested emails

Once your email is attested, and if you chose public attestation, it becomes very easy to send money to you. The senders need only to know your email address — which they probably already know — and enter it as recipient instead of Byteball address:

This is the same they do when sending textcoins, but since your email is already attested, we don’t have to go through textcoins. The wallet (since version 2.2) will automatically replace the email address with the Byteball address it is linked to, and send the money directly to the recipient, who will instantly receive the money.

So, public attestation of emails serves like a public address book. It can be also compared with DNS, which resolves human-readable domain names to cryptic IP addresses that the computers need to make internet connections.

Payments sent to email are easy to identify in your transaction history. Along with the recipient’s BB address, they also store his email address:

The attestor who attests the email addresses through the bot is H5EZTQE7ABFH27AUDTQFMZIALANK6RBG, and it is also a witness. The attestor is trusted to post only true Byteball-address-to-email-address links to the DAG, and since the DAG is public, the attestor’s activity is easily auditable. If you trust another attestor, you can change it in the settings:

This update is another step towards making cryptocurrency payments simple and enabling billions of regular users to get involved in crypto.