Head of Design, James Carolan, explains how the Centrality SWAG Store was created.

Introduction

First and foremost, what is a Sylo Experience?

Similar to WeChat Mini Apps, a Sylo Experience is an additional piece of functionality, accessed within the Sylo Smart Wallet, that anyone can build. Sylo Experiences serve as a win-win by offering useful or entertaining features for users whilst creating interaction or commerce opportunities for creators or businesses.

Built using the Sylo Experience SDK, Sylo Experiences are based on React Native, so using this framework is just like building any other React Native application. You could even use the Sylo Experience SDK to build your own stand-alone app if you wanted.

(However, the clear advantage of building a Sylo Experience rather an individual app is the opportunity to leverage the ever-growing Sylo Smart Wallet user base — which now spans more than 50 countries!)

If you want to include payment features in your Sylo Experience, you can then use the Sylo App API to interact with the Sylo Smart Wallet to create and sign Bitcoin, Ethereum, ERC-20, and CENNZnet transactions.

Perfect timing

Before this project, we had only developed in-house proof of concepts that ensured our Sylo Experience SDK and the Sylo App API worked correctly.

It was time to introduce Sylo Experiences to the world and showcase its potential in a real life scenario and coincidentally, our partners Centrality happened to be planning the perfect project.

At the time Centrality, were running a campaign where CENNZ holders could stake their

CENNZ and earn CPAY in return. At the end of the staking period, Centrality then wanted to give CPAY holders the opportunity to spend the CPAY they had earned on Centrality merchandise.

This was a fantastic idea on Centrality’s part and presented us with a great opportunity to demonstrate that the Sylo Experience framework was mature enough to handle real world transactions, as well as having all edge cases covered.

Since Centrality specialise in creating Blockchains, not online stores, we decided to take the easy option and use Shopify to easily manage inventory, orders, customers and products from the Shopify dashboard.

Using the Shopify Rest Admin API and Sylo Experience SDK, we were able to create a Shopify-powered Sylo Experience that accept Bitcoins, Ethereum and any other ERC-20 tokens instead of fiat for merchandise. Pretty cool, right?

To maximise the learnings from a development point of view, we decided to approach this as if we were a developer/business who had stumbled across Sylo Experiences online and thought ‘Bingo — this is exactly what I need for my project, where do I start?’

For this, we needed a developer that had experience building React Native apps but was removed from the development of the Sylo Experiences platform. Just like any other open source projects, the developer could only use the docs provided and any problems or questions would need to be communicated via Github (usually through issues).

This approach allowed us to identify holes in documentation, any bugs in our code and any general flaws in our projects.

Also, at this point, we had not planned to provide any visual resources that designers could reference when designing a Sylo Experience. So in order to see if this was logical, we took the opportunity in this unique case to work with Centrality’s design team as they were producing the UX/UI for the Swag Store.

This allowed us to discover and highlight the key questions that app designers would have when designing a Sylo Experience. It was a very beneficial exercise and since, we have been working on providing interface guidelines, principles and rules for Sylo Experiences, which will be made public shortly.

Release

The whole project took four weeks to complete — that’s including planning, design, implementation, testing, and release.

(That’s a very fast turn around by anyone’s standards!)

It then took only 10 minutes for the first order to be received. I’d call that a massive success for both Sylo and Centrality.

But you don’t have to take my word for it — try the Swag Store for yourself by scanning the QR below with your Sylo Smart Wallet.

However, this is just one example of what a Sylo Experience can be. So the question is, what would your Sylo Experience look like?

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