It is time to make IOTA payments widespread.

It has only been 1 year and 3 months since PayIOTA.me was created, and yet so much has happened. From our WooCommerce plugin, IOTA’s integration into the Ledger hardware wallets, to the release of the long-awaited Trinity Wallet and the wild year of 2018 for cryptocurrencies. Now, we have some important changes to announce.

This year, we are proud to announce that PayIOTA.me is transitioning from beta to production. This is marked by a big update to our core services and similarly important updates to our plugins. Our change of business model from free to 12$ year happened in late December; the following is what we have to show for it in February.

Address pregeneration

Address pregeneration has now been activated, which reduces the time cost of creating addresses using our service by 75% (to less than a second from 3–4 seconds).

Interface Optimizations

Our interface now loads correctly and refreshes quickly to provide a smooth user experience. Reductions in loading times are close to 99% for certain accounts. In addition, the seed, API key, and verification key is now by default hidden and only revealed by a click after the password is entered.

Node Optimizations

We are proud to announce that we have integrated iota.dance, nodes.iota.works, iota-nodes.net into our service to provide us with reliable nodes (and as last resort there are some hardcoded nodes to try). This means that the nodes PayIOTA.me uses will always be the fastest and most reliable, will always be available (3 fallbacks), which in turn means a more stable, production-ready PayIOTA.me. As a result of this, and other improvements, the average failure rate in 500 payments has gone down from 18% to near zero.

Wordpress/Woocommerce Plugin V2

Our Wordpress/Woocommerce plugin has been modernized to the latest specifications and made compatible with all modern Wordpress/Woocommerce versions, and almost all other plugins. As a result, we have been accepted into the Wordpress plugin directory. It now uses our external.php to process payments by the way of a redirect, sends the IPN to automatically update the payment status, and redirects the user to the correct Wordpress/Woocommerce page.

Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/payiota-me-iota-payment-gateway/

Payment checking architecture redesign

Whereas it may have taken up to 30 minutes for our service to mark a payment as complete, it is now instant. Our new API call, checkinvoice, triggers a check for an invoice’s payment status on our server and is called by external.php (used by most plugins and sites, of course, developers can also code their own payment flows, see the API documentation for all calls including checkinvoice). This means that each client has to wait no more than 5 seconds to process the payment after the IOTA network confirms the transaction. Reductions in payment checking times from the time of confirmation are close to 99%.

No expiration times and custom expiration times for selected payments

Selected payments can be now renewed (extended by the expiration time given each time) using the update API call (the same that updates price). On invoice creation, a custom expiration time can be set (maximum of 1 week).

API Optimizations

Our API has been made more robust in its error-checking mechanism to ensure that your business never fails to generate an invoice, and this has also been added to our API documentation. Our API documentation has also been made much clearer and neater, find it at https://payiota.me/resources/payiota_api_documentation.pdf with all of the above-mentioned changes. Also, to avoid surprises, we now have no default IPN URL (it must be specified at each call), but we have a default expiration time of 1 week.

New currency converter, price converter architecture

To avoid failed invoice generation caused by rate limits, unreliable, multi-tiered services, we integrate three different currency services into PayIOTA.me, and redesigned its currency conversion system. Now, conversion to IOTA is done from the base currency you give, and this base currency is no longer converted to USD automatically — this minimizes problems, and makes the service faster, more reliable, and standardized.

Forgot password function and delete account function

We now have a password reset function and a delete account function; no need to contact support anymore!

Dependency manager moved to Composer and other Github open-source improvements

We are now stopping with publishing a full source dump of our code, we will instead selectively upload the important functions that we use in our code (as a library). As our service is becoming a serious project, we have also moved to Composer for PHP dependency management, as you will be able to see on our Github page. Our code was greatly refactored, which resulted in better error handling, quicker debugging and more modular flexibility.

Why all the development? Now IOTA is more ready than ever, in terms of network health. With fast confirmations and fee-less transactions, IOTA makes a compelling case for merchant integrations. It is nearing being in direct competition with Nano, and as the IOTA network improves, so does our service need to keep up. Let’s make IOTA successful this year!