Welcome back to our Product Updates!

Last week we gave you an in-depth view of how we, as a product team, are working to make cryptocurrency payments simple and safe. We are changing the way we communicate by dropping you a line to keep you updated on every product cycle. In case you missed last week’s team insights, check them out here.

The Voyage 34 — Phase II cycle is over and now we’re on to the next one, Deliverance! We want to take this opportunity to share our current short term goals and wrap up our third quarter.

Voyage 34 — Phase I & Phase II

Both cycles took five weeks with an additional week for planning and research, which means Voyage 34 covered most of the Summer ☀️.

Throughout this period we focused on ensuring a smooth payment experience. This meant taking special care to cover edge cases while connecting all the different components of our platform. While this might not sound like the most exciting work, it’s fundamental in order to make a great product. Just having killer features isn’t enough for the UTRUST platform, so we keep striving to provide a great experience end-to-end. All in all, testing was the core of this quarter as we engraved it even more in our culture.

Now its time for us to take a closer look at each of our products, and you’ll notice how some correlate directly with our squads:

Payments

If you’ve been in crypto for a while, you know how frustrating it can be to make a transaction. You’ve seen how many times a payment has failed to go through or how difficult it is to adapt to different systems in order to make a simple deposit. This is why we dedicated our time to polishing edge cases in our payment flow so that we can take the frustration out of crypto.

Blockchain Integration

UTRUST is a payments platform, so the ability to detect transactions (both internal and on the blockchain) is crucial. These past few months, we identified a few issues which slowed our validation process, one of which was related to the support of Ethereum’s internal transactions. However, after squashing all those pesky bugs, we’re closer to our intended goal of creating a safe, quick, and simple payment experience. We realize there is still plenty of work to be done, so we’re counting on your help to identify challenges in our closed beta.

We finished these cycles with a improved confidence over our Bitcoin and Ethereum integration. This is huge for our upcoming cryptocurrency additions. We’ve also made great strides in our ERC20 integration which is now being tested with UTK. As you know from previous announcements, we’re working to bring DigiByte and ETC into our ecosystem as well, so stay tuned.

Top-Up flow on the most recent internal version of the wallet

Widget

Back in April, we launched our payment widget and started getting live feedback for the first time. We were thrilled with the support from the community and the amount of orders that we received. Even though we don’t have the traffic of a large e-commerce platform, our merchandise store still gave us plenty of information to enhance our user experience.

An order from our merchandise store by Eivissa (@jowin100) using UTRUST! 🙂

It became clear there were a few challenges that we needed to work through. By moving the currency picker into the widget, we are now able to show relevant information that will help you decide what currency to pay with, adding transparency to the payment process. We also tweaked the UI to add merchant and order information. This changed the widget considerably so we are happy to introduce it as: version 2!

We’re about to bring this new and improved widget online so that you can experience it for yourself, but before we do, we’re evaluating our performance across multiple devices and browsers and polishing our animations so we can have the best possible experience for everyone in the next cycle.

Old Widget v1 in Production Environment

New Widget v2 in Testing

Mobile UTRUST Wallet

Each crypto wallet operates a little bit differently. For instance, some wallets allow you to specify how much you spend on mining fees in order to increase the priority of your transaction. In order for us to achieve the best possible payment experience we knew we had to allow as much of the process to happen within UTRUST. That’s why we decided to build our own wallet which allows our users to avoid mining fees by topping up for multiple payments. It also instantly detects transactions and removes the risk of paying too much or too little.

On top of that, we cranked out a new version of our onboarding and sign-up process to make it more intuitive and of course, safe. One of the features we looked at was our ability to share top up addresses. We thought it was a bit limited so we added more options and streamlined the whole process.

Our Wallet is the best way to pay with UTRUST. It’s simple, fast and reduces fees. We can’t wait to get it on the hands of everyone 🙂.

Merchants

While we’re working hard to make using crypto the best possible experience for our users we’re doing the same for our merchants. We’ve been closing partnerships with some of the largest e-commerce merchants in the world, Gambio and the largest mobile payments technology enabler in Europe, UMT. It’s our belief that our users will follow our merchants into adopting and using crypto in their online purchases.

We invested a considerable amount of time in the last months talking, listening and testing with our merchants. Those who joined us on The Voyage saga know that we’re striving to provide an amazing experience for our early adopters.

Dashboard

From manual to automatic settlements and dispute resolution. From several stores per organisation to providing merchants with KPIs across multiple metrics and refunds. All of these are features we are working to bring into our platform. With all of this in mind, people on the Merchant Squad have been going to e-commerce organisations to document their flow and understand their pains. Based on this we were able to simplify the actions our merchants are required to take, turning the dashboard into a smart and efficient tool to manage your business. In the long term we’re aiming to boost functionalities while keeping everything as minimal as possible to ensure the best flow for all of our partners.

Disputes

One key feature that has been missing from the crypto market is buyer protection. So, these past cycles we’ve been prototyping how the dispute and claim experience can be integrated into our platform. We’ve witnessed our partners handling disputes in their current workflow and interviewed merchants to design the best system for everyone involved. We believe our sensible approach will be the solution the market has been asking for.

Claims

In an ideal world, disputes are solved through direct communication. However, we know that’s a lot to ask for, so UTRUST is prepared to jump in as a mediator when buyers and merchants can’t come to an agreement. We envision UTRUST as a global platform for online payments. That means we have to be ready to scale in order to solve several claims at the same time. At the moment we’re researching and documenting on how to achieve fair solutions by studying the major players in the e-commerce market.

We are working on how to further improve the dispute & claim system

Testing Platform

We’ve looked at several e-commerce use-cases. From selling tickets for a yearly conference to managing hundreds of employees and stores across the globe, we’ve got it all covered. After talking with key merchants across many industries we’ve come to understand some of their most significant challenges, and we know that first and foremost they need to understand how UTRUST integrates with their system. As such, we’ve developed an onboarding experience where they can test our platform in a sandbox environment which works for all merchants regardless of their size and purpose. This will ultimately attract more merchants to our network, meaning more places where you can pay with UTRUST.