Today, the IOTipBot is introduced to the official IOTA discord. This bot was built to increase the awareness of IOTA by helping you send IOTAs to other users, especially to new ones. Sending and receiving IOTA tokens within the chat is now super easy and users don’t have to ask for addresses anymore. Tipping anyone in the channel makes rewarding good content possible. If you like an article someone shared, just tip him instead of only throwing in an emoji. You can even request a personalized meme and show your gratitude to the creator just by tipping. Welcome to next level chatting.

Dave testing the IOTipBot. Tipping is super easy.

Why the IOTipBot and not any other Tipbot?

The bot itself is designed to reduce spam. We optimized it to work in crowded chats without disturbing the users. That’s achieved by moving all interactions with the bot to direct/private messages, except tipping itself. Every tip is confirmed by the bot, sending a private message to both, the sender and the receiver of a tip. Any other action takes place in private messages only. Further spam protection features are a minimum tip of 100 ki and a limitation of requests to the bot per second. This is how we finally managed the bot to be your butler and not the main event.

Dave tested a lot and found our spam protection.

You can tip other users with either USD or IOTA. So, you can choose yourself what you want to calculate in. Just tip like that: “!tip @username $1” or “tip @username 1 Mi”. It is intuitive and easy.

The bot itself runs on a super stable and high performance server, which solves PoW for IOTA in less than 3 seconds for each withdraw and we use several private Full Nodes placed in the IOTA Field Load Balancer, so withdrawing is very quick and reliable.

We also added a function that helps users to get any transaction on the tangle confirmed. The user is able to provide any transaction hash to the bot (e.g.: “!reattach TRANSACTIONHASH”), which then automatically reattaches and promotes the transaction. It will use its fast PoW skills and reliable nodes to get your transaction through as quickly as possible. This is a straightforward way for us as a community to quickly help frustrated users, whose transactions are “pending forever”.

How does it work?

The IOTipBot is carrying its own seed and provides addresses to users where they can deposit IOTA tokens. The amount gets stored in a local database, which is updated by the IOTipBot while users are tipping, depositing and withdrawing. Users can withdraw by specifying the amount and the destination address. Just send a private message to the bot with the command !help and you will get a list of all commands.

Here, Dave shows how to deposit.

How does the IOTipBot earn money right now?

Our goal is to support the IOTA platform and not to earn money for ourselves. But we still want users to contribute so we charge a little fee for each tip and each withdraw. Fees are optional. That means just by adding -nofee to each command, just like that: “!withdrawnofee ADDRESS 20 Mi”, you avoid supporting the team and the bot. But if you want to support the IOTipBot or the team, you can just tip the bot, by sending “!tip @IOTipbot 1 Mi”. We are always happy, if you support and appreciate our work.

Update: There are no fees anymore. The IOTipBot is sponsored by us, the developers.

What is on the Roadmap?

The most important future implementation will be IXI Hub. This will secure user funds and boost the confidence in the complete system. IXI Hub is a plug and play system for exchanges and if it is safe enough for them, it will provide a sufficient security for the IOTipBot, too.

Further we are going to simplify deposits, by adding a QR-code feature and deep linking to Trinity. So, deposits will take two clicks instead of copy pasting and messing around with multiple apps and the phones keyboard.

Update: QR-codes are finally implemented for deposits.

An almost identical IOTipbot is running in multiple Telegram groups. It was tested a lot in there and was the first project we started. Both bots have the same features and are running on identical hardware. The Telegram IOTipBot is now mentioned on the roadmap because we aim to connect both bots. Users will be able to access the same balance on both platforms.

To ensure high quality and regular updates, like an improved frontend, we are going to apply for the IOTA Ecosystem Fund. Financial support by the IOTA Ecosystem will also enable us to remove the fees completely.

What is left to say?

We wish you a lot of fun using the IOTipBot and we are happy to receive your feedback. Just send a !support ticket if you want to contact us. Don’t hesitate to ask us anything or to complain. We want the bot to be the best possible, so we rely on your feedback.

Project by: Philipp (Soulan) and Tobi (RonQen)

PS: If you want to test the bot just enter one of our servers listed below.

Update: Adding the server to your own discord server is now possible by using !add in a direct message with the bot.

Telegram:

Discord:

Disclaimer: We are not part of the IOTA Foundation or affiliated with the IOTA Foundation in any way. We are invested in IOTA and other cryptocurrencies. The presented software is third party software and any usage of the IOTipBots is at your own risk.