After launching our Stellar-based settlement backend in December, we are happy to announce our next major milestone: We are starting our 50 million Stellar lumens giveaway program, currently worth around €10 million. We will distribute to 1 million SatoshiPay users in total, and begin by rolling out the first wave of giveaways today.

Update: Added quote by Stellar Development Foundation.

First wave: 4,444 giveaways on 4 April 4:44 pm CET

While offering giveaways to a million users at once would be a nice stunt, it could also potentially create a bit of chaos. In order to maximise the impact of the giveaway program for everyone involved, we will roll it out in increments — we call them “waves.” Wave 1 starts immediately: on 4 April, 4:44 pm CET we will be giving away Stellar lumens to 4,444 users! For your pleasure, we packed in the number “4” as many times as possible. We hope this will not upset our East-Asian users, where 4 is an unlucky number. We might have something for you on 8 August though!

Each giveaway will credit 50 lumens to a user’s SatoshiPay balance. This means Wave 1 will distribute 222,200 lumens, worth about €40k in total, at current XLM/EUR exchange rate.

The following waves will be announced separately and most likely increase in number of giveaways. We will pair them with the announcements of major publisher integrations — some of which are not too far from being launched.

In fact, a few days ago we quietly released 50 giveaways as a test. A blogger from Croatia found out, wrote a blog post about it, and they were gone within minutes. Wave “0”, check!

We reached out to this blogger, Adrian Kezele, and here is what he said:

“As a writer, I noticed that my audience like exclusive materials, articles, extracts, or even parts of new book in progress. They are willing to reward such readings, but I didn’t have any means to make it happen. SatoshiPay is perfect for that purpose and it makes my life so much easier!”

1 million users, instead of 100k

Those who followed our previous announcements will know that in November 2017 the Stellar Development Foundation pledged to give us 500 lumens (XLM) for our first 100,000 users. This is 50 million XLM in total. Due to the increase in XLM value, a single giveaway was worth several hundred Euros at some point, and the general feedback we got from publishers and other partners was that this is way too much. An interesting problem to have.

We therefore decided to reduce the amount from 500 XLM to 50 XLM per user and increase the number of users that will receive giveaways from 100,000 to 1,000,000. Given that only an estimated 3 million people use cryptocurrencies regularly, this is a lot!

Boris Reznikov, Director of Partnerships at Stellar.org, commented:

“We’re excited that SatoshiPay is leveraging Stellar’s speed and cost to bring blockchain-based micropayments into real-world use”

Free SatoshiPay credit for consumers, but not an “airdrop”

The giveaways will be available to consumers, i.e. users of the SatoshiPay widget on a website. Publishers of digital content can benefit from our giveaway program by offering content for sale using SatoshiPay. Consumers with giveaway credits can then spend it on content with a publisher.

The free lumens we offer to consumers are intended to kickstart the SatoshiPay ecosystem. This means a user that receives free lumens is encouraged to spend them with SatoshiPay publishers and not cash them out. In summary, unlike your usual cryptocurrency airdrop, aka “free money”, our giveaway program has some conditions to it. We used some of Stellar’s cool features to ensure them. Read the “Behind the scenes” section below to learn more.

Step-by-step guide to claiming your giveaway

1. Open SatoshiPay widget (on satoshipay.io or any other website supporting SatoshiPay):

2. Select “Top-up”:

3. Select “Claim your top-up”:

4. Select “Verify your location”:

5. Select “Continue as …”:

6. Wait a few seconds for your lumens to arrive:

Congratulations, you now have 50 lumens to spend on content via SatoshiPay!

How to spend your lumens

The giveaway lumens can be spent on all websites that implement the SatoshiPay widget, not only the website you received them on. Here is a list of some smaller websites you can already spend your credits on:

For publishers

Ultimately, the giveaway program is for publishers. They will be the ones receiving most of the funds that are distributed. So, if you are a publisher, sign up, offer some content for sale, and send us a link, so we can promote your great content!

If you know a publisher that you would like to buy content from using your SatoshiPay credit, let them know about the giveaways!

Behind the scenes: Stellar simple smart contracts

Stellar is optimised to move digital assets fast and cheap, but it also offers features that make it “programmable money.” We are using Stellar’s multi-signature feature, which allows several parties to agree on a transaction being executed, and the time bounds feature that limits the time during which a transaction can be executed (for example, if you want to pre-approve future transactions). Combining these, we have attached the following conditions to user accounts, directly at ledger/blockchain level:

Lumens can only be sent if we co-sign the transaction. We will not co-sign if a user tries to send funds to an address that does not belong to a SatoshiPay publisher or consumer.

Unused lumens will be sent back to us after extended account inactivity, for example after six months.

Almost as a byproduct, this also allows us to offer something that is unique in the blockchain world — refunding users if they lose access to their private key (account credentials). If a consumer claims to have lost their private key, we can refund them, and from then on we simply won’t co-sign any transactions coming from the “lost” account. After the expiry period, funds on the lost account will be available to us, and we can recover the refunded amount. Blockchain magic!

What’s next?

One of the most requested features by publishers is protection against XLM price volatility. We will soon implement a solution to volatility by using the stable “EURT” token on the Stellar network for top-ups, pricing and payments.

Our widget users will be happy to know that very soon we will also significantly simplify export and import of accounts, which will allow for cross-device usage of your SatoshiPay account.

We are also working on extending our API and preparing software development kits (SDK) for mobile app developers, so third parties will be able to build on top of our payment backend. SDKs are frequently requested by corporate publishers we speak to.

Follow us on Twitter @SatoshiPay to stay up to date with our latest developments.

Meinhard Benn, CEO at SatoshiPay