Hey everyone! In late February I started to work on a Stellar anchor for Colombia.
I started by letting people trade XLM/COP in the DEX. After that I was planning on letting people start buying/selling stuff or do P2P in Colombia.
Unfortunately, due to legal regulations, I stopped receiving money and that forced me to re-evaluate my initial idea.
"The pivot"
After launching I started to get emails and talk with companies like co-ops and small saving institutions, which were interested in using Stellar to offer a mobile wallet for their customers (something like private Venmo)
They have all the regulation in place to deal with money but lack the technical knowledge.
That's were I decided change my direction and follow a SaaS model. I’ve been building the infrastructure and software to make it easier for companies, communities, co-ops and SMBs to take advantage of what Stellar offers without having to worry about the technical details. By signing up for my service, a company can give their associates/users a wallet which they could use to do P2P or pay for goods/services.
The final user never knows about Stellar or Lumens. They only see in their wallet the asset related with the organization they are associated with.
Currently I have a mobile wallet which works for iPhone and Android and then all the backend to implement an anchor following the approach #1 described here https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/anchor/#customer-accounts
Maintain a Stellar account for each customer. When a customer deposits money with your institution, you should pay an equivalent amount of your custom asset into the customer’s Stellar account from your base account. When a customer needs to obtain physical currency from you, deduct the equivalent amount of your custom asset from their Stellar account.
Open Sourcing
Now, here comes the crazy idea. Although I'm trying to build a business out of this, I believe others could benefit if there was an open source version of it.
That's why I've been thinking of gradually open sourcing all the backend + front-end components of AnclaX.
Currently I have:
- A mobile wallet in React-Native, which the user logs into with their phone number + password.
- A GraphQL server which proxies request to the API.
- A Ruby on Rails API + Web front-end for users subscription and dispatching payment requests.
- A set of Amazon Lambdas to create accounts, manage trust-lines and sign payments operations of behalf of the user's Stellar account.
The license would be MIT and then I'd offer an AnclaX (Pro) version for managed service (following Ghost model).
I'd love to hear your thoughts about this, cons/pros, and whether this would be something you would use or would like to contribute ?.
Cheers,
A
