Kungfoo.io is an online listing service disrupting Craigslist and taking classified advertising to the next level. Built on IPFS and Stellar’s blockchain, Kungfoo allows its users to transact via cryptocurrency, send crypto-loaded emails, search classified ads with a modern search engine, and offer ‘pay-per-click’ ad fees directly to consumers.
According to Wikipedia, “[Craigslist] serves more than 20 billion page views per month … with more than 49.4 million unique monthly visitors in the United States alone….” What are all these people doing? Essentially, they are exchanging online content (ads & messages) with the intent that this exchange will lead to a financial transaction. If successful, users end up engaging in a face-to-face, cash transaction with a stranger - a situation that not everyone is comfortable with. Craigslist’s users need crypto; Kungfoo provides exactly that (and more).
Kungfoo started out as a code experiment to see if the APIs provided by IPFS and Stellar could be wrapped up together so that a wallet could “store” its own data. In reality, the Stellar wallet, via its “manage data” operation, stores an encrypted pointer to an IPFS hash that uniquely identifies the data. Eventually, as the IPFS technology matures, the Kungfoo wrapper will function as a distributed virtual computer where the data is controlled by individual wallet holders. Essentially, the technology being built is a layer on top of stellar & IPFS with a user interface to a specific use case - a decentralized classified listing service.
Included with the listing service is “foomail,” an email like messaging application that allows users to send crypto to each other. A foomail is a payment operation on the Stellar blockchain that contains a memo in the form of “foomail - [uuid]”. We have a scanner that streams network transactions to identify foomails. Once found, the memo is parsed and the uuid is used to fetch the message data from IPFS; the data is then forwarded to the receiver’s wallet. All foomails requires a 1 token (minimum) payment in order to deter spam on the network. So that other domains can participate in a network-wide messaging system, we will be serving messages and broadcasting our PGP encryption key via our federation endpoint.
In addition, we created FOOD coin, a token on the Stellar network. FOOD coin is a large-supply (locked at 100 billion), utility token used to make micro-transactions. It isn’t promoted as an “ICO” or investment. For convenience, a FOOD coin cannot be broken (zero decimal places). It is used to place advertisements on the network while offering ‘pay-per-click’ ad fees to ad viewers. It is also used to meet the minimum 1 token requirement to send a foomail. Further, FOOD coin allows us to incentivise network adoption by offering an initial deposit for new accounts and a per listing reward for creating content. For additional token information, see our “toml” file at https://kungfoo.io/.well-known/stellar.toml.
Other than SQL, Kungfoo is built with JavaScript. On the back-end is Node.js with the following dependencies: bcrypt, dotenv, express, express-fileupload, express-mysql-sessions, express-session, great-circle, metaphone, mysql, nodemailer, pug, request, requisition, sharp, stellar-sdk, and stemmer. On the front-end is backbone.js, require.js, underscore.js, jquery.js, and text.js. We use Bulma as our CSS framework. Currently we are running four Amazon EC2 instances (Ubuntu): 1) Kungfoo.io http server, 2) IPFS http server, 3) Foomail scanner, and 4) Wallet crawler (search engine); all of which are set behind an https load balancer. In addition these instances have access to a single Amazon RDS service (mysql database). This setup is live and ready to scale.
Foomail will be open-sourced to encourage a network wide messaging system built on Stellar. Currently the messaging code is coupled with our IPFS integration. This dependency will be eliminated and a node package built so that other domains can quickly fire up a Stellar mail server. Hopefully everyone will adopt FOOD coin as the network-wide spam-deterrent token!
Please take a look at the site, https://kungfoo.io, and give us some feedback. Promo code is “FOOMAIL”.
