Stellarmint - Stellar Tokens Made Easier

magofox

Title:

Stellarmint

Summary:

Stellarmint makes creating tokens on the Stellar network even easier.

Category:

Applications, Tools & Infrastructure

Goals:

General. Remove the technical barriers associated with issuing a token on the Stellar network.

Specific.

Improve the UX and onboarding process by adding a walk-through option and other user cues once logged in.
Streamline the process of accepting the token's trustline. Near term - Add video tutorials showing how to accept a trustline with the major wallet providers. Medium term - Integrate available tools to make trustline acceptance easier, such as automatic XDR generation for easy export and signing. Long term - Champion a SEP if existing tools could be improved or supplemented to streamline the process of accepting a trustline.
Automate portions of the Stellarmint process to reduce token delivery wait time and to improve scalability.
Automate editing control of the Stellar.toml so changes are instant.

Description:

Someone shouldn't have to be a developer, or even have a website, to be able to issue a token on the Stellar network. The Stellar network was designed to allow any form of value to be issued on the network by anyone. To fully deliver on this stated purpose, issuing a token on the Stellar network needs to be easier and Stellarmint does exactly that.

Is this service really needed?
Without a doubt. First and foremost, not everyone with value to digitize and exchange has a website where a Stellar.toml can be hosted. Secondly, even with a domain name and website, there are technical challenges with hosting a Stellar.toml file. As most of you know, it must be served at a specific location and not all web hosting providers make it easy (possible?) to host a .toml file at that location. Further, even if web hosting providers made it easy, there can be complications caused by the Content Management System used to build the website.

I, and several other Stellar community members, discovered these technical complications first hand when setting up Public Node's Stellar.toml file. What was supposed to be a really easy task turned into hours of technical problem solving with no straightforward solution. We made several technical support calls to our hosting provider and even wrote a custom Wordpress plugin to try to circumvent the issue, but we couldn't solve the issue - we either produced forbidden errors or the Stellar network couldn't recognize the text as a proper .toml file.

We still do not know if the issue was something our hosting provider could have resolved or if it was a conflict with Wordpress (the single most popular way to create a website). Ultimately, we solved the issue by avoiding both and implemented a creative and highly technical Cloudflare workaround.

Needless to say, there had to be a better way and is why I created Stellarmint. As it turns out, I even ran into a technical issue related to stellar.toml files when creating Stellarmint. Thankfully, after two support calls to a premium hosting provider, we resolved the issue by having them add a MimeType rule for the ".toml" extension in the Nginx configuration. Case in point!

Links:

Stellarmint.io

magofox

Update: Added implementation of the COINQVEST payment option that lets people pay with cryptocurrency.

WalterBeen

magofox
We waited, this is an important step😉

titor

You are already charging your users for making tokens. Why do need more funding? Just curious.

magofox

Thanks for the question.

Added funding would let me invest further in the service and increase its chances of being a self-sustaining viable Stellar-based business. While I agree that it is great that Stellarmint already has paying customers, it's currently not enough to justify the cost and time required to provide the service. The other tricky part is more customers means more time spent to implement, particularly with how I have it running now - a very manual process. I currently send personalized emails to each customer, fix spelling errors, verify all inputs, apply standardized formats, standardize the uploaded image, etc. I also walk each user through the process of accepting a trustline (side note: I wish accepting a trustline was easier!) If I don't automate more parts of the service, I'll run out of time well before Stellarmint becomes a viable business.

So in the end, I'm looking for help getting started the same as all the other business-based proposals here. Many of the other proposals and winners in the past had sources of revenue too, so Stellarmint is not alone here. I actually see the fact that Stellarmint has paying customers as a good thing because it demonstrates the demand for the service and that it has a pathway to becoming a self-sustaining Stellar business that onboards lots of new users to the Stellar network.

Lastly, because I have your attention, I think my personal track record should be taken into consideration. Some of the SCF winners in the past have run away with the funds, without any hint of additional work being completed after the award is received. I've started three projects on Stellar now, Lumenthropy, Public Node, and now Stellarmint. Lumenthropy keeps growing and I personally turned a list of 1 nonprofit to a list of 15 nonprofits that accept Stellar lumen donations. Just last month I redesigned the entire website. Public Node has delivered on everything it promised and more. It's been publicly praised and envied by a head engineer at Ripple, has Tier 1 quality hardware performance, and keeps expanding its partnerships and use of other Stellar-based projects like Coinqvest and Lobstr.

I guess that's my way of saying, I think kick starting Stellarmint is money well spent from a lot of different perspectives.

tyvdh

Congrats on making it to the final round of SCF #5! Don't forget we'll need that ₅ minute video by Saturday this week at the latest. Just send the video file to Anke, anke@stellar.org whenever you get it finished.