DuckPay

DuckPay home page
DuckPay ATM

Inspiration

One significant reason many individuals worldwide don’t have bank accounts is their lack of confidence in the stability and integrity of traditional banking institutions, which are often perceived as corrupt or unreliable. Additionally, many others remain unbanked as they don’t have enough money to meet the minimum balance. This is consistent with data showing that poorer households are less likely to have bank accounts.

Recognising this issue, our team developed DuckPay (Digital Unsigned Cheque Key), a digital wallet designed as an alternative to traditional banking. Without needing a bank account, credit card, nor a personal account to use, DuckPay offers an efficient, fast, and user-friendly payment platform for all users, regardless of background or country. This innovation addresses their needs for trust and reliability, thereby connecting unbanked users into the world of digital payments.

What it does

Features and Functionality:

Retrieve wallet with key → Users may enter secret key to retrieve all tokens in the digital wallet tagged to key regardless of device (mobile phones or even laptops).
Deposit cash into DuckPay ATMs → Users can deposit cash into DuckPay ATMs to credit tokens into their wallet via QR codes and our DuckPay Qr code scanner.
Payment with tokens’ QR Code → Senders may tap on a token with monetary value in their digital wallet and display its QR code to the merchant to make payment.
Recipient of Payment with QR Scanner → Merchants may tap on the QR scanner icon on Home page and scan the displayed QR code of token from senders to accept payment.
Merging tokens → Users can drag and drop tokens onto one another to merge multiple small token values into larger token values to be used for larger transactions.
Splitting tokens → Users can click on the Split icon and specify the split values to split large token values into multiple smaller token values to be used for smaller transactions.
Theme mode → Users can customise application theme mode to their preferences.

Benefits:

Login Accounts not required → Users do not require creating an account with their personal information to use DuckPay. Instead, they simply enter a key issued to them by DuckPay to access the wallet tagged to the key. This key is issued to users once they have a token credited in the wallet.
Bank Accounts not required → Users do not require a bank account nor a credit card to make and/or receive payments and transactions.
Recyclable Accounts → Once a user’s wallet is out of tokens, the wallet will be deleted. A wallet is only created when a token is credited to the wallet, causing it to generate a key. Without permanent accounts, users do not have to worry about personal information.
Aesthetic and Easy-to-use → Every DuckPay feature (Key issue, QR Scanner, Wallet tokens, QR value of tokens, Merge token, Split token, Theme mode) is readily accessible on the landing page of the app through intuitive icons, cards and modals.
Secure transactions → DuckPay ensures that there is no way to steal tokens between users or modify token amounts in wallets. Additionally, once a token’s QR code has been scanned, its QR code will be invalidated, and it will be deleted from the user’s app to prevent reuse.

How we built it

Frontend:

React
TypeScript
Redux
Tailwind
DaisyUI

Backend:

Node.js
TypeScript

Database:

PostgreSQL
Prisma ORM

DevOps and Version Control:

GitHub Actions
Docker
Turborepo
Yarn

Code Quality:

Prettier

Linter:

ESLint

Challenges we ran into

The greatest challenge we encountered was really to come up with an idea that is innovative, inclusive, safe and fast, and one which would help uplift communities and integrate them into the world of digital payments.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to deliver an e-payment wallet which is working, functional and uses great architecture.

What we learned

We learnt about the challenges in building inclusive, safe and powerful e-payments systems. We also learnt to work together as a team to build software to help communities around us.

What's next for DuckPay

Having more DuckPay ATMs across the world so we have greater outreach in our e-payment efforts. We can also enable multiple merges and fast filtering across tokens in DuckPay wallet.