Giftrr

Gift Card Dashboard

Inspiration

With the explosive growth of cryptocurrency, we would love to be the pioneers between cryptocurrencies and gift cards. In 2019 total gift card spending clocked in as $98.6 billion dollars. With this massive market, having another payment other than cash would greatly increase this market and have many more ways that individuals can use cryptocurrency. We wanted to build a solution that lets customers manage their gift cards using crypto.

What it does

Giftrr is a gift card management application that allows you to manage your gift cards using cryptocurrency. It displays a list of your gift cards along with a side panel that lets you activate or reload your gift cards using Coinbase Commerce’s checkout page.

How we built it

We built a web application for Giftrr to allow users an easy dashboard to manage their gift cards. We used React for the frontend and Node.js for the backend server.

In order to build the logic for Giftrr, we utilized Coinbase Commerce’s Checkouts, Charges, and Webhooks API and Square’s Customers, Gift Cards, and Locations APIs. Finally, we deployed the application on Heroku to simplify our hosting service.

Challenges we ran into

We faced a major challenge during the development and testing process of the webhook handler for Coinbase Commerce notifications. We spent the majority of the last few days developing and testing the payment flow which required real transactions. This led us to conduct heavy testing to ensure that we were handling any possible edge cases that could occur.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using our limited knowledge of working with new APIs such as Square and Coinbase, we are very proud to have created this project for what we see as the future of the gift card and cryptocurrency space.

For a group of computer science students who love the tech industry and have a fascination with cryptocurrency, we are all equally proud of creating a project that combines our love of programming with what we see as the future of digital money.

What we learned

While creating this solution, we learned new skills such as working with the Square and Coinbase APIs, UI design, video filming and editing, and new programming languages.

When we were working as a team, we learned that we were most strong together and went through adversity and conflict to create the product that we have designed.

What's next for Giftrr

With Giftrr, we have many new features we would love to implement in the future:

Mobile application to easily access the gift card
A registration page
Email and browser notifications
Customer support page and feedback
User profile
OAuth support for other Square stores
Working with the Square team to create an ability to handle the payment flow through Coinbase