Smart Contract Development for Cryptocurrency Investment Platform

Project Background

Our client is a US-based FinTech startup who has developed a platform for crypto investors that allows them to control diversified portfolios, make transactions on a decentralized exchange, and store coins on cold wallets.

A key reason keeping investors hesitant about the cryptocurrency market is its extreme volatility, where a crypto can see an up to 20% rise and fall in one day. 

To dispel these doubts and attract new customers to the platform, the company developed patent-pending risk mitigation technologies, based on blockchain and smart contracts, which they wanted to integrate into the existing solution.

The client was searching for a skillful service development provider, who would carry out the delivery of custom crowd sale smart contracts. The vendor was expected to possess not only exceptional technical expertise, sufficient for working with an innovative technical solution. The client wanted to engage a tech company with a keen interest in FinTech, a proven capability to offer non-trivial solutions, and a portfolio of successful projects. 

Itexus mixed team of skillful engineers and business analysts with a Finance Degree made us the vendor of choice. We played the role of the core development provider and were challenged with delivering smart contract implementation against tough deadlines.

Functionality Overview

The client presented high-level requirements at the initiation phase, which we “translated” into a full set of SLAs, mockups, and use cases. For this, Itexus business analysts conducted a series of interviews with the client, and several workshops with our developers.

Here is what we offered for the business logic implementation.

The investment platform uses smart contracts to create trust between participants and provide additional guarantees to investors. Smart contracts are stored on the public blockchain where they can be neither erased nor altered. 

To ensure its proper functioning, the platform uses custom tokens of two types: transferrable, which are freely distributed by token owners, and non-transferrable (NTTs), which can’t be accessed until a set date. NTTs will be locked in a smart contract with a 365-vesting period and 90-day cliff. 

Tokens can be used in a number of ways: 

• Investors rent tokens to other platform users. When the price is prepaid, the token will move to the user who rented it; at the end of the period the token will return to the token owner.
• For managing portfolios with variable risks, users need to possess a proportional amount of tokens in their wallets. 
• Users pay platform fees with custom tokens at a reduced rate, and so on.

To deploy the smart contract technology, we studied different options and finally agreed upon a perfectly balanced tech stack, dedicated to smart contract implementation. 

The solution is based on the Ethereum blockchain, one of the most popular platforms for building tokens using smart contracts. Its ERC-20 protocol gives mass acceptability to the delivered tokens and allows them to be re-used by other applications: from wallets to decentralized exchanges. 

To accelerate the development process and at the same time stay in line with the best industry standards and security practices, we chose the OpenZeppelin library, the de-facto standard for secure smart contract development, used for more than 12% of the tokens built on Ethereum.

The library contains open source base contracts, which, combined with each other, provide customized contracts.

To make the system compatible with the ERC-20 protocol, our engineers leveraged OpenZeppelin’s contract files for the full implementation of the token standard. This way, we introduced a system of allowances for users who can emit or burn tokens; ensured built-in functionality for putting a pause for certain operations once a bug is discovered; added a list of blacklisted addresses to comply with the AML regulations.

Our developers used Solidity, a high-level programming language, which is most often used for smart contracts in Ethereum.  

To provide USD to token exchange, we used the Coinbase platform. Its APIs allowed us to implement a ready-to-use solution which supports a whole payment workflow without extending the development phase. 

A web app has been designed to provide an interface between the users and the blockchain, so they can see information and send transactions fast and easy, sign up/ sign in, and manage their wallets. For the development of the app, we used Python for the backend part and React.JS for the frontend.

Results & Future Plans

Itexus FinTech development team has provided the existing web app with the required functionality, which falls totally in line with the client’s initial expectations and requirements. The solution will go live once the patent on the risk mitigation technologies is granted. 

After the solution is launched on the crypto market, we will analyze its potential users’ reactions. In case of positive reviews, Itexus will be offered an extended agreement for further development of the product and delivery of additional blockchain-powered features.