My role in the project: Full-stack web developer. Full technical design and implementation of the project
What is the project about?
Trustcoin is a cryptocurrency listing platform built on top of WordPress CMS. Anybody can register an account and submit a coin. Other people can upvote the tokens they like, comment on, or report them. The main two challenges were that the client wanted the website to be developed as quickly as possible with the least resources spent for the MVP.
Moreover, the client wasn’t sure about some product’s systems’ logic and implementation details. The initial work statement was vague and didn’t provide much detail. In addition, that was the first time I had to work with blockchain and other web3-related technologies.
Trustcoin’s development
Due to the specific request of the client to get the product out in the wild as fast as possible, I decided that given the project’s scope and ambitions, the WordPress content management system would be the best choice to use as the back-end. The CMS is great for creating such proof-of-concept products. Together with the client, we could find a more concrete view of the product to get ahold of how I should implement it. After that, the development stage began.
Due to my inexperience in cryptocurrencies, I had to face many challenges along the way. Still, with my ability to quickly learn and adapt to new technologies, I overcame all the obstacles and delivered the final product.
Trustcoin became a commercial success, so we started working on an update. The client asked for a new feature: to show the price and the market cap of the listed cryptocurrencies. We couldn’t use any cryptocurrencies’ data APIs because the coins listed on the platform were very little-known and hence were absent in such data sources. After some investigation, I decided to make functionality to get the data off the blockchain, with liquidity pools on the cryptocurrency exchanges. It will let us find the price and approximate the market cap of any coin, as long as it is trading on the chain.
The WordPress ecosystem does not provide the tooling to help develop such functionality. I decided to use a third-party cloud provider – Digital Ocean – to create a virtual machine and maintain everything there, exposing it to the website via an API. Digital ocean provided us with a Linux (Ubuntu) virtual machine, so Linux skills were also required. After that, we chose Node.js and Express.js framework to provide the barebones of the API’s structure.
Takeaways of the Trustcoin project
As a developer, Trustcoin helped me:
- Learn more about cryptocurrencies
- Learn more about extra deep customization of the WordPress platform
- Learn more about interacting with a blockchain
As a manager, this job helped me:
- Better understand the process of planning out projects of a medium scale.
- Learn more about Agile Software
- Learn more about working in the team, and collaborate with the product owner
I also recommend checking out Coinmarketgem as a similar project
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