Building the proof of concept as a Windows application

31 June 2024

The idea to build SmartBux started from working with FFUNDER, Theta Next, and a trip to the mountains. Around this time, I was working on reverse engineering raw transactions, and designing the process for supporting a project on FFUNDER. I decided to take a break from coding and went for a 4 day hike in the mountains. Upon completing the trip I went into town looking for some real food (that wasn't freeze dried). But I didn't have any cell service. So I thought “How are people here going to use crypto currency if they don't have a data connection?” How would I solve this problem?

So I bought stacks of smart cards and started working though reading and writing to them, till I found the card I liked. Which is a SLE4428 card. It can hold 1K worth of data allowing the project to expand into the future. At this point I got busy with life. One night I was watching a Future Forecaster's video on Theta and they talked about this idea. I said to myself, “Hey, I am working on that.” After that I decide to dedicate the next month to designing the process flow, signing transaction, API interactions, and got some help with the design.

Now that I had the process flow, I needed to put it all together. Since most crypto interactions take place in Java or Javascript. I needed to code in something that supported JS but had an easy and fast way to create a user interface. Hello Visual Basic .NET! Yes, I said VB.NET. I know most developers would not use VB.NET but it allowed me to create a working demo in about a week. I create the flow and added in the processes, which created what I called SmartBux Kiosk. This allowed me to create the SmartBux cards, check balances, and recover the card from a recovery phrase.

Next, I turned my attention to making what I called SmartBux Terminal which is how I accepted payments and processed transactions. It had a embedded API server which processed commands allowing an app, webpage or another VB.NET program to sent it payment requests. This program read the card, then let the customer select the coin or token to pay with, finally signing the transaction and broadcast it over the Theta blockchain.

Last, I needed a way to interact with the SmartBux Terminal so I created SmartBux Simple POS which was the simplest form of a POS systems. Just enter a dollar amount and it converts it to the correct amount of coins and tokens to collect. Then I hooked it all up and started testing.

Finally, I had a working product! I reached out to ThetaEuroCon ask to present it and demo SmartBux at the conference. And that is how the journey started...