Crypto Payments on Starknet

Stefana: Right. So first of all, for us at the beginning, it’s more of like gathering the team together, proving that there’s synergies within the team that we can actually do something together. And then, we kind of looked into the payments industry and the payments vertical. And our goal or our question at the beginning was, “Okay, how do we reimagine this industry?” Because when we think about payments particularly… Well, payments are actually not fun, right? They are most of the time pretty boring, slow, and sometimes also expensive. So the question for us was how do we reimagine all of the things? It’s much better than where we started with payments. We can see it in the adoption, in the volumes, in the traction overall, but the question is how do we make it more seamless? How do we build all that fun around it so that we can ultimately also reach the adoption that everybody’s talking about?
So our goal at the beginning with Pulsar Money and with the whole app was to make payments more fun, to make the users interact more with payments, envision something different for this, and make it even more seamless. So this was the ultimate goal, and from there, things added up on the go. We kind of started within adding the fund part within payments, but then developing towards even more tangible complex use cases. We’ve developed this whole app towards both B2B and B2C. So yeah, that was for us from the beginning.

Devorah: It’s awesome. One of the things I love about Pulsar is in this technology age, I have my phone and my computer and all of these different things. It’s so confusing that not everything is in one place, and I love that with Pulsar network, you just go on Twitter, you type in the thing, and you make your payment. It’s so easy and seamless and a great, great user experience. So I would love to see a little bit more about Pulsar. You have anything you would like to show us?

Stefana: Sure, I’ll definitely do it. Just to give you some more context, we started with Pulsar kind of one year ago. We are already live on another layer one where we built the whole app, and of course, we’re going to develop it even more. But now, we brought it on Starknet with a particular module that we wanted to engage the community more, somehow bring the community together to engage with payments overall with the Starknet Ecosystem and so on and so forth. So I’m going to share my screen to give you a quick demo on the module that we currently have on Starknet, but super excited on what we’re going to build on top of that from now on and also specifically for the social pay. This is just the first version. There are a lot of use cases that we can build, and we’re actually going to build on top of the social pay. This is just the first version, and I think it’s a really, really fun one so far. So let me just share my screen. Okay. Right. Let me know when you can see it.

Devorah: Yeah, we can see it.

Stefana: Great. So I’m now in within the app. I already linked my wallet, so you just need to link your wallet. Then, you are in. I can see here my dashboard with the balance. I can send, receive, swap tokens directly within Pulsar Money. And then here, I have a dashboard with widgets that I can customize. I can see my social payments, I can see my tokens, my NFTs, so this is just like first, let’s say, impact within the app where you can see everything as a hub, everything you have within your wallet and within Pulsar Money. And then, on the left side, you can see some of the modules that we have in plan to build on Starknet as well. But the first one and the one that we launched last week is social payments. So if I go on social payments, I can see here my social payments’ dashboard. I already linked my X account, so my Twitter account. The first thing that you need to do is to just link your Twitter, and then you are almost set for the social payments.
Then, what you need to do, you need to make sure that you have topped up your social pay balance. So if you want to send tokens via Twitter, so this is kind of like the ultimate goal with the social pay. We can now send tokens directly on Twitter on Starknet, and this is a really cool use case for several things that you can do. For example, you can just tip your favorite contributor by just tagging their Twitter, or you can tip someone within a campaign. You can send the rewards within the campaign directly on Twitter in a really seamless way. You don’t need to ask for wallets or send them manually. You can do it directly on Twitter, or you can drive campaigns.
I’ll also show it to you live. It’s just about how you set up everything for the campaign to drive the campaign. So you need to, again, link your Twitter account. You need to make sure that you have topped up your balance. So for example, if I want to send now 10 STRK, I already have one STRK within my social balance, I can just add nine more STRK, and then I’m all set to drive a campaign on Twitter. Just give me one second. I need to do it again. Oh, it deconnected me. Let me just log in again. I think I was inactive within the app for the past half an hour or something like that, so it just deconnected me. So now back, I just want to send, for example, send STRK. I need to top up my balance from the wallet, waiting for the transaction to go through. And then, I’m all set to send the tokens via Twitter and Discord.
And for this, we have custom commands. So I’m just going to go on Twitter. One second. Just waiting for the transaction to be… So the transaction is successful. I’ll just refresh it. And now, I can see that I have 10 STRK within my social page, right? I now go on Twitter, and I say, “I want to send you, Devorah,” for example, “I want to send you five STRK.” So I’m going to tag Pulsar Starknet, which is the bot for driving campaigns, and I’m going to say, “Send five STRK to @Devorah.” I’m posting this, and that’s it. In a couple of minutes, you will receive your STRK within Pulsar Money. You just need to log into Pulsar, link your social, so your Twitter account, and you will immediately see your tokens within Pulsar Money. And the cool thing is that even if you don’t have your Twitter linked to Pulsar Money by the time I send you the STRK, you can do it after that because smart contract stores the data, and once you log into Pulsar, you will be able to claim your tokens. So-

Devorah: What happens if nobody claims the tokens?

Stefana: It will revert back to you.

Devorah: Okay, very cool. Somebody commented in the comments, “Wow, this is so convenient.” It really is. It’s so easy to use and really, really simple.

Stefana: So you can see the bot already responded. You will be able to see your STRK, and this is just one of the things that you can do. The other thing is if you don’t want to do it P2P, so just directly reward you or my community or my contributor or whatever, I can do it, for example, in a fun way where I say, “Pulsar Starknet, send five STRK to,” let’s say, “10 reactions,” and then I’m just posting it. What happens here is that 10 people that will react to my posts, so like, retweet, comment, but make sure you also retweet it, will receive a fraction of the amount of tokens. So all of this will be processed by our bot within the first 24 hours, and basically randomly, 10 people that react to my post will ultimately receive a fraction of the amount of tokens.
So for example, if I go back to my account, I can see here, for example, that one minute ago, I sent you, Devorah, five STRK. And then, I posted another command, another campaign with 10 reactions. So basically, once those reactions are filled within the first 24 hours, it will be processed. And again, 10 community members will receive the rewards directly on Pulsar Money.

Devorah: Very cool. We have a question from the audience from Meison, “How does Pulsar Money plan to deal with potential cybersecurity threats given the decentralization of the platform?”

Stefana: Well, of course, we have our anti-bot system, for example. So first of all, the first thing that we do, we distribute the rewards randomly. So this is one thing that we make sure that we are avoiding bots. We also have our anti-bot system, so we are kind of looking into all of those use cases that can threaten our app and try to always encounter that and try to avoid those kind of threats within our app.

Devorah: Very cool. Awesome. So I wonder what’s your favorite feature of Pulsar, and what do you feel like is your favorite use case for this?

Stefana: Well, in terms of the social pay, because this is the first one that is already live on Starknet, I’m pretty excited about the way you can reward individual contributors, and within giveaways, for example, you can use it like a really cool system when you are driving giveaways, and you can reward the winners directly on Twitter. It’s really seamless, transparent. It gives you the sense of, “Okay, this is really something transparent that we can do.” But then, I’m super excited of the things that we can build on top of the social pay. So of course, now, we have the social pay as P2P and as campaigns as reactions.
But for example, we can do a lot of custom commands, build a lot of custom commands on top of it if you want to distribute just to some NFT holders or some specific wallets, or there are a lot of custom commands that we can do, and the ultimate goal is to drive engagement towards those use cases. For example, if you want to drive engagement to a platform, we can do that. We can filter towards only the users of the platform to receive the tokens or only some specific NFT holders. So the social pay is cool. This is the first version that we have, and it’s a really powerful one, but I’m super excited also about the things that we can build on top of the social pay and how we can play with these commands. You know?

Devorah: Yeah, I saw that there was going to be future integrations with Discord and Telegram and Instagram.

Stefana: Yeah, so-

Devorah: Super interesting.

Stefana: … this as well, right? So to ultimately also have it live on all those social media networks because you want to be where your community is, and you want to do the things there where your community is. You don’t want to take out this part of rewarding the community outside the platforms. You want to do it transparently on the social media networks, so we have all of those things in the pipeline.

Devorah: Yeah, it’s interesting that you guys are planning to go live on Instagram, which is very much not generally Web3 platform. It’s more of a Web2 platform. I wonder if integrating with more of a Web2 platform will bring Web2 users to Web3 making it easier for them to use their apps.

Stefana: Well, definitely, and this is the ultimate goal, I think, for all of us in terms of adoption. This is why I was saying in first place about payments as an industry and how we can make it more fun, how we can talk about that adoption if we don’t bring the use cases and the technology that will eventually also bring those people within Web3. And I think that we should start with payments because payments, again, is something that is here, will stay forever within, whether it’s Web2, Web3, but the question is how we can make it more seamless, how we can make people interact with it in a more seamless way.

Devorah: For sure, especially because people in Web2 or in, you want to call it, the real world use… Payments are so seamless right now. I don’t know what they use in where you’re from, but Venmo is a really popular thing in America. You could just pay someone with a click of a button, so people are so used to that. And if Web3, when it’s not like that, it’s very hard. And it sounds like your goal is really to bring that seamless payments to the Web3 world, which is amazing.

Stefana: Yeah.

Devorah: Cool. So let’s talk a little bit about Pulsar and Starknet. I know we touched on it a little bit, but could you talk a little bit about your journey on Starknet? Why did you guys decide to build on Starknet and how you got involved?

Stefana: Well, first of all, when we started looking into Starknet, I think it was a couple of months ago when we first had a first discussion with Abdel, I think it was, and he introduced us more to the Starknet Ecosystem, the vision there. We’re really looking forward to the technology, the vision, and everything, but the thing that excited us the most about the Starknet Ecosystem was the community. Because of course, having this community-driven product where we wanted to leverage this social pay, we kind of looked into the community, and this is something that was really in sync with our vision, with our goals. So we just decided to do it and to leverage all the products that we have into bringing the Starknet Ecosystem closer together and engaging within the ecosystem more.

Devorah: Very cool. Cool. And how has your experience been like building on Starknet? Yeah, tell us a little bit about that.

Stefana: Right, so of course, I’m not on the technical side, so we will need to ask our technical team. How was the experience so far? Of course, on our first layer one where we deployed first, we wrote everything in Rust. So then, with the deployment on Starknet, we needed to rewrite everything in Cairo. So that was a challenge I have to admit for the whole team because of course, building something from scratch is not easy regardless of whether you’re writing it in Rust, Solidity, Cairo, and so on and so forth. So that was a challenge, but we managed to do a lot of cool things in terms of also the technical integration. The technical possibilities that we have on Starknet were something that we were pretty much looking forward from the beginning.
Yeah. Just to come back to your first question about how we started to look into Starknet and so on and so forth, it was like the idea, first of all, was to bring the social pay live to bring the community together, but then build everything on top of that. And we’re going to… Another module that I’m super excited and I’m pretty bullish, let’s put it like this, on it is the next module that we have in pipeline for the Starknet that we’ve already started working on, which is airdrop. And I think that with airdrops, there’s a whole narrative around it within Web3. Everybody’s talking about it. All the communities are engaging with airdrops. They are expecting airdrops from their projects. And I think that this module, particularly this module that we’re going to launch on Starknet, is going to really change how big projects are launching and are distributing their tokens and they’re driving their airdrops.
Just to give you a quick insight into that, it’s going to be like a whole airdrop infrastructure where we’re going to have a points-based system. We’re going to have different classes all dedicated towards different allocations within the community from the project allocation, Starknet Ecosystem allocation to other communities within the space, but also a whole, let’s say, challenges part where users and community members join in, tap into the module, and just do the challenges, gain the points. And then, in the end, if you don’t log into the platform, if you don’t actively involve with the airdrop, you won’t be eligible for claiming your tokens. So in this way, we also want to ensure just genuine activity, that only genuine activity is rewarded within the ecosystem. So I’m super excited about that module as well.

Devorah: Awesome. So let’s say let’s fast-forward five years. Where do you see Web3 payments?

Stefana: Again, I’m mentioning again, it’s definitely we’ve seen a lot of progress from where we started, and I think, again, we should be proud of having payments as an industry within Web3, but there are a lot of things that we need to do and build on top of payments to really make it as seamless as possible. So to answer your question, where do I see it in five years? Maybe I would just say from our perspective, from Pulsar Money’s perspective. For us, it’s important to build this super app for everything payments. So I think that community members, users need a whole app where they can do everything within it, and I’m going back again to how seamless can we make payments is to build an app where users can join and do everything related to payments there from, I don’t know, transferring, swaps, to interacting with digital assets, and everything you can do on top of that.
So for us, this is the ultimate goal, to make this super app where users can identify with the app, can engage with the app. There’s going to be a whole gamification system to it as well. So you want to make payments, first of all, seamless, then also fun, and just want to give users a way that they can interact with payments in a really, really cool way.

Devorah: Awesome. Okay. Besides for Pulsar, what’s your favorite use case for Web3?

Stefana: Well, I wouldn’t say that Pulsar is specifically a use case, so I will link it to payments as a use case within Web3. What’s also interesting for us and what we’re looking into, particularly within Web3, is the NFT space, and not necessarily how we have experienced it so far as, I don’t know, being a whole collectibles, artwork kind of industry, but actually, what excites us most about NFTs is more of the technology and what will you do with the technology and how can you actually use the technological layer of the NFT industry to build on top of it.
Just to give you some example of how we use the NFT technology within Pulsar Money is, for example, we have this whole vesting system where we offer projects a whole like A to Z solution to vest their tokens towards their investors. And we integrated the NFT technology where each and every investor, they receive one SFT, and with that SFT, they can claim their allocation according to the tokenomics and the vesting schedule. So we are pretty excited about the NFT space, and again, within that, there’s so much more than just, let’s say, collectibles, artwork around it, but it goes more into the DeFi part of things, digital identity. So yeah, super excited about that as well.

Devorah: Cool. So where can we find Pulsar Money on socials?

Stefana: Well, you can find it definitely on Twitter. That’s where we are the most active, @PulsarMoneyApp on Twitter. You can find us on LinkedIn, on Instagram just by the name of Pulsar Money and of course, on Telegram and Discord as well. So we are pretty much active everywhere, and we are looking forward to having as much of you as possible from the community join us, interact with us, ask us questions. We are pretty much very looking forward to answering all the questions from the community members. We want to make sure that Pulsar Money is really understood from, let’s say, use case perspective. And there’s a lot of things that we do on Telegram and Discord as well. We’re going to start some cool AMAs on Discord, some cool contests, so join our social media networks.

Devorah: Well, it seems from all the comments here, everyone’s saying, “Awesome. Awesome to see something so new and unique in the space.” Someone else said, “It’s so cool. Glad to be here.” So it sounds like people are really as excited as I am about Pulsar. Cool. Any closing thoughts? Anything else you want to leave our audience with?

Stefana: So same on our side, we are super excited to being here within the ecosystem again. Social payments was just the beginning, just the first version. We’re going to do a lot of things on top of it, and we’re super happy to have the community by our side and interact with them and engage. Again, as excited as everyone, we are really looking forward to all the things that we’re going to build.

Devorah: Amazing, and we’re very excited to see about what happens next.

Stefana: Definitely. We’ll keep you updated.

Devorah: Amazing. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us.

Stefana: Thank you.

Devorah: And that’s all. Goodbye, everyone.

Stefana: Bye-bye. Bye, everyone.