NFC wallet for event payments
A smart crypto wallet from any NFC tag
About
The problem it solves At the moment the Web 3 space is still missing the physical payment infrastructure to easily do real-world transactions using cryptocurrencies. As events often still lack convenient solutions to manage payments we believe offering a web3 solution for this would be a great entry point to bring web3 into the real world. Small-scale events often don’t have the budget to set up traditional payment terminals. So a simple and accessible web3 solution would be a good fit. When you organize an event or manage a community space, it’s great to be able to give participants an NFC card, tag or wristband for access control. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could also use that NFC tag as a crypto wallet that people could easily top up and tap to pay? For this idea, we started the development of an MVP during EthGlobal in London. During this hackathon, we want to add three extra features to it: 1. Simple top-up process using a stripe integration so that users can top up their NFC wallet with event tokens, like a BEER token using their own smartphone. 2. Improve the NFC tap-to-pay experience with a dedicated PoS terminal hardware device that has an easy-to-use NFC reader and can print receipts. 3. Give the user the option to set a user profile linked with the NFC tag to share his contact details by simply tapping someone's phone.
How it's made
Challenges we ran into - Hardware compatibility using dedicated hardware devices: We noticed that custom-made terminal devices do not use the standard NFC libraries of Android so we have to add specific service drivers to our app to connect with the NFC reader of the terminals. - Security: By using tap to pay combined with standard NFC tags like NTAG213 there are some security vulnerabilities as tags could be copied. As we focus our solution to support event payments that are limited in time and limited account balances we do not consider this as a huge issue at the moment.