Heard about Vanilla by Cinnamon yet?

Cinnamon — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 21:41:11 +0000

During the last weekend of May, Cinnamon’s dev team decided to take part in Grant for the Web’s Hackathon. After having spent more than 40 hours coding, we are proud to announce that we have developed something we believe will make Web Monetization even better.

How does Web Monetization actually work?
For those of you completely new to the party, Web Monetization (or WM) is a JavaScript browser API which allows the creation of a payment stream from the user agent to the website. Content usually receives income from Pay Per Click or Cost Per Impression advertising, but with WM, relatively small subscriptions are distributed with micropayments to pay for content.

While this is an absolutely revolutionary way of money streaming, it is still an ongoing project with endless possibilities. At the moment the process of WM is a communication process between a user visiting a monetized piece of content and a WM provider, who sends funds to a content creator’s wallet.

There are two issues we identified with this. Firstly, the only way to verify payments is by looking into your wallet, which means that someone could find a way around the WM process, without you knowing. Secondly, looking at the source code of a website displays payment pointers of everyone receiving money. This could potentially allow someone to change payment pointers, leaving you without a way to check. Payment verification on the back-end is extremely complex and requires in-depth knowledge of Interledger Protocol. That being said, there is an open source method for payment verification under development called STREAM Receipts, which will make payment verification much easier, but not for all use-cases.

Vanilla, more than a flavour
We discovered a way to improve these features with a little something we named Vanilla. Vanilla is a new service (API) adding an extra security layer for your monetized content. We created Vanilla to keep your information more secure and to ensure users don’t cheat their way around the payment mechanism.

What does Vanilla do? Simply put, we inserted ourselves into the equation. When users attempt to access monetized content they will transfer Vanilla’s payment information to a WM provider, instead of their own. WM provider then streams payments to Vanilla which we forward to a creator's payment pointer. By using Vanilla API you can then easily verify an ongoing payment stream and decide whether to show exclusive content or not. Additionally, we shield information of individual payment pointers (you will only see Vanilla in the source code). For those of you using Cinnamon, we already had this implemented since day one, and seeing that it works well, we feel other platforms could also benefit from its use. Vanilla is a result of our duty to protect creator income and privacy.

This will (in the near future) also allow us to develop a long sought out concept of payment splitting. Payment splitting will enable several creators to split profits from one piece of content based on their contribution. What we are even more excited about is that this will enable creators with altruistic intentions to dedicate all or part of their profits to causes of their choice (non-profit organisations, charities, and other NGOs). We’re also preparing Music/Video Web Monetization features, transaction history features, analytics, and more.

Should you feel like you don’t really wish to use Vanilla to keep track of payments, we will also implement STREAM Receipts soon.

If you have read this and felt you’d like to contribute, or have ideas for plugins and features, make sure to contact us at contact@vanilla.so.

So keep your eyes open for Vanilla, Cinnamon’s latest tool for creators.

Hope you guys have a great week,
-Cinnamon Dev Team-

Vanilla by Cinnamon

Cinnamon — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 17:35:57 +0000

What I built

Vanilla is a new API which adds an extra layer of security for monetized content. When users attempt to access monetized content they will transfer Vanilla’s payment information to a WM Provider, instead of their own, WM Provider then streams payments to Vanilla which we forward to a creator's Payment Pointer. Additionally we shield information of individual Payment Pointers with ours.

Submission Category:

Foundational Technology

Demo

Link to Code

https://github.com/vanilla-wm

How we built it

Vanilla provides Web Monetization verification features for applications that require higher level of flexibility.

💡 Vanilla is currently working on implementing STREAM Receipts. STREAM Receipt is a proof of payment provided by Web Monetization Wallet.

Vanilla solves complex use-cases where websites want to ensure
that a visitor is paying. This can be very tricky and requires deep knowledge of ILP and Web Monetization. We made this much easier for anyone. Current Vanilla project includes Vanilla Admin, Vanilla API, Vanilla ILP and Vanilla App.

Vanilla App

App was written in Next.js and describes the Vanilla project
and the main features for Websites.

Vanilla Admin

Users are able to set the payment pointer and read Vanilla API documentation. Admin was build in Next.js as a simple client-side React application that uses GraphQL for fetching data. We will extend the endpoints and features for Web Monetization in the future.

Vanilla API

It is an GraphQL API that provides a set of endpoints for payments verification and Web Monetization features.

Vanilla ILP

Vanilla ILP is the foundation of our Vanilla project. It is build with Nest.js and WM access. It enables payment verification and multiple other WM features such as payment splitting and analytics.

Additional Resources/Info

Read more about it in our Coil Blog post at https://coil.com/p/Cinnamon/Hackathon-/vNQIJIL6-

Forem: Cinnamon