Hey everyone (especially judges!),

This is my final update as a part of the Product Hunt Global Hackathon. Exactly a month ago, I started this exciting journey of working on CryptoVigil from scratch including: 💡ideation, 🔬research, 💻coding, and more importantly, 🚀shipping before deadline! For those who have been getting constant updates through Slack, please bear with this longer text update which covers the entire month's progress in one post.

Although I have been following the cryptocurrency space for 5 years, the ICO rush earlier this year forced me to take a much deeper look into the intricacies, especially the technology aspects. Also, Unikrn, a company that acquired my previous venture, was planning an ICO and Kartik from Springrole.com got me on-board as an advisor to his upcoming ICO. I started spending a lot of lurking on other ICO communities to find out what challenges each company was facing. One of the most commonly asked questions, even by serious investors, was how to know when & where they have received coins from a token sale. Moreover, most of them track their portfolio manually by entering the data on excel sheets! Twitter & Subreddits are full of posts where people trust random website/apps with their private key and end up losing everything, not just tokens but also their entire wallet.

Enter CryptoVigil: It automatically tracks all your ICO (or any ERC20) tokens in one place using just your Ethereum address in real time. You either copy paste the wallet address or send a picture of its QR code and CryptoVigil takes it from there. Unlike other portfolio apps or excel sheets, it automatically pulls all your tokens, every token transfer made, whether through ICO, exchanges or even airdops. You also never need to part with your private key, which means even hardware or paper wallets work perfectly! Even the interface & interaction is handled through 🤖bots on platform of your choice - Telegram, Slack, Discord and even Messenger! No apps or the constant need to visit a website. Pricing information of your entire portfolio is also kept up to date and available instantly on your fingertips. CryptoVigil constantly monitors the Ethereum blockchain ⛓for token transfers in real time and hence alerts you via the bots each time you receive (or send) a token – it's just like magic!

As of today, it is publicly available as a Telegram bot – rest of the bots need to go through an approval process with the respective platforms and I intend to do that only when the product is ready for public beta. Here's a direct link to get started:

Note: To those trying out/judging, if you do not have an Ethereum address with tokens, feel free to give this address to the bot: 0x8d12a197cb00d4747a1fe03395095ce2a5cc6819

Mind you, it's one of the busiest accounts which constantly sends/receives tokens and you may receive a bunch of updates every second. You might want to send /stop if you want to try viewing /dashboard & transaction history.

A hackathon update wouldn't be complete without talking about the technology. My code is 100% Javascript – my Ethereum nodes run on Go (Getch) and Rust (Parity). Since I first started building this as a web app, the backend core (NodeJS) was designed to interact through websockets. Eventually, I started writing the platform bots to talk to the core using a similar architecture. The core then directly interacts with the Ethereum nodes via websockets to sync realtime transactions & JSON-RPC to fetch historical data. For the first 3 weeks, I had the entire system running without an additional database layer making it truly de-centralized & distributed. More recently, I added AWS Aurora & Redis clusters to log & cache user & pricing data to speed up repeat calls. It also manages rate limits for different platforms and allows me to add more user specific features. Because I run my own Ethereum nodes and not depend on 3rd parties APIs to fetch the data, the service infinitely scales and can have 100% uptime – as long as I keep paying the AWS bills! The only dependency is the pricing info which I periodically fetch from external exchanges where the respective tokens are traded.

Now that there's an MVP, it's extremely important to not just acquire more users but also get constant feedback to test & iterate on stuff that matters. The first few users were my friends and people at my workplace. I then managed to get some of you through Product Hunt's upcoming pages shared on Twitter, Reddit & Leeroy. It was great to get feedback on the private slack group and more recently on Telegram. As of this week, I have started hustling on other Telegram groups and reaching out to people who face the core problem CryptoVigil intends to solve. Unfortunately, the crypto space is full of scammers and CryptoVigil, although with a transparent interface, is unknown and it's challenging to convince strangers and group admins to trust it. I also intend to attend more offline meetups and showcase to people in person. One of you even suggested I should do flash talks on ICO investing 101 and showcase how with CryptoVigil & secure wallets, anyone can safely & smartly invest and/or hold tokens.

👏 Thanks to all of you for spreading the word around – please continue doing so by sharing the website link, no medium is stronger than word of mouth!

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Swaroop Hegde

Maker, CryptoVigil