Stellar Community Fund

By Beans app

Beans app - Cards & passkeys

SCF #29

$99.7K

Legacy v5.0 Community Award

Awarded

Adding cards, passkeys and DeFi to the Beans non-custodial wallet.

Products & Services

As a non-custodial wallet built for people without knowledge about blockchain, users can already send and receive money internationally. We have seen though that users would love to use their Beans balance to directly spend their funds in shops. This would mean they don’t have to withdraw and keep their funds in a more stable currency for longer. We are excited to add support for prepaid cards in Europe, LATAM and Africa. This will mean that users will keep their funds in the app (and on Stellar) for a longer period and will mean a significant increase in utility. It aligns really well with our vision that blockchain based wallets have the potential to look and feel similar to normal centralized banking services.

To add prepaid cards, we are looking to work with our card partner to leverage existing SEP’s like SEP 10 and SEP 6 and 12. By building on top of these standards it will be easier to maintain and the functionality will become available to the broader ecosystem easily as well. As cards need some additional features around card management, we are looking to build this in a way that has the potential to become a new “card standard”. In future iterations we might shift from prepaid cards to debit cards by using Soroban. This is something closely related to our ambitions to shift towards a smart wallet architecture.

We have previously done a proof-of-concept with very easy to use lending pool functionality inside Beans, through an integration with Blend. To take this into production, we require features like earnings management, multi procotol support, automated pool balancing and safety mechanisms. We were planning to build this ourselves, however, our direction changed after connecting with Paltalabs during the Consensus 2024 hackathon. Paltalabs showcased an idea that closely aligned with our needs. They expressed interest in further developing DeFindex in cooperation with us, offering substantial benefits by offloading the development of critical features to Paltalabs. Most of the work done on our Blend proof-of-concept can be reused or adapted to align with the DeFindex protocol. Additionally, we will develop a DeFindex adapter for the Blend lending pool that can be used by everyone in the Stellar ecosystem. To build the integration, we will build a Blend adapter that connects DeFindex with Blend. This adapter can be re-used by ecosystem projects.

We have seen that the onboarding flow can be a bit long for some users and SMS authentication is not the best fallback authtentication option in all countries. That’s why we are looking for other authentication options. Secondly, we see a lot of potential when we shift towards a smart wallet infrastructure. The first step in that direction is working with passkeys for account recovery. We are super excited by the ease of use of password less account recovery and looking to use passkeys for seemless account creation and recovery. A first step in this direction is by addin passkeys to our SEP 30 authentication options. After that, in future rounds we will be able to explore smart-wallet infrastructure changes in more detail. Here we expect to run into challenges like compatability with existing SEP's, sending from C addresses to G addressses, offering cross-currency swaps etc.