[Top Builder 2025]: Club Bink

[realjuangalt]

🏗️ Top Builder 2025 Application Form to track progress through Round 1 - 3 ~ Currently in Round 1

📝 Instructions

Welcome to the Top Builder competition! Before you begin, here’s what you need to know:

1. Eligibility: Only teams that have been officially selected for Top Builder by PlebLab are eligible to use this form.
2. Detailed Submissions: Provide comprehensive information to assist the judges in evaluating your project effectively.
3. Submission Deadlines: Adhere to submission deadlines for each round to remain in good standing.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The Team

• Team Name: Club Bink

• Number of Founders: 4

• Team Background:

  • Juan Galt: Project & Content Lead
  • Robert Allen: Back End Dev
  • Ivan Robles: Front End Dev
  • Brenda Reyes: Graphic Design

• Bitcoin & Lightning Involvement: Describe your involvement and experience.

  • Juan Galt has 10 years of experience in Bitcoin education and media, as well as trading and peer-to-peer markets within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

  • Robert Allen is a backend Bitcoin developer with 4 years of experience in the industry.

  • Brenda and Ivan are new to Bitcoin, but they bring deep expertise in UX and Design.

• Origin Story: What inspired your idea?

  • The idea was born out of frustration. As a so called ‘paranoid crypto anarchist’, I am keenly aware of the vast number of data hacks from exchanges and other centralized financial institutions. Most Americans have had their social security numbers leaked into the dark web at this point, for example, so the requirement to submit this data to centralized exchanges in order to trade Bitcoin was a personal pain point.

  • On the other hand, as an active user of peer-to-peer markets in Latin America, the commissions to trade were also a pain point. With a minimum fee of 2% and as high as 10% for sellers or buyers, this cost to access more private markets bothered me enough to decide to build Club Bink - a toolkit to bootstrap local peer-to-peer markets within high-trust Bitcoin communities, allowing members to keep their privacy intact and save on commissions.

💡 The Idea

• Project Overview: Club Bink facilitates trade of Bitcoin and fiat within high trust local in person social networks.
  • It begins with a normalization of the dollar cost average investment strategy, presented as the best investment path for newcomers to Bitcoin.
  • By breaking down the size of trades into small weekly or biweekly chunks, the trust built between Bitcoin community leaders and newcomers can be leveraged for trade, bypassing the need for trusted third parties or escrow services.
  • The app educates newcomers through a drip feed of Bitcoin principles and fundamental ideas. Additionally, it keeps both DCA buyers and community leaders (sellers) on a schedule to trade, reminds them, and helps them calculate the best price for both parties in that moment and local market.
  • The calculation of prices, in particular, can be tricky since peer-to-peer markets have significant variability from index Bitcoin USD prices. Club Bink software leverages local peer-to-peer market data to give both buyers and sellers the best price they can get, saving both parties the commissions paid to exchanges and professional p2p traders.
  • Finally, Club Bink allows local Bitcoin communities to quantify and leverage their existing trust, enabling them to trade among themselves with minimum friction by stacking reputation data and blacklisting anyone who abuses that trust.
  • Club Bink is intended to be a fully open-source project that can be run locally by bitcoin meetups worldwide in whatever language is needed, keeping the toolkit infrastructure lean and distributed.
  • The first instance of the project is intended to have a website and a WhatsApp bot for maximum distribution across the global south.
• Website: Bink.club
• GitHub: https://github.com/realjuangalt/Club-Bink-Demo
• Project Stage:
  • The full website has both been wire framed and built out. Landing pages for both evangelists and stackers (sellers and buyers) and corresponding onboarding flows all the way to their personalized dashboards.
  • • The site, seen at bink.club is not yet connected to the back end, missing whatsapp bot integration and live price data. But in terms of design and page flow, it is a strong MVP and effectively completed.
  • WhatsApp integration is still pending, though the library and integration path has been wireframed as well, and the bot's script has also been drafted. Both need further development.
  • Order book logic has been worked out enough to function and design choices have been identified that lower the infrastructure build out to a model similar to that of lnp2p. Optimized for high privacy and the database does not need to store financial account data from users. They simply exchange that information via their own channels.
  • P2P price calculation for COP has been prototyped. Needs to be integrated into site. This model can probably be applied to other markets easily enough. Bink price can be calculated between p2p and index global prices already, but still in prototype stage. needs to be integrated and optimized for each market.
• Supplementary Materials:
  • https://github.com/realjuangalt/Club-Bink-Demo
  • Spanish demo video from Hackalajara hackathon presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIGuozwGpEU&list=PLxCILFSTir7SbRNL18V4BU89Gcfh9dpNN&index=4
  • Live demo of landing page at Bink.club

📚 Additional Information

• Additional Links/Info: Bink.club

📌 Submission Type

• Initial Project Creation

🚀 Current Project Progress

• Progress Made: Website wireframe completed and website designed based on it, with feedback and approval from UX advisor.
• Challenges Faced: Skiping the wire frame step at first cost me time, but once the wire frame was done, things moved a lot faster.
  https://www.figma.com/board/QW0qNcVFIi7Dhj6wbB80gE/Prototype?node-id=0-1&t=5rADnDLtM22J8Bbm-1
• Future Roadmap of what's next: With the MVP of the website completed, I'll move forward to updating all relevant content and showing off the site, improving the content to make the idea easier to understand.
• WIll then move on to integrate live price data
• bot logic needs to be integrated as well
• live database for user data also needs to be integrated.

⏳ Round 1 Milestone

• Keep in mind that completion will need to be by February 8th, 2025.
• First-round milestone the team has set for themselves:
  • Landing page for buyer and seller MVPs done Wireframe completed
  • P2P price calculator logic done Test version of p2p price completed
  • Whatsapp Bot MVP live. Whatsapp api framework identified and content mvp1 completed.
  • SHORT VIDEO UPDATE https://youtu.be/FxjmUgzGWLA

📝 Submission Complete

• All required information has been provided above.

📅 Top Builder Program Structure

Registration Opens: Monday, October 28th, 2024

• Application: Interested teams apply for Top Builder.
• Selection: Teams will be chosen based on their application. See FAQ for details.

Round 1: January 6th - February 8th, 2025

• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops start, available live and online.
• Chat Access: Selected teams join the PlebLab internal chat.
• Mentorship: Begins for teams.
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their first-round milestones.

Round 2: February 9 - 22nd, 2025

• Team Reduction: PlebLab cuts half of the Top Builder teams. (Only half continued in Round 2.)
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their second-round milestones.
• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops continue.
• Mentorship: Continues.

Round 3: Starting February 23rd, 2025

• Team Reduction: PlebLab narrows down to 5 Top Builder teams. (All will be pitching in Austin.)
• Final Milestones: Teams set final project milestones for the last round.
• Preparation: Teams prepare their pitch in front of judges. Final teams are contacted to come to Austin for Startup Day.

Final Round at Startup Day: March 13, 2025

• Preparation: Teams work on their final pitches at PlebLab.
• Presentations: Final teams present before judges on Startup Day.
• Deliberation: Judges decide during a happy hour.
• Announcement: The winner of Top Builder is announced at Austin BitDevs.
• Celebration: After-party for Top Builder.

[realjuangalt]

Hi everyone! Some updates from the past two weeks.

Spent a good amount building the demo you can now see at bink.club and secured the domain which, I'm surprised was still available.

Realized that instead of building a demo, I should build out a wire frame / mockup of the project as I see it instead and then try to simplify that, to minimize wasted dev resources. (Thanks to Keith and Robert for helping me reach this conclusion).

Expanded the mock up which I am now building on figma with low resolution. You can see the wire frame here. Feel free to give me feedback on how I am doing as it is the first time I use figma!

https://www.figma.com/board/QW0qNcVFIi7Dhj6wbB80gE/Prototype?node-id=0-1&p=f

For now I think that's all I have to report. Missed some of the calls last week cuz of a conference, but will catch up and move fast this week God willing.

[realjuangalt]

Alright! here's the video overview. I tried my best to make this as short as possible and as close to 1 minute long, but unfortunetly I'm not of the tik tok generation. xD I hope this is works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxjmUgzGWLA

[realjuangalt]

Hey everyone. Quick updates on Club Bink. The demo website is live! Every page that was wired framed is now implemented, and looking pretty good.

I recorded a video going through the idea and explaining the problem, solution and vision for the future which you can find here.

https://youtu.be/BLQIiD1DJZU

Also, here's a quick overview of the main pages, starting with my favorite, the "Stacker" landing page. Meant for people new to Bitcoin to understand the DCA investment strategy and get basic Bitcoin literacy.

The Stacker landing page lays the foundation for a future where Club Bink drop feeds new Bitcoiners only the highest quality Bitcoin only information, in as little text as possible with high quality custom made graphics. A piece of the project that is further down the road map.

Next up we have the Evangelist landing page, where I hope to explain the project to Bitcoin evangelists and entice them to start their own local Bink Clubs.

Once the evangelist decides to start a new local club, they can go through the sign up and club creation flow, finally landing at their Evangelist Dashboard.

The evangelist can then grab a stacker invite link and send it to their friends and family, which will take them to the stacker landing page and onto a similar sign up flow.

Finally, the stacker has a personalized DCA dashboard once they begin making trades, helps them see their progress over time and presents potential opportunities to 'buy the dip' in future version of the project.

What's next:

• Live price integration for both Index BTCUSD and local P2P prices, to calculate optimal Bink Price.
• Whatsapp bot integration for notifications and coordination between stackers and evangelists
• Database integration
• Nostr integration encrypted comms for sensitive data.
• Easy to bootstrap open source package for communities that want to host locally rather than use the Bink.Club platform.

[realjuangalt]

Just added a spanish translation to the whole site. Little language toggle at the top right! Will push to github soon. :D