Lite.IM was the world's first hybrid-custodial social wallet that provided services through Chatbots on platforms such as Facebook, Telegram, Whatsapp, and even through SMS Text Messaging. The concept was unique at the time, instead of interacting with a website or mobile application, you would simply talk to your money. The service would authorize your wallet with your social media account (or SMS Phone Number) after a verification process which would allow you to manage, send, or receive funds through a messenger-like interface.

While this service is no longer available, because the parent company collapsed due to unrelated reasons, you may read more about the service on this medium article.

Being that I had built most of the backend for Zulu Republic, the company behind Lite.IM I was excited to see how it would scale into hundreds of thousands of users, thankfully, due to careful planning early on we were able to expand to support these users without so much as a thought. The auto-scaling mechanisms that were in place did their job and we woke up overnight to a marketing campaign gone viral that resulted in nearly half a million created accounts. The backend was only half the battle though, tasked with handling and processing message requests from all of these users posed another challenge, with the help of my collogue we had designed a processing queue that allowed us to process messages in order of priority, typically responding to inquiring users in about ~1 second on average. As you can imagine, this grew quite complex as we integrated sockets, hooks, and shared state management between several backend instances and platforms such as Facebook, Twilio, Telegram, and Whatsapp. Fun Fact: Did you know that we had a Twitter implementation too, which allowed you to interact with the bot in a comment thread? This never saw the light of day, but it was an interesting idea.

A feature that never got released, but was interesting to develop for some targeted countries was implementing the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) protocol. This was primarily focused to be a feature for Nigerian based users as it provided the benefit of being a lower-cost alternative to the less-secure SMS Messaging approach. It also didn't require internet connectivity while the options such as Facebook, Telegram, and Whatsapp did. Believe it or not, this is actually a quite common approach in Nigeria and is commonly used for things such as Mobile Panking, Government Services, and Two-Factor Authentication.