- The IOTA Community has received a new tip-bot for Telegram and Discord.
- The tool is in beta stage and BaFin compliant.
After the IOTA community has not had a tip-bot for well over a year now, the two developers Martin Neubauer and “Huhn” have released a new version, which is provided by einfachIOTA.de. As Neubauer explained in a Medium article, the old community tip-bot had to be shut down for legal reasons. Because of this, both developers searched and found a new solution:
It’s hard to host something like this without a BaFin (Federal Financial Supervisory Authority) license. But the answer was as simple as it is brilliant: The bot only provides the recipient’s address and makes them as easy to process as possible (using deeplinks, for example). This approach is not only BaFin- compliant, but also enables maximum decentralization because the bot does not serve as a custodial, as it is the case with most other solutions.
How the IOTA tip-bot for Telegram and Discord works
The Telegram tip-bot now works in such a way that users can simply send a direct message with the command “/add + address” to add their receiving address to the tip-bot. If the address is known to the backend, other users can send a tip to the registered address with the command “/tip @username”.
The bot then replies with the custom address and a button with a deep link to Trinity, which automatically fills in everything except the amount of IOTA the user wants to give – and a QR code to scan, which the user receives from the bot via private message. When the user clicks on “Trinity”, he will be redirected to a tinyURL link, which is the deep link for Trinity. Furthermore, Neubauer explained:
By the way, if you don’t trust us, with the command /source in private you receive a link to our GitHub repository!
The Discord tip-bot works similarly. Discord users just have to write a message with the text “!add + address” to register their receiving address. Dispatching the tip works with the text message “!tip @username.”
For legal reasons, the developers point out that this is only a beta version and no liability for financial losses will be accepted. Therefore, users should only send small quantities in IOTA with the tip-bot. In addition, the following important note applies to its use:
Please don’t forget to set your new address everytime you send from your wallet, due to Winternitz one time signatures!