The fifth AMA (Ask Me Anything) of the year features André and Limo of Cryptum—an abstraction layer built by Blockforce to help developers interact with blockchains using a simple JavaScript SDK.

Today, we discuss their inspiration for building Cryptum, how they're lowering the barriers to entry to Web 3 and how XRPL documentation made it dead-simple to get started integrating their project. Check out the full recap below, and head to xrpldevs.com for updates on the next AMA!

BiasGoose: Hey everyone! Join me in welcoming Limonada and dr31 from Cryptum and Blockforce 👋

Thank you for joining us for this AMA! If anybody has a question please send it over to the ama-questions channel.

Limonada and dr31 please introduce yourselves and your project. Also, it's awesome to have fellow Brazilians here 😎

Limonada: Hey guys! I go by Limo (or just Vitor), and I'm a blockchain developer at Blockforce. Our main product atm is Cryptum, an abstraction layer that helps developers interact with several blockchains (including XRP Ledger) through a simple JavaScript SDK.

Dr31: Hello! I'm André (drei) and I'm a software engineer Blockforce.

I've been working with Blockforce for quite a few years now, and I took part in the team that built and is building Cryptum. I also help our enterprise customer integrate with our products on a day-to-day basis 🙂

BiasGoose: Thank you for the intro! Can you tell us a bit more about your background as a developer and your team?

Limonada: My story as a blockchain dev is the same as most of us in here. At first, I was just interested in the tech, then I started to dabble with it and eventually landed a job with Blockforce through a hackathon! (Engage in community events, guys!)

Drei can tell us a little bit about the company, too.

Dr31: Blockforce started as what we call a "blockchain Studio." Companies that wanted to build Web 3.0 solutions came to us, and we offered consultancy and development services to build their products together with them.

After building a lot of projects with our customers, we realized that almost all of them included building and using core Web 3.0 features that we could turn into a SaaS product, which is where Cryptum came from.
I started my journey with blockchain when I joined Blockforce, and I've been with them since then 🙂 <3. I had the pleasure to participate in many of those projects I've mentioned.

BiasGoose: Amazing! Thank you. That's a great journey Limonada. And thank you dr31 for the background on Blockforce. Can you tell us more about Cryptum? Who is your target audience and how can developers here at any stage of their journey use your product?

Limonada: We help companies and developers get into the Web 3.0 world by removing several layers that are blockchain "novelties." Most of us already know that a wallet consists of a cryptographic pair of public and private keys, but maybe that's still a bit confusing for someone who's just getting started! With Cryptum, all you have to do to programmatically create a wallet is sdk.wallet.generateWallet({protocol}) and that's it.

The same concept applies for tx building and etc. Furthermore, we handle all the infrastructure necessary to run all of these things (like nodes) so that you don't have to worry about providers (or even know what they are, really).

Dr31: Currently, we offer products for three groups: devs, sellers and creators. In all of them, our goal is to help people transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 without having to handle all the complexities involved in day-to-day blockchain development.

For devs, we offer an SDK and a set of APIs that make it easy to build applications with ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, interacting with blockchain data and things like that.

For stores, we offer no-code checkout plugins for Wordpress and Magento + woocommerce websites and also checkout solutions to make it easier to accept cryptocurrencies as a payment method.

For creators, we have a dashboard in which one can create collections, mint and transfer NFTs and also integrate them with stores.

Everything is available through our dashboard at dashboard.cryptum.io.

BiasGoose: That's absurdly easy 🤯

One question from the community: What are the top industries creating projects on Cryptum? Where do you see most activity?

Also, when was cryptum launched? I believe it was recently, right?

Dr31: The asset tokenization industry is one that has been trending within our products. There are large companies that do not have an internal blockchain team starting new projects and looking into building Web 3.0 solutions, and they found a way to do it with us. To name a few cases, we have one customer in the real estate business and another one that is a big player in [the] car rentals industry which is looking into tokenize carbon credits.

Limonada: We are currently witnessing a lot of demand for NFT solutions. People/companies want to mint NFTs easily and in a way that integrates with the rest of their business model. Digital art NFTs are only a fraction of what our customers want to implement. We've seen companies want to adopt NFTs to tokenize carbon credit emissions for example, or even track graduation certificates.

Other than that, we plan on launching more front-end features to make the application building process even easier + publishing some educational content for a better Web 3.0 on-boarding experience both to our enterprise customers and the whole community!

BiasGoose: That's great news! What was challenging for the team while integrating with the XRP Ledger? And what went well?

Limonada: The main difficulty was the difference between other EVM chains that we are used to supporting and XRPL (for example, trustlines). But the good part is that the documentation is incredibly complete and well-written, so it was just a matter of reading through it to understand these new concepts. The fast transaction times also made it easier to test and debug haha.

Dr31: 👆 Huge emphasis on the documentation part! It is both really useful and also beautiful.

BiasGoose: That's great to hear! I know many work hard to make the developer experience better every day in this community.

I wanted to thank you both Limonada and dr31 for participating in this AMA and for the very thoughtful answers. We appreciate you! It was great to learn more about Cryptum 🫂

Limonada: It was a pleasure! Thank you for hosting us. Big love to the XRPL community ❤️

Dr31: Thanks for inviting us and for sharing this space 🙂 ❤️