Snow - A high-performance alternative to popular cryptocurrency payment gateways such as CoinGate, BitPay

by React

?️ Snow – A High-Performance Cryptocurrency Payment Gateway

? This project is actively in development ?

About The Project

Snow is a self-hosted, high-performance cryptocurrency payment gateway. Payments can administer via the API or with the built-in invoicing client (image below).

Currently support currencies: Solana, Cardano, Litecoin, and Dash.

Purpose

  • No KYC
  • No fees (besides network) or middleman
  • Private
  • Self-hosted
  • Easily extensible for new currencies
  • Highly performant
  • No IP Blocking

Funds go directly to your wallet via the one-time addresses that are created for each payment.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Installation

TODO Create Dockerfile (Nginx, Mongo no external, Node, Npm)

Usage

Snow requires some configuration. Create a file called .env in the project root to edit of the parameters below. Use the provided .env.default file as a reference (your .env will override these).

Key Description Required Default
ADMIN_DASH_PUBLIC_KEY Public key (address) of Dash admin wallet Yes null
ADMIN_DASH_PRIVATE_KEY Private key of Dash admin wallet. Used for programmatically sending transactions from admin No null
DASH_RPC_URL URL of Dash RPC, such as (getblock.io). Yes null
DASH_RPC_API_KEY Optional API key to the Dash RPC No null
ADMIN_LTC_PUBLIC_KEY Public key (address) of Litecoin admin wallet Yes null
ADMIN_LTC_PRIVATE_KEY Private key of Litecoin admin wallet. Used for programmatically sending transactions from admin No null
LTC_RPC_URL URL of Litecoin RPC, such as (getblock.io). Yes null
LTC_RPC_API_KEY Optional API key to the Litecoin RPC No null
ADMIN_SOL_PUBLIC_KEY Public key (address) of Solana admin wallet Yes null
ADMIN_SOL_PRIVATE_KEY Private key of Solana admin wallet. Used for programmatically sending transactions from admin No null
SOL_RPC_URL URL of Solana RPC. No https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com
SOL_RPC_API_KEY Optional API key to the Solana RPC No null
SNOW_API_KEY Custom key that will be required in the administrative requests snow-api-key requests to Snow No null
IP_WHITELIST List of IP address (1.1.1.1,2.2.2.2,…) to be whitelisted for administrative requests No null
TRANSACTION_TIMEOUT Milliseconds for which a transaction will be valid for No 1200000 (20 Minutes)
TRANSACTION_REFRESH_TIME Milliseconds for which each active transaction will be re-scanned No 10000 (10 Seconds)
TRANSACTION_SLIPPAGE_TOLERANCE Percentage of a payment that discounted as transactional slippage (e.g. a TRANSACTION_SLIPPAGE_TOLERANCE of 0.02 for a 100 SOL transaction will mean that at 98 SOL the transaction will be considered fulfilled). This is recommended for a smoother experience given transaction fees. No 0.02
MONGO_CONNECTION_STRING Connection string for mongodb instance, which is installed automatically with docker No mongodb://localhost:27017
MONGO_SNOW_DB Mongo database to use for storing/managing payments No snow
TESTNETS For development only. Turn on testnets for given currencies No false

Development

Development experience and extensibility are a high priority for this package.

  1. Git clone this package.
  2. cd Snow && npm i
  3. Add a mongoDB connection to the MONGO_CONNECTION_STRING .env parameters. For development, the Mongo Atlas free tier works great.
  4. npm run dev to start the invoice client and backend.
    • Any changes in packages/invoice-client/src will be automatically reflected on refresh.
    • Any changes to the source of packages/backend/src will be reflected automatically via ts-node-dev.

Adding a currency

There’s four steps in adding a currency to this package.

  1. Add the ticker, along with some metadata, to the currencies type in packages/common/src/currencies.ts.
  2. Create the admin wallet. This is where payments are finally sent to and presumably the real wallet of the client. Note that the admin wallet can also be used to programmatically send transactions as well.
    • Start by taking a look at Solana’s admin wallet and note that you only need to implement two functions: getBalance and sendTransaction. The class that admin wallets inherit from, GenericAdminWallet, handles class inheritance.
  3. Create the transactional wallet. This class can be thought of a payment, since a new transactional wallet is created for every payment, along with a new Public Key and Private Key. Transactional wallets, and their associated payment data, are stored in Mongo.
    1. Start by taking a look at Solana’s transactional wallet and note that you only need to implement three functions: fromNew, getBalance and _cashOut. The class that transactional wallets inherit from, GenericTransactionalWallet, handles the rest.
  4. Add both the transactional and admin wallet classes to packages/backend/src/currenciesToWallets.ts so it can be referred to by ticker across the project

And that’s it! Start the dev environment and create a new payment of any amount with your new ticker.

Adding an API route

Customizing the invoice interface

The invoice client is a statically built React package (via Vite). This static build is served in backend. This functionality can be seen here.

Editing the react package will automatically build to dist, so just refresh the page to see the changes.

The source code in invoice client is pretty straight-forward, so anyone familiar with React (& TailwindCSS) should have an easy time making their desired alterations.

GitHub

View Github