Tracking Transaction Life Cycles via SMS 📱

While dApps on Ethereum have become incredibly complex, one of the largest pain points for Ethereum users is the lack of transparency and clarity surrounding a transaction's life cycle. Oftentimes, dApp users are left with uncertainty surrounding pending transactions, forcing them to constantly refresh block explorers or their wallet dashboards to check if their transactions have been confirmed/mined.

Problem Statement:

For dApps, simple notifications that track transaction life cycles provide a valuable user experience that allows for higher customer engagement, helping to alleviate the stress involved in pending transactions as Ethereum's ever-increasing gas fees force users to set lower maxPriorityFeePerGas to save money and inadvertently increase wait times. While building reliable transaction trackers has traditionally been complicated and unreliable, Alchemy Notify and Alchemy's pending transaction WebSocket allows us to monitor and send sending real-time push notifications regarding tx life cycles.

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In this tutorial, we’ll look at an example of how, with just a few lines of code, your dApp can integrate the power of Alchemy's Enhanced API suite, leveraging multiple Alchemy products to build a single feature to enhance user experience.

🚀 Launching with Heroku

1. Get the repo!

   • https://github.com/alchemyplatform/Transaction-Lifecycle-via-SMS.git

For all Heroku dependent documentation, refer to: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs?singlepage=true for more detailed instructions. The Heroku instructions included below are abridged.

2. Install Heroku-CLI and verify/install dependencies.

   • Download Heroku-CLI based on your OS [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli]
   • After installation, open your terminal and run heroku login; follow the commands that follow to login to your Heroku account. If you don't have a Heroku account, you can sign up for one!
   • Run node --version. You may have any version of Node greater than 10. If you don’t have it or have an older version, install a more recent version of Node.
   • Run npm --version. npm is installed with Node, so check that it’s there. If you don’t have it, install a more recent version of Node:
   • Run git --version Check to make sure you have git installed.

3. Initiate Heroku.

   • Run heroku create to create your heroku app. Take note of the info that pops up in the terminal, especially the URL that looks like http://xxxxxxxxx.herokuapp.com/ That's the URL for your dashboard!

4. Create Twilio account / configure SMS integration

   • If you are new to Twilio, sign up for a trial account. With your trial account, you'll have enough credits to power your SMS notifications! Once you've signed up, head over to your Console and grab your Account SID and your Auth Token.

   • Once you have a Twilio account, note that sending messages through Twilio requires a Twilio phone number with SMS capabilities. If you don’t currently own a Twilio phone number with SMS capabilities, you’ll need to buy one with your provided credits. After navigating to the Buy a Number page, check the 'SMS' box and click 'Search' to find/buy a number that works for you!

Open the app.py file.
Change lines 17 and 18 in the file to reflect your particular Twilio Account SID and Auth Token. Change line 58 in the file to reflect the Twilio phone number that you acquired previously in the from field and your own phone number in the to field!

Open the sniffer.py file.
Change lines 10 and 11 in the file to reflect your particular Twilio Account SID and Auth Token. Change the twilio message snipper in the file to reflect the Twilio phone number that you acquired previously in the from field and your own phone number in the to field!

3. Add in your Alchemy API Key.

   Open app.py file. Replace line 13's ""with your Alchemy key! We recommend that you set this key in your environment variables for prod environments.

Don't forget to sign into your Alchemy account to use the Transfers / Notify API. See https://docs.alchemy.com/alchemy/documentation/apis/enhanced-apis/transfers-api for more specific documentation.

If you don’t already have an Alchemy account, you’ll first need to create one. The free version will work fine for getting started. First, we create an App for our Dashboard by clicking “Create App” under the Apps dropdown menu.

Once we have created the app and pointed it towards the appropriate network, we're ready to go and can paste in our key.

4. Deploy Heroku.

   • Run git add .
   • Run git commit -m "added Alchemy keys"
   • Run git push heroku master to push and deploy your heroku app.

🎉 Congratulations on your SMS iintegration! Feel free to edit your app, change its behavior, or add more functionality.