Kani Bot - v1.7.1 Update - Introducing NFT notifications and streaming everything from SE sidechain

In this new version I'm bringing two major changes to the bot. One is the introduction of NFT notifications and another is that I'm streaming all the notifications from SE chain. Last two weekend had been a busy one for me. I had to work on some of the issue fixes for the bot and while working on that, I thought why no introduce some new features to the bot. With all the confusions already happening on the chain, I was lazy to write this post and publish about the new changes. I actually drafted this post two weeks back but was lazy to complete and post it. Glad that today I found some time to do it.

This post was delayed because of few additional reasons as well. I was also trying to work on a web interface for Kani Bot to introduce some more features as well. After all these new changes, I couldn't spend more time on the UI yet and had to work on my other applications. I will soon be introducing some more features with a web portal to view and subscribe to those services.

Streaming everything from SE sidechain

Ideally from the begining this should have been the case. When I initially started to write this bot, my intention was not to create this for public use but just for myself. When few of my friends showed interest in this, I thought why not make it available for others as well. During the early days I was not much familiar about Steem Engine so much. I streamed all the data only from Steem blockchain. This is not the ideal way to do it because there can be fake transactions as well in Steem Custom Jsons.

That is the reason why I had the above disclaimer in the bot help command. Now that I have refactored the bot to stream the information from Steem Engine side chain directly, I will be removing this disclaimer. Now all the notifications are verified by the side chain. It is tedious and challlenging to understand how the data is structured there and bring the notifications. I personally felt that it could have been a lot better there. Some of my developer friends on Steem also mentioned the same. Anyways not going to go into details of that.

NFT tokens support

In this new version, I'm introducing support for NFT tokens. Currently we have a game called Steem City which is built using NFT tokens from Steem Engine. The game was developed by @gerber and the market for that was designed by @mys and it is gaining popularity in the steem ecosystem. I have added some support for this game in the bot. Whenever a new cards are purchased or if they are issued from time to time, the bot will now send that as a notification. The token transfers from one account to another will also be sent as a notification.

There are few more NFT notifications the bot can send but I will save it for the future version of the bot. Currently the NFT notification support is mostly for the Steem City project if I'm not wrong. I wish to see many new NFT projects emerging with SE Sidechain and at the same time I also wish that Steem Engine was little more stable with multiple RPC nodes.

I'm also thinking of developing a web user interface for easy payments and reports. If you have any suggestions or issues or ideas for Kani bot, please contact me in Discord. You can also visit the Kani Bot discord server to share your views.

Discord Server Link: https://discord.gg/S4x6PFz