Aegora.jp: CRYPTO? OMG! Buy REAL THINGS with CRYPTO NOW?!?

Ah... clickbait style video title glory... This is actually a straightforward video with no hype to it. But it is true: There is a real marketplace now where you can use crypto directly on chain as a payment method -- and the process is arguably smoother than Visa (and the site fees are only 2% compared with 13~20% for eBay/PayPal). Also, sorry about the audio -- sounds like I'm in a can!

Aegora.jp is the first boringly ordinary person-to-person sales site that uses a #cryptocurrency (#Aeternity ticker #AE) governed through smart contracts, as its primary payment method rather than Visa/PayPal/etc. No NFTs, no "digital assets", no hype. All trades are completely on-chain, for real tangible items, and the negotiation is left up to the sellers and buyers.

Mainnet site: https://aegora.jp
Testnet site: https://testnet.aegora.jp
Testnet faucet: https://faucet.aepps.com

As for actually buying AE and getting them out of those creepy exchanges and onto the chain for real, so far we have had the best experience using Gate.io -- if something takes too long, open a support ticket and they will actually get to your issue right away (yes, actual support people doing support things -- what a wild concept).

More tutorials, explainers, howtos, help articles, etc. are planned but as the site just went public on Thursday this is an early first look and can act as an English-language demo/howto for early adopters to understand how it works and discover where they can find the testnet version of it to play around and figure things out for themselves. The site will be changing rapidly over the next few weeks to improve discoverability, but the minimum feature set is fairly small and easy to comprehend after a few minutes poking around the testnet site.

As a side note, the backend is implemented entirely in Erlang, and the backend libraries necessary to communicate with the chain (aka "Vanillae.erl") and the in-page code necessary to communicate with the wallet (aka "Sidekick") are open source, though not packaged nicely yet.