YouthPay

Features

• A full digital bank that behaves like the real thing, with no real money involved
• Three balances per user: a checking account, a savings account and a Bitcoin wallet
• Send money to another person by email address or phone number
• Move money between your own checking and savings accounts
• Send an external transfer to another bank with full recipient details
• Send Bitcoin to an outside wallet address at the live rate
• Every transfer confirmed by a code emailed to the user before anything moves
• Step by step transfer screens with a review of the details before you commit
• Dashboard with all three balances, recent activity and frequent recipients
• Full transaction history, colour coded for money in and money out
• Bitcoin balance valued against a live price that refreshes every ten minutes
• Account numbers, routing numbers and open dates shown on each account
• Profile page for updating your details and changing your password
• Password recovery by a code sent to your registered email
• New signups wait in a queue until an admin approves them
• Admins can suspend and reactivate any account at any time
• Admins can add transactions by hand, including Bitcoin buys and sells
• A log of every login with its address, time and device
• Rebrand the whole platform from one settings page: name, logo, colours, legal pages
• One chosen colour expands into a nine shade palette across every screen
• Animated marketing landing page driven by the same settings
• Self hosted with Docker behind NGINX with a security certificate

Challenges and solutions

1. 01

   Challenge

   The product had to feel like a real bank to be worth learning from, while never touching real money.

   Solution

   Built every flow to full banking standard, multi step transfers, emailed confirmation codes, pending states, statements and login audit logs, and kept balances as platform figures an admin controls. The experience is realistic while the risk is zero.

2. 02

   Challenge

   A transfer that is half applied when someone closes the tab is a real money bug.

   Solution

   Staged every transfer as a pending object on the user record with its own verification code, and only moved balances once the emailed code came back. An abandoned transfer expires as data and never touches a balance.

3. 03

   Challenge

   The client wanted to rebrand the whole platform without a developer.

   Solution

   Moved every branding value into a settings document and served it from an endpoint that every page reads on load. The primary colour is expanded into nine shades at runtime and written as CSS custom properties, so one save changes the entire look with no deploy.

4. 04

   Challenge

   Anyone could sign up, and a learning environment for young people cannot work that way.

   Solution

   Split registration into a pending collection kept separate from real users. The applicant verifies their email, then waits, and only an explicit admin approval creates the actual account.

5. 05

   Challenge

   Four different transfer types would have meant four nearly identical flows that slowly drift apart.

   Solution

   Built one step wizard pattern, select, enter the amount, review, verify by code, result, and reused it across all four transfer types, with only the middle step differing.

6. 06

   Challenge

   Users and admins needed separate sessions that could not be confused with each other.

   Solution

   Kept them on different mechanisms. Users authenticate with a JWT the client sends as a bearer token, admins use an HTTP only cookie session, so an admin session cannot be lifted out of browser storage.

7. 07

   Challenge

   Bitcoin balances are meaningless without a current price, but polling on every render would hammer the feed.

   Solution

   Fetched the price on a ten minute interval and recalculated the dollar value from the cached figure, and stored the price at the time of every crypto transaction so history stays accurate as the market moves.