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I’m kind of lost on where to start with Ethereum.

I would like an easy way to integrate Ethereum with my app. My main goal is to facilitate trades between users.

There are 2 ways of doing this, transfer all of the Ethereum to 1 account take my fee and then I transfer to the destination account.

Or I can write a smart contract which will take a fee and transfer to the destination account.

I’m looking at the Coinbase api, which doesn’t really like smart contracts, transferring to my account and then back to the destination will cost a 4% fee and then another 4% fee.

Is there a simple api which I can use to transfer Ethereum without doubling my transaction fees?

johnny 5
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    I'm afraid I don't understand the question. What kind of trades are you planning to facilitate? Why do you need external exchanges for your app? – Lauri Peltonen Aug 04 '18 at 18:37
  • @LauriPeltonen my app exchanges money for services, in which I will take a small fee from. What do you mean external exchanges? What api can I use to facilitate transactions? – johnny 5 Aug 04 '18 at 18:55
  • External exchanges such as Coinbase. I still don't understand what you are trying to accomplish so I can't give you any good answer. How is this all related to Ethereum? Is your "money" fiat money (euro, usd, ..)? – Lauri Peltonen Aug 04 '18 at 19:08
  • @LauriPeltonen, I’ll explain what I. Want to occur, users has Ethereum, they use my app to book a third party service, I need to assure the the third party will get paid, after the service occurs, I also want to take a fee. I need to either transfer there ethereum into an account and distribute it after or use a smart contract to guarantee payment occurs. How can I initiate that transaction inside of my app? – johnny 5 Aug 04 '18 at 19:15

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Write a smart contract to do it. You don't need any APIs or exchanges (Coinbase), except for guiding users about where to buy Ethers from.

When a user wants to book a service, they reserve it by sending the required amount of Ether to the contract. After that you need some way to ensure that the service occurred. How to accomplish this is a totally different story - you may google for options or ask another question on this forum.

When the service has been done, the user's Ether is transferred from the contract to the third party (minus your fee). If the service wasn't completed, the contract may return the Ether to the user.

Lauri Peltonen
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  • How can I consume the usage of the contract? Eg connect to the ethereum network without Coinbase api – johnny 5 Aug 04 '18 at 20:04
  • Coinbase is just an exchange, you can't really use it to connect to the Ethereum network anyway. To connect to the network you need to use some node which acts as your connector. Please ask a new question if you have further questions. – Lauri Peltonen Aug 04 '18 at 20:08