WordPress Web3 Integration

WordPress revolutionised Web2 by making it easy to create websites, forums and blogs. Today over 30% of all websites in the world are made on WordPress, and considering only CMS, WordPress has a market share of over 60%. 

With the arrival of web3, you may be wondering how best to participate using your WordPress site.

First of all, understand that web3.0 is a broad concept, as we explained in this article. You can participate in this environment fully or partially.

A full integration with web3 consists in creating a site with a decentralized domain and hosting it in decentralized servers, like IPFS or Arweave. It is important to realize that the most used browsers (Chrome, Edge, etc.) do not yet offer support for this architecture. We will leave this technique for another article.

We will focus here on the integration of a traditional website with web3. This integration is partial because the domain and hosting will remain in centralized environments, but it will be possible to make a connection between the web3 user wallets and the website.

To understand how it works, we will present three plugins: Bitpay, EthPress and Unlock Protocol. Each of these plugins offers functionalities that make it easier for users to interact with your website via web3.0.

Bitpay

This plugin is for you to receive payments in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. The advantage is that you don’t need to worry about volatility because you can set a value for your product (say $20.00) and every time the user selects the Bitpay payment option an invoice will be generated for payment via cryptocurrency at 15 minute intervals.

In other words, the corresponding value of the product in BTC or ETH will be updated every 15 minutes, which is the maximum time limit for the user to make the payment.

The balance is then transferred to a Bitpay wallet and 1% of the transaction value is charged as a fee for the service.

EthPress

The EthPress plugin allows users to log into the site using Metamask or any WalletConnect compatible wallet.

When you install the plugin on your site, a web3 login button will be added automatically, allowing the user to access restricted areas. A regular WordPress account will be created in this procedure, i.e. there will be full interaction with web2, but authentication will be performed by web3.

It is possible to add custom logic for users logged in through the plugin. For example, it is possible to check which tokens and amounts the user has, blocking access if a certain condition is not met.

In this connection process with a web3 wallet, users’ private keys are not exposed, guaranteeing security for all.

Unlock Protocol

Logging in using an Ethereum wallet is cool, but what if you could authenticate using NFTs? The Unlock Protocol plugin allows for that.

With Unlock Protocol you can create NFT collections and have a direct relationship with members from those NFTs. The process works like this:

1. First you define what the membership parameters are and create a collection of NFTs.
2. Then you define which content will be accessed by the members.

This way you can create a loyal audience structured around NFTs, which makes the collection gain value over time.

In this way, you can monetize your content directly with the NFTs feature, which today represent one of the most used standards on the web3.

Conclusion

Even without having a fully decentralised website, it is possible to participate in web3. You can receive payments in cryptocurrencies or allow user authentication from your wallets or NFTs.

These approaches tend to gain adoption over time, as web3 will hardly live completely disconnected from web2. The trend is that integrations will gradually increase. In this article, we’ve tried to show simple resources that any Blog or Website owner can adopt.