Stars Converter

Stars Converter started as a Stars-to-USDT exchange and grew into a full Telegram-native commerce platform my co-founder Mohamed Rabie and I run in production. Users can buy and sell Stars, purchase Telegram Premium subscriptions, send gifts, and earn through referral mechanics — all inside the bot and Mini App. What began as the public ASTRA prototype is now a private, heavily extended codebase: self-hosted on our VPS via Coolify, with every critical path under our control.

Architected a multi-product payment engine on FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Redis: bidirectional Stars trading, Premium subscription fulfillment, gift purchases with wallet balance, TON Highload payouts, VIP tiers, cashback, and refund workflows. Built gamification layers — user levels, leaderboards, and referral rewards — to drive retention. Shipped a full admin control plane for transaction monitoring, user management, manual overrides, and audit trails. Docker services orchestrated through Coolify on a VPS, with strict idempotency and queue-based reconciliation across every money-moving flow.

Each new service — buy Stars, sell Stars, Premium, gifts, referrals — introduced different Telegram API flows and settlement rules. Unified them under one ledger with strict state machines. Reconciling async Telegram webhooks with TON blockchain finality while keeping admin visibility into every transaction required a queueing layer that never loses or double-processes events.

The hardest jump was product complexity: one payment pipeline became six product lines sharing the same wallet, ledger, and admin surface. Co-founding taught me to own infra reliability while the product expands — every new feature (Premium, gifts, levels) had to plug into the same paranoid financial core without breaking existing flows.