Wallet and DID in the Arweave Ecosystem
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Author: Gerry @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Reviewer: Viya @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Good day, everyone, My name is Gerry. I’m from everPay.
Today, I would like to introduce the wallet development and decentralized identifiers (DID) exploration in the Arweave ecosystem.
First, Arweave's account is different from the mainstream EVM account. Arweave uses 4096-bit RSA-PSS key pairs in JWK (JSON Web Keys) format and uses Base64URL encoded public key into a 43-character address.
So it looks like this: MnYBURB3NcF6R2tfWkXWMtdzv0X1tchgXpWZPKpmjuA
In the Arweave ecosystem, There are currently two EOA (Externally Owned Account) wallets. They are Arweave wallet and ArConnect, The Arweave wallet is a web wallet. But for users who want to interact with DApps, the weakness of web wallets is apparent. We need a user-friendly wallet extension.
Talented young people in the ecosystem, Marton and Tate, developed a wallet extension with a better user experience: ArConnect. At that time, they were only high school students.
ArConnect has recently launched the 1.0 version. In terms of experience and functionality, there have been a lot of improvements. It is preparing for the future developments of the Permaweb.
In addition to the native wallets within the ecosystem, decentralized wallets support Arweave, including Bitget Wallet (Bitkeep), Math Wallet, and cold wallets like Ledger and Keystone.
However, using a wallet as a DID is not an ideal solution. After years of development, the blockchain industry still cannot be widely used by normal day-to-day users, mainly because the wallet barriers are too high. Such as private keys, mnemonic phrases, gas fees, TPS, front running, MEV, etc. Their goal is to use new technology to solve old problems, but this has brought them more new problems.
So, lowering the entry barrier is extremely important. This is the reason why we left the wallet company imToken and built everPay.
everPay‘s model is similar to Ethereum Layer2, except that we use Arweave as the consensus layer. Because Arweave is a network that focuses on decentralized and permanent storage. Arweave has no block size limit, allowing Arweave to infinitely scale and everPay as well.
Because everPay is computed off-chain, there are no gas fees. Only a one-time payment to permanently store. Right now, the average cost per transaction is $0.000004.
Thanks to Arweave's Infinity Scalability, we’ve solved performance and Gas Fee issues.
everPay needs to be connected to EOA wallets, such as Metamask or ArConnect.
Now, it’s time to fix the DID problem. Blockchain technology uses encryption algorithms to generate unique private keys. But private keys are easily lost. Can we find a private key that will never be lost? Yes, the answer is DNA.
DNA is a kind of private key encoded by four types of deoxyribonucleotides. Fingerprint and facial features are used as public keys.
So, we can use this innate ability, in combination with blockchain technology, to create a better experience DID system. The approach is biometric authentication technology.
Fortunately, most devices provide this capability. Such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and so on. They’ve also joined the FIDO Alliance to create authentication standards and certificates for password-less solutions.
It is worth noting that all devices from 2018 support the FIDO Alliance standard. One of the important solutions in FIDO Alliance is WebAuthn, it was released by the W3C, it’s the core of the FIDO2 project and supports FIDO2 authentication.
WebAuthn is an identity authentication standard based on public key encryption, providing a series of standardized protocols that completely abandon traditional password login, allowing users to directly use Touch ID, FaceID, USB, Bluetooth, or NFC physical keys for login authentication.
Based on this, if everPay’s abstract account supports WebAuthn, users can directly use the biometric Authentication technology from their phones, laptops, and other devices to create an account and sign transactions. Private keys no longer need to be backed up, but actually turn your DNA into a private key.
Today, I’m honored to announce, everPay's DID function EverID is officially online.
It not only retains the EOA wallet connection login method but also provides a way to register accounts using email. Through this video, we can feel that the entire account creation process is very simple, no EOA wallet is required, and no private key is needed, Just open your Chrome and use your Email to register a non-custody crypto account.
We believe this will greatly facilitate lowering the entry barrier for users, and help onboard millions of day-to-day users into the Web3.
That’s all that I want to share today. Thank you!
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