Two Years Later: Wallet-Independent Applications Are There
Two years ago, I introduced Cosmic.link to the Stellar community and last year, I summed up the progress made so far.
I went briefly over the concept of Cosmic.link and delegated signing, and announced the first app to use this technology on Stellar. I concluded on the challenge ahead: bootstrapping adoption.
By the time, the number of wallet-independent applications on Stellar was 0. Let’s see what developers have accomplished since then.
Brief Remainder
Cosmic.link makes it possible for applications to communicate with your software wallet the same way they do with Ledger wallets. In other words, it makes it possible to login & sign transactions from multiple Stellar applications using only one wallet — without ever granting any form of control over your accounts.
The present article is a summary of the 2019 developments on that matter. If you want to dig about delegated signing itself, please refer to:
- The Cosmic.link about page,
- The Cosmic.plus blog,
- The Interview with Brian Goldberg of InsideStellar.co.
2019 / Quarter 1
- First wallet-independent application on Stellar: Equilibre.io, a portfolio balancer for the Stellar DEX, is released for the first Cosmic.link birthday, the Feb 16th 2019. (Announcement)
2019 / Quarter 2
- Equilibre.io is among Stellar Community Fund #1 winners.
- CGIG, a market-place for Stellar, implements Cosmic.link.
- StellarAuth, which show-case a new authentication mechanism based on Stellar, makes use of Cosmic.link for its first iteration.
2019 / Quarter 3
- Cosmic.plus opens as a hub that provides applications & resources related to Cosmic.link.
- A Trezor library is released by Cosmic.plus & Trezor support is added to Cosmic.link. Joint work leads to several improvements in the Stellar app for Trezor.
- Lumenthropy implements donations through Cosmic.link.
- Among the Stellar Community Fund #2 winners, 3 out of 8 support delegated signing.
- Lobstr implements partial support for it.
- StellarAuth proposes a proof-of-concept for an alternative delegated signing solution.
- StellarPay released a demo showcasing the newly developed Cosmic.link widget. Unfortunately, the author stopped working as soon as he received the funds from SDF — a recurrent issue with this kind of contest.
2019 / Quarter 4
- PublicNode.org implements donations through Cosmic.link, using the new customizable widget.
- r/stellar Photons relies on Cosmic.link to embark users into its project of on-chain migration.
- NiceTrade.co uses Cosmic.link to become the first Stellar exchange front-end to support delegated signing and SEP-0010 login.
- Keybase fixes its support of delegated signing & becomes available as a Cosmic.link signing method.
- Cosmic.plus gets in touch with Tangem to explore opportunities for integration.
- Cosmic.link is among the Stellar Community Fund #3 winners, as well as two other projects that use delegated signing (PublicNode and StellarTerm).
Today’s Challenge: Raising The Level
In an industry where over-promising became the norm, one easily forgets that filling the gap between marketing and reality is about achieving one technical step after another.
We won’t go & disrupt those multi-billions markets everyone is talking about with a fragmented ecosystem, half-secured vendor wallets & copy/pasting private keys around.
“Raising The Level” — that is, the fundamentals — is not only about making one’s software better than others but about establishing new industry-wide standards that upgrade developers ambitions & user’s expectations.
Two years after its first steps, delegated signing for Stellar is proven & well-tested. Let’s make 2020 the year where it becomes the norm, and where one user, from one wallet, can securely access the whole constellation of Stellar applications.
