Magic SDK Now Supports Harmony Protocol

Passwordless Logins for apps on Harmony and Committing Part of $7M in Grants for Developers that Utilize Magic on Harmony

Peter Abilla

Published in

Harmony

4 min readOct 12, 2020

TL;DR

💻 Focusing on Developers — making app development easier
✨ Magic Integration on the Harmony Protocol
💸 Grants for Dapps that Use Magic on Harmony
🧰 Under the Hood
✅ Resources

💻 Focusing on Developers — making app development easier

As we build out the Harmony ecosystem, our key area of focus is to add ecosystem building blocks that incentivize developers to want to build on Harmony, make their job easier, and allows them to focus on creating great user experiences for their users and on user acquisition.

Most recently we added Chainlink and Band to our ecosystem, allowing developers two Oracle options from which they can get real-world data such as price feeds, etc. Another key building block that makes it easy for users and developers is an easy way to manage identity and key management. That’s where Magic (formerly Fortmatic) comes in.

✨ Magic Integration on the Harmony Protocol

Magic is an SDK for developers to create passwordless and social and email logins. Put another way, it’s a way to manage identity and authentication using web3 technologies under the hood, but it has a web2 user experience.

That last part is important because we know that the hardest challenge for most blockchain projects is user acquisition. And one of the most annoying parts of using dapps is authentication and key management. Magic makes that easy, feels like a web2 experience, and removes headaches for developers.

No more seed phrases or browser extensions to use an app. That’s what Magic offers developers that build on Harmony.

Magic gives users decentralized identity which is self-sovereign without having to trust centralized identity providers. Magic also gives developers the ability to customize the magic link experience, giving them a lot more control over the UX! A cool secret with Magic is that every single user will be issued a blockchain key pair, which means for advanced developers, they’ll be able to easily tap into the power of blockchain and cryptocurrency to build future-proof and innovative applications!
— Sean Li, CEO and Founder of Magic

💸 Apply for a Grant — Utilize Magic on Harmony

Harmony has committed $7M in grants to developers and small teams that want to build on Harmony. Today we’re dedicating a portion of the $7M to small teams and developers everywhere to bring your most creative ideas, apply for a grant, and build an app on Harmony utilizing Magic.

👉 Apply HERE 👈

🧰 Under the Hood

Research tells us that storing keys in a database is one of least secure things you can do. So how does Magic do it?

Zero-knowledge Proofs

Instead of SSH key-pairs, for each application end-user, Magic generates a key-pair based on the Ethereum decentralized blockchain network. The public key acts as an identifier for the user. Leveraging elliptic curve cryptography, the private key is used to generate a verifiable proof of identification and authorization from a claim. The proof is then sent to the developer application servers where data in the claim can be recovered, and the authenticity of the request can be ensured. This is how Magic achieves Authentication and authorization without requiring user passwords.

Delegated Key Management

How does Magic secure the private key? Magic leverages Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) provided by Amazon Web Services’ Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Dedicated user master keys are stored on the HSMs, which are generated using AES-256 with 384-bits of entropy. The master keys never leave the hardware as they are meant to be locked inside and unable to be exported, where all encryption and decryption operations happen inside the hardware itself. HSMs are a lot like popular FIDO devices like YubiKeys or hardware-based wallets for cryptocurrency storage such as Trezor or Ledger, but instead, they sit in the cloud, heavily secured by AWS’s data centers.

Users’ private keys are encrypted by these hardware-based user master keys, which means that attackers need to gain access to these hardware to be able to retrieve the keys, and are forced to stay within Magic’s adversarial infrastructure — which is capable to detect, impede, and monitor attacker’s progress to prevent and mitigate any damages.

✅ Resources

Become ONE with Harmony

Developers can build on Harmony today, a fast and open blockchain for decentralized applications, suited to handle DeFi and cross-border finance. Harmony Mainnet supports state sharding with instant finality. Our staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting delegation and slashing.

We ❤️ Developers.

Want to build on Harmony? We have grants available. 👉 Apply HERE 👈

Learn More About Magic ✨