O3 Account Management: Your Keys to the Smart Economy

Today we’re unveiling a new way to manage accounts on O3 mobile, but before discussing it in detail let’s look exactly at what a blockchain “account” is. A traditional web account for any service is based around some sort of email/password combination. This is the basic authentication mechanism that web services use to make sure you really are you, and allowing you to access items like your bank account info, social profiles, etc. In the blockchain world, your private key is your account. This is what authorizes you, and only you to send funds, claim gas, and more generally alter anything on the blockchain associated with your “Address”.

In this sense, your “Address” is your blockchain public identity.

It serves as your authentication credentials for dapps and proof of ownership of your assets. Furthermore, all other identity information associated with you is connected to your address.

Previously O3 mobile only supported one address on your wallet, but as of our latest version O3 supports infinite wallets and watch addresses all directly from your mobile device.

Store multiple wallets, watch addresses, and securely keep track of all of your accounts

Why would I want multiple addresses?

As a user it makes a lot of sense for you to have multiple public addresses. Some potential benefits include.

1. Privacy: Because storing all of your funds in one address makes you easily identifiable
2. Security: Because storing all your funds in one address increases the risk that a mistake on your end causes you to lose all of your savings
3. Convenience: Because storing all of your funds in one address makes it inconvenient to use your wallet anywhere without fear of theft, damage, or human error

However, perhaps more importantly multiple addresses become very important when you start interacting with decentralized applications. I’m sure plenty of you have been asked to login with facebook OAUTH at some time or another. If you have, then you might have seen a screen like this.

You are basically proving your identity to the Auth0 app in this example, in order to gain access to their service, and using facebook as your identity provider. In the future, you will be able to instead to use your NEO blockchain address as a form of decentralized identity, and authorize the DAPP to do certain actions on your behalf. If you only have one address then you have to share the same identity with every single service that you sign up with. Instead it makes way more sense to separate your identities.

Here’s a sample of how an ordinary user might interact with multiple accounts.

For example, I might have a savings address, that I never use to interact with dapps, it has my main holdings, and I only use it to top up my spending address.

I don’t keep my private key associated with my savings address on my phone, only on my ledger device. I use my spending address for every day transactions and payments. Lastly I have dapp address. I use it to interact with new dapps that I have never tried before. I only keep a small amount of funds there to reduce any chance of connecting to a malicious dapp and losing funds.

Now with O3 Mobile, a user can seamlessly switch between these addresses without any hassle, and actually try and MAKE USE of their cryptoassets and blockchain accounts as opposed to just hoarding them.

But wait a second, what dapps can I connect to? Well we have one more piece of good news to share. Our O3 implementation of the NEO dAPI protocol is nearing completion. It will allow service providers to accept NEO based assets for payments, and connect seamlessly with the NEO blockchain.

Our test store (which is fully functional) allows O3 to sell a hat to a user for GAS, using one of their multiple wallet accounts all directly from their mobile wallet. We’ll have a more detailed article on the the dAPI protocol, on our next release so stay tuned!

To learn more about the DAPP protocol check out
https://github.com/neo-project/proposals/pull/69

If you’d like help integrating the protocol reach out to us at support@o3.network

If you want to download O3 checkout our website
https://o3.network/

Need a NEO block explorer? Checkout
https://explorer.o3.network