Stellar Chrome Extension (similar to metamask)

zthomas

I'm working on a wallet as a chrome extension. This is similar to MetaMask for ETH.

MetaMask.io has made the UX of interacting with distributed applications seamless and while Stellar does not have such a rich support for smart contracts. Stellar's simple contract is good enough for a lot of use cases. I'm currently also working on a gamified content platform where instead of voting, the users can bid on importance of the content. The added speculation process can improve content curation significantly. However in order for that application to work, there needs to be a seamless way for average users to purchase and spend Stellar Lumens.

Enable the stellar network to be easily used on the browser is very important.

About Me:
- I've previously built VisualCV.com a resume app with over 2 million users and one of the top resume apps on mobile
- worked on meta.re and gitlogs.com both using algorithms and data mining to curate news
- currently working on pushtable.com a headless CMS for Google Firebase Firestore

I appreciate any feedback for the project. Thanks!

Thomas Z.

rbates

zthomas Hey Thomas, this sounds awesome.

I'll be honest, I haven't spent nearly as much time in the Ethereum ecosystem. I recently decided to dive in just to get a better sense for their tools and the buying/selling process around tokens & exchanges. I was really impressed with Metamask. It's really clean and simple, and I agree being able to use it in the browser from whatever page you're on is huge.

Keep us updated and let us know if you need any help testing the extension.

zthomas

rbates Thanks a lot. It's out on the chrome webstore now. feel free to check it out at pay.meta.re. I'd love to get our feedback.

rbates

zthomas High five Thomas. This is a really great first release.

While a Chrome extension might not be as robust as a full fledged desktop app, I feel like this is a good path forward as it does a solid job of bridging the gap between security and convenience. For developers being able to pass context from a webpage to a payment app without requiring the user to do anything reduces a lot of friction.

Obviously there's a dependency on the user running Chrome and there's still a gap for mobile users, I'm really excited about this though. I'll implement it on my site, and I'd love to help out in other ways where I can. Good stuff!!

zthomas

Update:
The project is live at https://pay.meta.re and it's available on the chrome store

zthomas

rbates Thanks a lot, actually in this case it's not reliant on Chrome. It'll fallback to a web wallet (similar to Stellar's official account viewer). This means it'll work for mobile as well.

tomerweller

Thanks @zthomas, this is cool. It would be great to have it support any transaction, not just XLM payments. That would enable, for example, token sales that require "CHANGE TRUST" operations and non-XLM payments, to use this extension.

zthomas

tomerweller Thanks, yes definitely what I have in my roadmap. For now I was just getting the basics out to meet the build competition deadline. I'll add more in the future. Stay tuned!

rbates

zthomas Right, I tested it in other browsers and saw how it redirects the user. I definitely think you are handling the fallback properly, I just know that when people see "enter your secret key" it makes them nervous. Even more so if they are on your website and they get popped out to another.

Something you might consider is giving devs a way to detect if the extension is installed so they can adjust their messaging to the user. I've been looking around Stack Overflow and getting conflicting info, does Chome allow this? I have to believe there's some sort of way b/c if you're on Bancor they pop a message asking if you want to use the Bancor wallet or MetaMask.

zthomas

rbates it was nice chatting with you over hangout last week. So right now the best way to detect if a chrome extension is install is probably have the chrome extension inject some type of js variable. This is essentially what MetaMask does to enable developers to interface and trigger MetaMask.

It's definitely possible, thanks for the suggestion.

dzham

zthomas

I'd go as far as saying that 100% of the usefulness of Metamask comes from the API it injects.

I think Metamask worked because the Ethereum ecosystem was way less fragmented than what we have, and it was one of the first solutions where you didn't have to spend an eternity downloading the blockchain first.
Stellar has been "light-wallets" from the get-go, which is why we have 40+ of them.

TidesNetwork

This is the kind of work that Stellar needs. Metamask is a killer feature for Ethereum, and I am glad that Stellar has it's own alternative.

These two projects are very similar, and that allows Ethereum to be a road-map of sorts for Stellar, but also these projects are sufficiently different in scope that they're non-competitive.

I am certainly a fan of using Ethereum's current infrastructure as a To-Do list for Stellars growth.

Keep up the good work!

BrentLabasan

I look forward to trying it out! Maybe in the future Stephen Girder will be teaching a Stellar smart contract course on Udemy and he'll be using your extension.

ErwanNovianto

awesome project, this can be a game changer, i'm sure stellar ecosystem will replace ethereum, i had enough with eth gas price and congestion lately, switching to stellar ecosystem is solution, with fast and cheap gas fee.

Goob job. I'm looking forward to have stellar's token on it, i'm from one of stellar's token community and very excited to create apps based on your extension.

rob

Sort of skimmed to the end of the conversation... does this support SEP007?

michelem

Is this still maintained? Where is the author @zthomas ? Where is the source code?

QuasarK

I already done the same kind of plugin : https://github.com/HerveKoener/ULASafe
You can check my source code. Maybe you will find some ideas to improve your plugin.