Identicons
We (the team behind LOBSTR and Stellarterm) are introducing a small tool to easily generate identicons for Stellar wallets - unique icons, generated based on the wallet public key.
Each Stellar address will have a unique (in a practical sense), easy to remember icon. This can be used in the interface of any products built on Stellar to improve the user experience.
Identicons can be useful in crypto products, since:
- they allow users to visually distinguish different addresses
- help verify that the are sending funds to correct account
- help visualize history of transactions or multisig configuration
If you’ve used Metamask, you’ve probably noticed the usage of identicons there.
Here’s the sample of 90 random icons, to give you an idea of how they will look like:
We want to make these identicons easily accessible for other projects building on Stellar.
And since it would be confusing for the user if his address is visualized differently in different products, we have built a dead simple API for anyone who would want to integrate the identicons in their app.
Let's say you have a Stellar address: GA2T66AMBWHNR7S23MMQ4RR5KIPITETFOUC6DATE74FIFGRYKQIW7RWV
This is how you can get the identicon:
https://id.lobstr.co/GA2T66AMBWHNR7S23MMQ4RR5KIPITETFOUC6DATE74FIFGRYKQIW7RWV.png
Result:
Basically you make a GET request to get the image: https://id.lobstr.co/YOURPUBKEY.png
The identicons are:
- generated only once, then saved and served fast
- have a size of <1KB
- served through global CDN (Cloudfront) for fast delivery and high availability
We will open source the code used to generate them soon.
Identicons are served as square images in PNG format, 200x200 size, which should fit for most usecases.
Would be happy to see them integrated in more projects - wallets, ledger explorers, exchanges!
Yes, number of Stellar wallets >> number of identicons, so the icons are not strictly unique. However, the chance of 2 wallets having the same icon is so small, that they can be reliably used to identify and distinguish addresses.
