In line with our commitment to community transparency and regular development communications, we are excited to share our monthly product progress report for April 2018.

Database Updates: Uncoupling SelfKey ID and ETH Addresses

We’ve decided to remove the requirement of creating a SelfKey ID during the creation of a new ETH address. There were a couple of reasons for the decision.

More flexibility with multiple ETH addresses. In our current data model, every new ETH address created in the SelfKey Identity Wallet is associated with a SelfKey ID consisting of your ID attributes and documents. This creates a lot of friction if you want to have multiple ETH addresses for different use cases. By decoupling this in the backend and using profiles, there is more flexibility to use different ETH addresses for one SelfKey ID.

Login with SelfKey Dependency: Login with SelfKey (LWS) is a browser plugin that offers participating websites a decentralized mechanism to securely identify and authenticate users without exposing them to a single point of failure in the event of a data hack. On a high level, the authentication mechanism works by using your ETH address that’s connected to the SelfKey Identity Wallet as login details. The database updates we’ve been working on will improve how this works in the backend as the browser communicates with the application.

Login with SelfKey (Browser Button & Extension)

In the last month, our business development team has taken a working MVP of the browser plugin to meetings with crypto exchanges in China and provided a brief demo of how it works. For exchanges, this helps them reduce the operational cost of KYC while allowing new users to onboard faster and maintain compliance. By having this button on their website, it also provides SelfKey with more visibility within the blockchain identity space.

Manual Refreshing of Transaction History

Sending assets on the Ethereum network can be challenging when the network speed is not within our control. Inside the SelfKey Identity Wallet, we have a transaction scanner built that monitors incoming and outgoing activity of assets to be displayed in the dashboard. Last month we made an addition to this by including a button to manually refresh the transaction history. During testing, we found that the network confirmation speeds vary a lot between transactions and that it’s better to have this functionality to improve usability.

Automatic Builds with Travis CI

To improve our internal workflows and increase efficiency, we’ve implemented automatic builds of the SelfKey Identity Wallet with Travis CI for internal testing whenever a pull request is approved and merged from the development team. Travis CI is an integration service that helps us automatically build and test the codebase from Github. After a build is exported and zipped, it gets uploaded into a cloud platform where our QA and product teams can download it to test new features or bug fixes.

Nano Ledger S

We’ve successfully sent ETH and KEY on the Ethereum mainnet through the UI of the SelfKey Identity Wallet. We will have a few remaining tasks to finish before this integration is complete, namely error message handling if a transaction isn’t confirmed, disconnections, and HD derivation paths of new ETH addresses to select when connecting your Ledger. We look forward to wrapping up this integration soon as it was in very high demand from the user testing group and community feedback. After this, we will also move on to integration with the TREZOR hardware wallet.

Decentralized Identity

A smart contract was implemented as the basis for Selfkey decentralized identities, which allow the management of different authentication keys, among other attributes for future use. Also, a DID (Decentralized Identifier) resolver library was implemented, for retrieving the keys and relevant authentication data linked to a given identity from any client app. DIDs act as the entry point for self-sovereign identity, and provide the foundation for the development of verifiable attestations on the Selfkey Marketplace. You can read more about DIDs and verifiable attestations here.

Marketplace

Development of the Exchanges marketplace is on track. We are implementing and testing components to enable an instant KYC sign up from within the Wallet, both for exchanges that plan to use our KYC software and for integrations with platforms that use their own KYC systems.

Conclusions

We have finished another month of intense work with satisfactory results. We will be planning a small beta release to a group of about one thousand community members that initially signed up to participate in alpha testing group. While not everyone was able to schedule a test session, we hope this can help you get a better idea of what we’ve been working on in the last few months. Please stay tuned to the official announcement channels when this is ready.

From the alpha testing group, we also got some good feedback from participants in Telegram and will continue to do so with more structure by having dedicated office hours every week. Our product team will open up 4–5 time slots (30 mins each) every Thursday for community members to book a call to talk about SelfKey, discuss what we are working on, or demo the latest features in development. Community members that applied to be in the alpha testing group back in March will get first priority.

Our team has also been busy with recruitment, working adding team members to the design and development roles. Specifically, we’ve been looking for a senior UX designer and Junior UI designer to work together across all our product verticals for both B2B and B2C. We are also shifting elements of our application to React that can provide reusable components to give us more flexibility and efficiency within the codebase.

We’ve also added new hires to our internal operations and marketing team this month. As a remote team that is growing fast, it’s important to have good processes in place since we’re not all in the same room. Part of this involves nurturing the culture that we already have with the internal team, and maintaining this as we become a larger organization and work with candidates of all walks of life that are interested in blockchain technology.

Thank you very much for the continued support to SelfKey.

We will be updating you again next month. As always, if you have questions or just want to chat about SelfKey with the core team, we invite you to be part of our Telegram community. To stay up to date on the latest news, join our announcement channel or subscribe to our mailing list.