Let’s not kid ourselves. We would have liked seeing more blockchain adoption by now. Adoption rates for even the most used blockchain applications are low. The most used dApps don’t even reach 5k users a day. A big part of the problem is the terrible user experience (UX) within blockchain. Today, we are here to solve this problem for Neo — with you.

If you’ve been in the blockchain space for a while, chances are you have or use some kind of noncustodial software wallet. You will have backed up your mnemonic phrase or private key, perhaps using a paper wallet. Alternatively, you might have a hardware wallet, and/or use cold storage. In any case, your private key management is on point.

But if you haven’t been in the blockchain space for a while, you have no clue what I just said. And that’s not your fault

The (wrong) UX assumption

When you pay for your groceries at a store, no one expects you to know how the payment infrastructure for your credit/debit card works either. If they did, you would just go to another store. So why do we assume that users will learn private key management?

Getting new users to try out an app or game is hard enough. Requiring them to understand why they need a new browser extension, mobile app or weird USB-like stick to store their crypto just scares people off. Especially because the first thing they’ll learn is that they will lose their funds if they mess up!

We can’t assume people will learn a completely new way to connect and interact with applications. Only the earliest adopters do so. Any other user will simply skip to the next thing.

We ran into this problem ourselves while building a Neo-based dApp. While good Neo wallets (such as O3) exist, we just can’t explain to our users why they need to download an application from another programmer just to use our dApp. It doesn’t make sense from a UX perspective.

Also, giving more options to connect different wallet solutions does not equal a better UX. While helpful for us crypto-nerds, the average mainstream user will never understand something like this.

So how do we solve this? How do we give Neo the best UX in crypto?

One solution would be to simply hold a users’ private keys ourselves. However, this goes against everything crypto originally aimed to solve (as we could run away with the users’ funds, and it leads to hacks). It’s a big no-no.

So how do we give a user experience that’s easy for the mainstream user, without taking custody of the user’s tokens?

The solution: NeoLogin

Today, it’s time to launch our solution: NeoLogin

NeoLogin is a purely web-based login service that provides users with a UX they are familiar with: a user account. If a user creates an account with NeoLogin, a private key is generated, encrypted and stored on a server. This private key is decrypted using the user’s password. Every time a user logs in, he unlocks his funds for that session.

In other words, we made a login system that gives access to a wallet. A simple username and password is all the user needs to know or remember, to use a game or dApp.

Most importantly: we cannot access the users’ funds in any way.

This is how NeoLogin will give access to dApps and games. We used a placeholder website without functionality to show this login flow.

Learn more about NeoLogin and try it out for yourself here!

Although we initially built the wallet to scratch our own itch, we realized this is bigger than us. Since the whole ecosystem suffers from the terrible state of UX, we are open-sourcing NeoLogin. Any dApp developer or game can implement NeoLogin as one of its wallet options.

Eventually, we hope NeoLogin becomes the go-to wallet solution across the entire Neo ecosystem.

Just like a single Google account can be used to log in to many different services, a NeoLogin account can then be used to access the many different dApps and games that are built on Neo. The only difference is that we don’t save your data.

A single account, for all of Neo.

To achieve our vision, we made it incredibly easy for any developer in the Neo ecosystem to integrate NeoLogin. In fact, any dApp which has already integrated O3, can integrate NeoLogin in hours, as we use the same API. Here’s our documentation and API testbed.

So, in summary:

users get a better UX;

dApp developers improve their adoption rates (or lower their customer acquisition cost); and

Neo gets a more integrated ecosystem

This is how we give Neo the best UX in blockchain. And with ‘we’, we mean you as well. Yes, you.

Building NeoLogin won’t do anything for the Neo ecosystem if we cannot get adoption. If you (and others like you) create a NeoLogin account, more dApps are likely to integrate NeoLogin, as it will help them onboard users faster. The more dApps integrate, the more useful it NeoLogin becomes.

A single account might eventually give access to the entire Neo ecosystem. A single account, for all of Neo.

To achieve this, we hope we can unite as a community. Give some claps, share this article and signal your support by creating a NeoLogin account here! It takes only 20 seconds.

(Note that this ‘wallet’ interface is not what NeoLogin is intended to be used as. NeoLogin’s main purpose is easy access to dApps, who will provide their own interface. If NeoLogin proves to be popular, we might build a stand-alone wallet interface as well.)

Neologin website | Very alfa stand-alone wallet | API testbed | Documentation | Source Code | brief security analysis