SelfKey Product Progress Report October 2018
What’s New In This Version?
This month, we’ve released the newest version of the SelfKey Identity Wallet - version 0.3.0. If you are using an older version of the wallet, please restart the application and the new update will automatically download and install. If you’ve never downloaded the SelfKey Identity Wallet, you can get it here.
New Feature: Address Book
Fresh out of the kitchen is our new Address Book feature. This allows you to access and save commonly used Ethereum addresses inside the wallet. In this first version, you can save, copy, and paste addresses within the SelfKey Identity Wallet when sending a transaction. This information is stored with your identity attributes and files, so there’s no need to keep addresses in a text file elsewhere.
The address book is accessible from the main menu inside the SelfKey Identity Wallet. For security purposes, it is currently not possible to alter an address once it’s been created, although you are free to modify the labelname. To change an address, you must delete and re-add it into the Address Book. In the future, we will add auto-fill into the transaction address bar to improve the user friendliness.
Update: SelfKey Marketplace
KEY Staking & Deposit: To unlock products and services in the SelfKey Marketplace, you will have to stake (deposit) a certain amount of KEY tokens for 30 days. After this time period is over, you can keep them deposited to continually access the Marketplace, or have them returned to your wallet. Please note, that a service provider is no longer accessible once the stake is returned.
We’ve successfully completed testing for this functionality on the Ethereum testnet and mainnet. This includes sending the deposit, unlocking the marketplace, and retrieving the deposit. The Ethereum smart contract has gone through a security audit.
We are still deciding on the final amounts of KEY tokens required to unlock each product vertical. Our next goal is to help our Marketplace partners get across the line with the technical integration.
Update: Bugs, Performance Improvements, & UX Audits
TREZOR Integration Maintenance: We’ve started working on important maintenance updates for the TREZOR hardware wallets, as TREZOR are updating their official integration software and retiring some older tools. This requires us to do some work to ensure the integration with the SelfKey Identity Wallet stays up to date. This should not impact your usage of a TREZOR device.
Web3 Updates: Other improvements in our wallet include some refactoring of our Web3 codebase that communicates with the Ethereum network. Without getting too technical, this will result in less bugs, technical debt, and better integrations for the SelfKey Marketplace in the future.
UX Audits: We have also been conducting a new set of user test sessions to make sure that the SelfKey Identity Wallet is as user-friendly as possible. If you’d like to participate in a session, please fill out this from here and our product team (Oana and Terry) will get in touch with you.
Update: Team & Development Process
As a remote team, we are always trying to improve our communication and development processes. At the core of product development is communicating through a user story which describes a function in everyday business language. User stories help capture customer requests instead of formal language documentation that requires a lot of maintenance. In the past few weeks, we’ve adopted a version called Gherkin language user stories.
If you don’t work with software development — often times communicating between developers, designers, testers, and product teams can be challenging. For example, if I ask you to imagine an apple in your head — what size will it be? Color? Taste? Type? Are we even thinking of the same thing?
Gherkin is an alternate form that adds human-readable system behavior descriptions that further defines the structure of the document. The end-to-end scenario is described of application behavior from registration to completion of the application. All actions are created for, which makes QA testing and edge cases easier to solve. Here is an example below of how we used it for the new Address Book feature:
It helps avoid non-compatible user stories within application architecture. It shows how changes affect the application structure. It enables customers to make new requirements and wishes more understandable for developers. Gherkin is a great way for teams to agree on what “done” means for features they build, but it’s a very nuanced language.
October 2018 Partnerships & Announcements
Listing on LATOKEN: Offering over 90 trading pairs and generating more than $25 million in turnover per day, LATOKEN has established itself as one of the top 50 exchanges by adjusted trading volume. KEY, the native utility token of the blockchain-powered identity management solution, SelfKey, will be listed on LATOKEN — one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. (LINK)
HitKorea Partnership: As one of South Korea’s most exciting new exchanges, HitKorea will be integrating Login with SelfKey (“LWS”) to allow users to log into the platform in a more secure and convenient way. LWS allows SelfKey ID holders to log into third party services, while maintaining complete control over their data. More specifically, LWS will be displayed as a button on Hitkorea’s login page, which users only need to click to access the exchange. This type of one-click login is unique to the world of secure identity management, and will vastly improve the online experience of SelfKey ID and HitKorea users. (LINK)
KoinOK Partnership: KoinOK will now be integrating Login with SelfKey (“LWS”), to provide their community with a secure and convenient way of accessing the platform. Additionally, KoinOK will be listed on SelfKey’s upcoming marketplace, giving Wallet holders one-click access to the exchange. (LINK)
SelfKey: In The Media (October 2018)
1) Episode #212 ATP Stories by Asia Tech Podcast: Identity In The Blockchain Era
Edmund joins the Asia Tech Podcast to talk about the intersection between works of finance, technology, identity, privacy, and the world of blockchain. Other topics include the evolving industry of KYC, dealing with large financial institutions, and how identity is a critical element of our society. (LINK)
2) What Is SelfKey (KEY)? A Beginner’s Guide
Identity theft is a growing issue worldwide. Results from the Federal Trade Commission and private consulting group Javelin reveal that fraud victims in the US were up 8% in 2017 alone. Recent data leaks from Facebook and Google, considered by many as the darlings of the tech revolution, haven’t helped either. Blockchain just might be the solution here, and fortunately, several startups have emerged and are racing to get in front of the problem. In this article, we’ll cover one of these popular projects known as SelfKey. (LINK)
3) Taking Back Ownership Of Our Identities With Blockchain: The Decrypting Crypto Podcast
We speak with Edmund, founder of SelfKey about how he’s on a mission to give people sovereignty of their identities through the use of open source software and blockchain technology. (LINK)
Conclusion
We hope you find these updates helpful in keeping up to date with our continued progress at SelfKey. October has been a month of incremental, yet important, updates that will help us scale in the future.
Our next immediate focus is getting our SelfKey Marketplace partners on board. If you have any feedback or product suggestions, please share them at idea.selfkey.org. We look forward to sharing next months exciting updates!
