SteemConnect v. OpenSeed?

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openseed179.905 years agoSteemit3 min read

We at OpenSeed have a huge amount of respect for @fabien and SteemConnect, the tool he developed. SteemConnect plays a critical role in the Steem ecosystem and we believe that it is important that this tool continue to exist. If you haven’t already, please head on over to his Steem.DAO proposal and throw it a vote!

Throwing Shade?

But if we love SteemConnect so much, what’s up with the title of the post? Well, since we tend to talk about OpenSeed almost like it’s a “swiss army knife” for application developers, one thing we haven’t highlighted as much is the fact that OpenSeed also solves many of the same problems as SteemConnect.

SteemConnect is great if all you want to do (as a developer) is gain the authority to perform Steem transactions on behalf of your user. It’s a dedicated solution to that problem, and a very secure solution at that.

Customizable Passwords

OpenSeed’s approach is a bit different. Our goal is to enable developers to offer all kinds of features to their users in addition to user authorities; features like encrypted messaging and, as we just disclosed earlier today, fungible and non-fungible tokens. OpenSeed also offers the ability to sign into applications with a customizable password, you know … like you do on every other site on the internet.

Steem Verification

We then allow the user to “verify” their Steem account, thereby linking their OpenSeed account to their Steem account. Most application developers just want their users to be able to perform certain actions within their application, some of which may involve the Steem blockchain.

If a user verifies their Steem account on OpenSeed, and a developer integrates OpenSeed into their application, then all the user has to do is sign into the application with their OpenSeed password and they will be able to perform whatever transactions they need through the OpenSeed network without ever having to input their private keys.

Community Developers Wanted

We don’t yet have a user interface developed for these features, but developers are welcome to build their own or adapt their existing sign in pages and hook into OpenSeed on the backend. We’d love to develop some stock frontend elements for these features, so if you're a frontend developer and are interested in helping us ship that product, be sure to stop by our discord server and let us know!

Finally, OpenSeed is very much in the prototype phase, unlike SteemConnect which is a mature solution. We’d love for developers to test out these features so that we can find any bugs and make it even more useful.