Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There is no less attractive use of blockchain tech than login. The biggest problem with login security isn't attesting to an identity, it's account recovery; blockchains make that incredibly difficult.


Fair enough, I guess for crypto wallets there isn’t any recovery that can be done if you lose the private key. In the end a cryptocurrency wallet is usually just a pub/priv keypair, so purely for login/identity purposes it’s similar to passkeys. And can be backed up easily.

What I wanted to say is that hopping around different ‘dapps’ is quite seamless from a login point of view (and has benefits like ability to pay for goods immediately). Often I don’t even proceed exploring some website if it asks me to create an account since the friction is high.

In any case, this popped into my head as I was exploring openrouter.ai yesterday (routing layer for LLMs, you buy credits and can use many models), and they had a “Login with MetaMask” option, which is rare for non-crypto websites, and it worked quite seamlessly.


There's a new trend coming up of "Smart Wallets" which make use of synced passkeys for authentication.

I can share a blog post about this topic that I recently wrote if you're interested in some details (e.g. Coinbase did it this way).


It's easy to make things seamless if you define away the corner cases!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: