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The auth thing is great! But from the end user and the developer perspective there’s no difference between an oauth provider and a wallet. You still have to set

The auth thing is great! But from the end user and the developer perspective there’s no difference between an oauth provider and a wallet. You still have to set it up on the machine and “login”, same for the app developer

shiohime 5y ago
Yeah, they are comparable, but there is definitely a difference, from both an end user, and developer. The flow is similar - you have to have a wallet, and you have to authenticate it. But really, that's about it. From an end user perspective, all I need to do is press a button to connect my wallet, and I'm in. The site doesn't even need to reload or hit a callback uri. It's a much simpler flow than any of the oauth authentication flows. Also, as anyone can create a wallet and it is not tied to any other identifying information, it's a breath of fresh air to have some vague sense of anonymity than hooking everything into a centralized email account. From a developer standpoint, all I need to do is use an API with a callback function that on success takes whatever data I need and update my application state appropriately. It really is smooth, and I don't need to do things like maintain session or handle access token expiration and request refresh tokens. I can sign messages on the frontend & verify signatures on the backend to ensure the user is who they claim to be. It's so simple compared to the stuff I had to implement in the corporate world for OAuth (granted, the projects I've been working on in the space are much less complex). If you want to try it out yourself as an end user, just download a wallet extension and check out an nft marketplace such as solanart or opensea. You simply have to connect, and that's it. I find it fascinating personally and it's one of the pieces of web3 that I'm most excited for. I believe we're going to continue to see a lot of innovation in the space.

shiohime 5y ago

Yeah, they are comparable, but there is definitely a difference, from both an end user, and developer. The flow is similar - you have to have a wallet, and you have to authenticate it. But really, that's about it. From an end user perspective, all I need to do is press a button to connect my wallet, and I'm in. The site doesn't even need to reload or hit a callback uri. It's a much simpler flow than any of the oauth authentication flows. Also, as anyone can create a wallet and it is not tied to any other identifying information, it's a breath of fresh air to have some vague sense of anonymity than hooking everything into a centralized email account. From a developer standpoint, all I need to do is use an API with a callback function that on success takes whatever data I need and update my application state appropriately. It really is smooth, and I don't need to do things like maintain session or handle access token expiration and request refresh tokens. I can sign messages on the frontend & verify signatures on the backend to ensure the user is who they claim to be. It's so simple compared to the stuff I had to implement in the corporate world for OAuth (granted, the projects I've been working on in the space are much less complex). If you want to try it out yourself as an end user, just download a wallet extension and check out an nft marketplace such as solanart or opensea. You simply have to connect, and that's it. I find it fascinating personally and it's one of the pieces of web3 that I'm most excited for. I believe we're going to continue to see a lot of innovation in the space.