On Thursday, December 19th, NeoLogin participated in Neo Global Development’s (NGD) English Neo Live event. Neo Live is an Ask Me Anything (AMA) style community event that takes place on the official Neo Telegram channel.

NeoLogin CEO, Thijs Maas, and CTO, Albert Acebrón, participated in the AMA, where the duo discussed the reasoning behind the NeoLogin concept, how the wallet acts in a non-custodial manner, future fiat on-ramp portals, the security of the NeoLogin wallet, and more.

The full transcript can be found below:

Songping Que (NGD marketing team): Hi, everyone, welcome to the NeoLive on Telegram! This is Songping Que from the Neo marketing team. I will be your host today.

As you may notice already, we switched the session time from 8pm to 2pm (UTC+8), in order to cover a bigger audience group. We will continue to invite as many NGD core teams/Neo Eco Project leaders/Neo dev community leaders/pioneering blockchain leaders to join the session and share the latest technological development, industry insights with the community members.

Our guests today are Thijs Maas and Albert Acebrón. They founded NeoLogin, a new wallet solution for the Neo ecosystem together.

Thijs is a blockchain-focused entrepreneur with an LL.M. in International Business Law. After his experience at law firms he started his own consultancy firm, aiding companies in the crypto-industry with legal compliance, fundraising efforts (including token offerings) and business strategy. Now, most of his time is dedicated to NeoLogin, an easy to use noncustodial wallet for Neo that aims to improve the user experience of Neo-based decentralized applications and games.

And the other guest is Albert, a brilliant COZ contributor and CTO of NeoLogin. He was previously an intern at the Neo Foundation, and has recently been awarded a Binance fellowship. He’s an active open source contributor, who frequents hackathons all around the word. Before co-founding NeoLogin, he created Safesof (an EVM-compatible smart contracting language). He’s further a triple LLB student at UAB, majoring in Math, Computer Science, and Telecommunications.

Thijs Maas (founder of NeoLogin): Hi all! Thanks for introducing me, Songping!

Albert Acebrón (CTO of NeoLogin): Hi!

Songping: Please kindly wait till the sharing session ends. We will leave time for open questions.

So, Thijs and Albert will share some info about NeoLogin today. Albert, Thijs, feel free to start.

Thijs: Thanks, Songping!

This AMA is about NeoLogin, so I’ll give a little introduction about what NeoLogin is and what problem we are solving.

NeoLogin is a new wallet solution for the Neo ecosystem. NeoLogin is different from any other wallet out there: It has been created to make access to decentralized applications (dApps) and games on Neo as easy as possible.

Currently, adoption of blockchain-based dApps and games is still very low, and the user experience is pretty bad.

To use a dApp/game on Neo for the first time, new users (who aren’t familiar with crypto/Neo) currently have to:

  • Learn about blockchain/private key management in order to understand why they need a wallet
  • Research different types of wallets: paper wallets, custodial wallets, noncustodial wallets, software wallets, hardware wallets, etc.
  • Pick a wallet provider and download their software/mobile app/extension
  • Create an account on an exchange to buy NEO/GAS
  • Transfer this NEO/GAS to their new wallet
  • Connect the wallet to the dApp/game
  • Use the dApp / play the game

In short: currently, the user experience is pretty terrible. We aim to fix this. We envision a world where users don’t have to know anything about blockchain to try out a dApp/blockchain-game. We want an ecosystem where users don’t have to go to an exchange to buy NEO/GAS and they don’t have to download third-party software wallets first.

This is why we have built NeoLogin: a simple and secure wallet solution that is built into dApps and games on NeoLogin.

Happy to answer any questions together with Albert!

Songping: Thanks for the quick intro, Thijs! Let’s take some open questions then.

Q1: How does NeoLogin work?

Thijs: NeoLogin is a wallet solution that is directly integrated with Neo-based games and applications. The first time a user visits games or dApps, he/she can create an account. Creating a NeoLogin account automatically creates a wallet (by creating a private key, encrypting it and storing it on a third-party server).

Every time the user visits a game or dApp, he can log into his NeoLogin account, which unlocks the wallet for use during that session (by decrypting this private key with the user’s email+password).

In other words, if a user wants to use a dApp or game, he/she just logs in using NeoLogin. Users will also be able to buy NEO and GAS with NeoLogin, straight from within the game/dApp itself.

Songping: I saw this video on the Reddit earlier today. Looking pretty good how NeoLogin works on NeoEconomy.

Source: NeoLogin

Q2: Does NeoLogin work right now? I’ve input my private key but it doesn’t take me to next step.

Albert: Yes, it’s working now. Feel free to send me a DM to see at which part of the process you are.

Q3: Can I see my balance in NeoLogin now? Or, it is only for dApps.

Thijs: Currently, the balance of your NeoLogin wallet is shown to you through the dApps that have integrated NeoLogin. However, if you want to check for yourself, we made a very simple stand-alone wallet for that purpose: https://neologin.io/wallet/.

Since NeoLogin is mainly used through apps, we have not built out a nice UI for this stand-alone wallet. However, if there is demand for it, we will.

Q4: Have you identified any business use case or domain for the Chinese government? What is your plan for outside China?

Thijs: We do not have any ties for the Chinese government. However, NeoLogin is publicly available and can be integrated by anyone who wants to provide a better UX for their dApp/game.

We have made sure to make the wallet available in both English and Chinese (and the same applies to all documentation etc.).

Q5: How is NeoLogin handling security?

Albert: While creating NeoLogin we had two goals: it should be easy to use, and secure. We never have access to the user’s tokens nor their private keys, and cannot run away with them.

NeoLogin is non-custodial.

Q6: Why Neo?

Thijs: We believe Neo has great potential, especially with regards to its ability to scale well, which is helpful for scalable decentralized applications and games specifically.

Q7: Any plans to somehow support Ledger?

Albert: Not currently, we are focusing on making dApps really easy to use for users that don’t have much experience interacting with the blockchain and for that reason we want to avoid adding a lot of stuff to the interface in order to keep it as simple as possible.

Furthermore, users just introduced to Neo don’t usually have hardware wallets.

Q8: How I will be able to buy on an exchange? Which exchange this will be?

Thijs: To allow people to buy NEO/GAS in NeoLogin itself (and thus in dApps themselves), we have integrated Carbon Money and are looking to integrating more fiat gateways and decentralized exchanges.

Currently, however, Carbon Money is offline as they are working on their banking infrastructure.

We are working on a system which automatically picks the best gateway providers and exchanges for the user based on offered rates.

Albert: Furthermore, we can provide better rates than solutions that just do direct conversions from fiat to NEO by taking the fiat on-ramps that offer the best rates for any crypto and then automatically converting that to NEO or GAS.

We have already built the system and it’s ready to go, at the moment we are just waiting for our upstream provider to solve a banking problem.

Q9: Is there any road map or features that are currently being worked on?

Albert: The biggest upcoming feature at the moment is the fiat gateway, which we will continue working on in order to add support for more countries and provide lower fees.

Apart from that, we are working on improving the design of NeoLogin and streamlining the user experience by making changes based on the feedback we are getting.

Q10: What if a user forgets his password? What kind of solution does NeoLogin offer?

Thijs: We cannot give users a traditional email-based password recovery flow, as we believe this would be too large of an attack vector.

Instead, the users can recover their accounts using their private key only. As such, on the creation of a NeoLogin account, the user automatically downloads his/her private key, which has to be kept safe as it is the only way to recover the user’s NeoLogin account.

Loss of both the user’s password *and* private key at the same time results in a loss of funds.

Q11: Do you know if Visa/Mastercard are supported? From most countries?

Thijs: Yes, we will support both credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard), as well as ApplePay.

Albert: Yes, we will support support credit/debit cards with low-friction KYC (for most users this will be instantaneous and only require basic information like name, birthday…).

Q12: Have you started working on transitioning to Neo3?

Albert: We are currently closely monitoring the work being done on neon-js to port it to Neo3 and due to how we have built NeoLogin (all of our neo-related code depends on neon-js) we should be able to easily migrate over to Neo3.

Q13: Can you name some dApps/games which have integrated NeoLogin, or in the process?

Thijs: Currently, we have integrated with Neo Economy Store and https://dapp.neoeconomy.io/, as well as Neocompiler.io/.

There are a number of new integrations on the way. Say tuned for more news on that front! The more integrations there are, the more useful NeoLogin is.

Q14: Is NeoLogin open-source?

Thijs: Yes, we have fully open sourced everything under the MIT Open Source License. You can find our Github here: https://github.com/safudex/neologin.

Q15: The user doesn’t have to install anything, right? Personally NeoLogin seems to be ‘lighter’ than O3, it’s good not having to install anything.

Thijs: That’s exactly the point. Having to download a wallet is bad UX, which makes it difficult to reach mainstream users!

Albert: Yep, O3 and NeoLogin are solutions for different use cases.

Some people might prefer storing the private key on device and for them O3 will work perfectly, while for other people that might not be important and they’d rather use a more convenient system that syncs their wallet across all devices and doesn’t require them to install anything.

Each person can use the solution that fits them the best.

Q16: Can you guys explain why dApps/games should integrate NeoLogin?

Thijs: Currently, dApps and games allow users to connect with their existing wallet solution. While this works for crypto-enthusaists, it doesn’t work for mainstream users.

They have to first learn about private key management, then have to download third-party wallet software and then go to an exchange to buy NEO or GAS. After transferring this to their wallet, they can finally use your game or dApp.

This UX is terrible.

If dApps/games integrate NeoLogin, new users can just create an account (i.e. wallet) and even buy NEO or GAS without leaving the dApp/game.

In other words, with NeoLogin, it is finally possible to easily onboard mainstream users!

Q17: Are users free to take their private key and port it into another wallet?

Albert: Yes, of course! You can download or back-up your private key at any point from NeoLogin’s settings panel, and import it in other wallet software.

On registration of your account, the private key is downloaded to your pc. In fact, a use case that we see playing in the future is having users be onboarded onto Neo through NeoLogin because of it’s convenience that later move to other wallets when their security needs change.

Songping: We’re approaching the end of the NeoLive session today. But I am sure Albert and Thijs would be happy to take further questions about NeoLogin in DM or in this group if you would like to know more.

Feel free to ping them directly.

Thank you Thijs and Albert, and everyone for your participation today!

Thijs: Thanks for having us, Songping! Great things lay ahead for Neo and we are happy to building with such a great project and ecosystem!

Definitely happy to answer any questions you may have in DMs.

If you are a developer interested in integrating NeoLogin, feel free to contact us and we’ll help out! NeoLogin uses the same API as O3, which makes it incredibly easy to integrate.

Albert: Feel free to contact me directly on Telegram (@corollari) if you are interested in integrating NeoLogin, want to learn more or have some feedback.

Note: Some edits have been made for formatting and readability. The full conversation can be found at https://t.me/NEO_EN/35483.

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