We’re happy to announce that an early version of the new Stacks Wallet for Chrome and Firefox (previously known as Blockstack Connect) is now available as a “developer preview” ahead of the upcoming release of the Stacks 2.0 Mainnet.
Initially released earlier this year, Blockstack Connect equips developers with an easy and effective way to authenticate users into their apps with the Stacks 1.0 Mainnet.
Since this summer, it’s also enabled developers to start experimenting with transactions as triggered by those apps then signed and broadcast to the Stacks 2.0 Testnet.
The general sophistication of Stacks 2.0 has subsequently motivated us to upgrade this client-side authenticator across the board with the following capabilities:
- Authenticate apps with 12 or 24-word Secret Keys
- Set passwords for the encryption and storage of those Secret Keys per session
- Manage usernames registered with the Blockchain Naming System (BNS)
- View fungible and non-fungible token holdings on the Stacks blockchain
- Send and receive both fungible and non-fungible tokens
- Sign transactions with Clarity smart contracts as published to the Stacks blockchain
- View recent transactions associated with holdings
- Configure nodes for usage with various Stacks networks (e.g. testnet, mainnet)
As such, we’ve also renamed the product to Stacks Wallet in recognition of its increasing role as a facilitator of both identity- and token-related tasks on the network.
This rename has the additional benefit of merging its identity with the desktop Stacks Wallet, a product with a shared purpose that’s similarly available for MacOS, Windows and Linux under “developer preview” and testable against the Stacks 2.0 Testnet.
The new Stacks Wallet for Chrome and Firefox comes as a web extension for installation in those browsers as well as other Chromium-based browsers such as Brave, Edge and Vivaldi. Developers are encouraged to integrate it with the @stacks/connect package of Stacks.js.
Find a build for installation in this pull request
Click the “Download the latest builds” link at the top of that page, select the build for your browser under “Artifacts” (“connect-addon” for Firefox or “connect-extension” for Chromium), then follow instructions in the README for installing the downloaded ZIP file.
You can also read documentation about how to integrate @stacks/connect into your app so your users can login and broadcast signed transactions with the Stacks 2.0 blockchain.
Please file issues for any bugs, questions or suggestions you may have, and hop into the #userx channel in the Blockstack Discord community to chat with us about this release.
Note that Stacks 2.0 Testnet bug bounties are not available for this particular release given its status as a “developer preview”.
Screen-by-screen designs for this new Stacks Wallet are available on Figma here: