We are excited to announce that Steem Keychain is now integrated into steemit.com! That means that you can now sign into steemit.com without entering private keys into your browser. Keychain is a browser extension similar to Metamask for Ethereum that enables Steem users to store their keys and broadcast transactions to the blockchain.

Keychain gives Steem users more choice with respect to how they leverage the world's most used blockchain-powered social application: steemit.com. One of the benefits of open source software is that 3rd party developers can add features which enable users to customize their software experience to their unique needs, which is precisely why were happy to add support for this 3rd party extension to the site.

Keychain was released by the developer of SteemMonsters, @yabapmatt and is open source. You can view the github repo here.

From the Repo

The Steem Keychain extension currently includes the following features:

• Store an unlimited number of Steem account keys, encrypted with AES
• Easily view balances, transaction history, voting mana, and resource credits for all of your accounts
• Send STEEM and SBD transfers right from the extension
• Securely interact with Steem-based websites that have integrated with Steem Keychain
• Manage transaction confirmation preferences by account and by website
• Manage automatic lock settings to lock when the browser is closed, the device is locked, or after the browser is idle for a specified period of time

Community Contributions

At Steemit, we want to empower community developers to help improve steemit.com and steemitwallet.com. We have an amazing developer community that we have failed to fully honor in the past. We know that many of them have become disillusioned with the process of contributing to Condenser (the software that powers steemit.com and steemitwallet.com) and we want to do whatever we can to reverse that.

That’s why we were glad to merge the PR submitted by @eonwarped which added Keychain to steemit.com. We would have liked to merge this change sooner, however, we determined that it would be safer for our users to implement this change after we had split off the wallet (steemitwallet.com) from steemit.com.

Other community contributions that were merged are:

• Shorten permlinks from nested comments #3357, by @quochuy
• Mark when a post/comment has been edited#3358, by @quochuy
• fix non-existing post 404 #3359, by @blockchainstudio
• Add ellipsis overflow for author description#3350, by @quochuy
• Toggle dark/light theme on the body tag #3348, by @quochuy
• Tag Steemit employees #3341, by @Smittyvb
• esteem:// protocol support #3323, by @good-karma
• Set editor preview max-width to 42.125rem #3322, by @quochuy

MVP: @quochuy

The majority of this batch of community pull requests were submitted by the user @quochuy making them the obvious candidate for this week’s Most Valuable Programmer ;). Steemit’s community is its “killer app” and we believe that by empowering community developers to add the features that users want to steemit.com will be critical for creating the unparalleled user experience necessary to mainstream Steem and blockchain generally. Without great contributions from community developers like @quochuy, this won’t be possible.

Special Thanks

Thanks again to @eonwarped who submitted the keychain PR (and a number of PRs that have now been merged) and the other great community developers who have submitted PRs.

The Steemit Team