SPS Proposal for Steem Keychain Development

About Steem Keychain

Steem Keychain is a browser extension currently available for the Chrome, Brave, and Firefox web browsers that allows users to securely store their Steem keys for multiple accounts and seamlessly interact with nearly all available Steem apps. It also provides a number of convenient features right within the extension such as:

• Checking balances, resource credits, and voting power;
• Transferring STEEM / SBD and viewing transaction history;
• Managing power ups, power downs, and SP delegations;
• Managing witness votes; and
• Viewing and transferring Steem Engine tokens.

It is available to download and install from the following locations:

• Chrome / Brave: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/steem-keychain/lkcjlnjfpbikmcmbachjpdbijejflpcm?hl=en
• Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/steem-keychain/
• Source Code: https://github.com/MattyIce/steem-keychain

Request for Funding

@aggroed and I have been personally funding the initial creation and ongoing development of the Steem Keychain extension over the past year or so and we are extremely fortunate to have been in a position to do that - all thanks to the Steem platform and community.

Going forward, we would like to utilize the new Steem Proposal System to ask the Steem community to help support the costs of continued development and maintenance of this project in the future.

We are requesting 100 SBD per day for the next 6 months. This comes to 3000 SBD per month, which is approximately $2000 USD per month at current market prices for SBD.

The funds will be used to pay for development and/or design work to add new features to the extension, keep it updated with any changes released to Steem or Steem Engine, and fix bugs and issues that are reported. The amount of funds requested is an estimate of what may be needed based on past history, and any unused funds will be returned to the @steem.dao account to be put back into other projects.

At the end of each month we will publish a report detailing what work was done and what funds were used for the community to review. The list of tasks currently in progress or planned for the near future are as follows:

1. Add the ability for apps to choose which RPC node the extension should use to broadcast transactions (from a pre-approved list of available nodes only for security reasons)
2. Allow a default RPC node to be set and updated remotely by the development team
3. Code cleanup and refactor
4. Add ability for sites/apps that create accounts to automatically add the new account to the keychain extension if it is available
5. Advanced design and planning for SMT / communities integration
6. Improved documentation & error messaging
7. Localization support

Why This is Important for Steem

Steem is a platform primarily focused on powering web applications, and as such it's very important that it be as simple and secure as possible for users to interact with those applications if we want to have any hope of serious growth. While there are a number of different ways to store keys and sign/broadcast transactions, a browser extension provides the best overall user experience without trading off security, which is essential.

Steem, unfortunately, doesn't have the best reputation within the cryptocurrency community, so if we want to have any chance of changing that perception we need to not only have all of the tools users are expecting, but they must be easy to use, well designed, and be actively updated and maintained.

Professional, user-friendly, well maintained products give people confidence in a project while buggy, complicated, and poorly-designed products drive people away. If Steem can inspire confidence in the community through the quality of its products and apps then that confidence should eventually be reflected in the markets.

Of course, professional, user-friendly, well maintained products require funding to create. It's usually pretty easy to tell which products were created by a couple people in their spare time vs the ones that have a properly funded team. Many of the projects on Steem in the past have fallen in the former category, but our hope is that via the new Steem Proposal System that will start to change.

That's why the SPS is such an important addition to the Steem ecosystem, but it won't achieve that goal by itself. It will require good teams to submit and deliver on great proposals, and it will require the Steem stakeholders to make smart decisions in the allocation of the available funds and to ensure that the teams behind funded projects actually deliver at the level of quality that we need.

We Need Your Vote!

The Steem Keychain extension currently has over 5000 users and growing (according to data from the Chrome and Mozilla web stores), and I like to think that the team behind it (including myself, @aggroed, @stoodkev, and @nateaguila) has a decent track record of delivering results. So if you feel that this is a worthwhile project and would like it to receive funding through the SPS, please consider giving it your vote!

You can view and vote for proposals at the following sites:

• Vote for this Proposal using SteemConnect
• Steem Proposals: https://steemproposals.com/proposal/55
• SteemPeak: https://steempeak.com/me/proposals
• Steemit Wallet: https://steemitwallet.com/proposals

Note: This post has a 100% beneficiary set to @steem.dao