Vessel — Your passport for the internet

Hi Product Hunt 👋 We’re so proud to be launching our first consumer-facing authentication solution: Vessel, powered by Stytch. Vessel is a fully non-custodial digital passport and multi-chain crypto wallet. With this product, we’ve imagined what a passport for the internet would look like. We’ve combined the best of Web2 authentication innovations to simplify account creation and data provisioning with the power of Web3 wallet architectures, to condense authentication, identity (e.g. NFTs), and payments into a single browser extension. For Web2 user experiences, Vessel removes the need to create passwords for every site you visit or verify your email + phone number for every account you sign up for. To enable a simpler onboarding to Web3, Vessel also contains fully non-custodial Ethereum and Solana wallets that eliminate the need for seed phrases. End users own their digital identity and can choose whether or not to share their verified data with chosen sites. Vessel is also naturally privacy-preserving through a built-in obfuscation layer. Once you download the Vessel browser extension, a private Web3 ID is created that allows you to be anonymously authenticated as you land on connected sites. You’re also in complete control of your data and can choose to share it, or not, with sites you trust. Since Stytch’s founding, our core mission has been to eliminate friction from the internet, and authentication remains one of the biggest points of friction on the modern web. Over the past two years, Stytch has been building out the authentication platform for developers, making it easy and seamless to integrate passwordless authentication into websites and applications. To date, that has primarily meant allowing developers to integrate technology that makes it easy to backbone the creation of a new user account with an existing root account that a user holds (e.g. a third-party account like Google, their email account, their web3 wallet, etc.). However, we’ve always been interested in what having a first-party concept of a user’s account across the web could enable, with a “passport for the internet” concept as our north star. Vessel is our imagination of what authentication would look like if Stytch designed that root account and provides benefits for consumers and businesses across both Web2 and Web3: 🛂 A single, portable identity: forget about remembering hundreds of passwords, seed phrases and creating siloed, disparate accounts. Bring your account credentials and wallet with you, to any site or transaction. ✅ No seed phrases = improved UX and conversion: Vessel uses common Web2 patterns (a password & a PIN) to generate a non-custodial private key in lieu of seed phrases. We want to meet where many users are and create a friendlier on-ramp to the Web3 experience. ⛓ Multi-chain: Vessel is a multi-chain crypto wallet by design, and we fully support both Ethereum and Solana to start. Wallets are powerful tools in digital identities because they can house information like a user’s application usage, identity traits (NFTs), and financial status. Including non-custodial Web3 wallets in Vessel allows users to augment their data graph and identity as they see fit. 🔖 ID Attestations: you can optionally decide to verify fields like your email address or phone number once upfront and choose to share those traits with the sites you visit. 🙈 Privacy preservation: you can choose whether to actually share the Ethereum or Solana addresses with particular sites. But if you choose not to, you can still perform the authentication event to show control of your Vessel passport while retaining your privacy. 🤝 Easy integration: we have out-of-the-box backwards compatibility with WalletConnect and Solana's wallet adapter project for the ETH/SOL wallet authentication + signing. For Ethereum, users can connect to sites that support Wallet Connect by choosing the “copy to clipboard” option on the QR code image. For Solana, users can choose the Phantom connection option on sites, which is compatible with Vessel’s connection architecture. And for sites that want to take advantage of the other ID attestations and Web3 auth features, it's a very simple integration: https://github.com/vesselpassport Starting today, Vessel is now in public beta and anyone can download Vessel and start using it right away! This is a huge step for us in our mission to eliminate friction from the internet, and we’re thrilled to have you join us. Reed, myself and the rest of the team would love to hear your feedback!

Congrats on the release, team Stytch! Cool to see an API service extending out into consumer-facing offerings 🌠

The onboarding is as promised (no seed phrase, familiar auth pattern) and I love that you're supporting Ethereum AND Solana. Excited to see "login with Vessel" pop up in unexpected corners of web2!

The mission to eliminate friction from the internet is a noble one - and this certainly feels like a step in the right direction. Congrats to the Stytch team on the launch and excited to try this out :-)

Congratulations @mcstempel @jelamb -- your shipping velocity at Stytch is incredible! So pumped to try this :) Clever use case and excellent execution.

@jelamb - I am fascinated by this idea! I've only just begun digging into the Web3 arena, but I have seen some incredibly neat applications come forth, Vessel included. Congratulations on the launch and best of luck!

Congrats on the launch! Sounds great. You looking to expand to the Cosmos ecosystem? At cheqd we're building a verifiable data registry (layer 1 blockchain) on Cosmos to manage the exchange of Verifiable Credentials (all decentralised identity / SSI space). Could be cool to chat

Congrats on the launch! Love how simple the onboarding process is :)

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I've been trying for YEARS to find a 1Password-like solution for my mom to be able to use, but always came up short. This just might be it!

I know it's the same for metamask, but when a browser extension can "read and change all your data on all websites" it's terrifying!

Congrats on the launch @jelamb! Excited for what's to come. Quick thing: you haven't made your Chrome Extension open-source? I'd love to contribute to this initiative

great example of great UX to solve old fashion UX. so awesome to see Stytch attacking friction on the internet in so many innovative ways.

Great work. Congrats on the launch.

Congratulations @jelamb! This is really cool and also very needed. What an exciting day!

Looks very cool. Been looking into digital identity and can't want to give this a try

How does Vessel work for sharing logins (and hiding passwords) with the rest of the team?

amazing work. can't wait to try this tool!

Incredible product velocity from the Stytch team - can't wait to check it out!

Stytch are total innovators and this product looks like a complete game-changer. Great work!