This is a web application (and service) to activate new Signum accounts.
A Signum account is considered active only, if it owns a public key. Usually, the public key is only available once the
account has executed at least one transaction on the blockchain. To execute a transaction one needs
a sufficient balance to pay the transaction fee. To do this, an user who just created an account must ask someone to
transfer some Signum to that account (or using a faucet). In that first step, the account will be registered in the blockchain (as receiver) and
though exists publicly. To turn from an passive into an active account the user has to create any kind of transaction.
This service sends the user a welcome message and by passing the user accounts public key the account gets activated. Doing so, the user does not need to create a transaction and the sending step can be omitted.
Before you obtain an account in Signum you have to generate a so called passphrase. This passphrase is used to derive a set of one public and two private keys (sign and agreement).
The public key - technically the cryptographically hashed passphrase, is being decoded in an almost unique number, which is used as account id.
For better readability the account id is also encoded to a Reed-Solomon-Address - that identifier starting with S-. Both are interchangeable, but do not reveal the original passphrase.
Although, it's possible to use any kind of string as passphrase, it's highly recommended to use a "random generator" (like in the Phoenix Wallet), because once created a passphrase it cannot be changed anymore.
Ideally, it's best to have a truly randomized passphrase, but this true randomness is hard to achieve. Passphrases in crypto coin world are permanent and immutable;
that is, they determine the accounts identifier/address. In other words: The passphrase is the account - An individual that knows the passphrase (or it's derived private keys) owns the account.
It's the owners responsibility to secure the passphrase as much as possible
As describe earlier, an account only exists in the Signum blockchain once the owner has realized his/her first transaction. But it's also possible to announce the public key of the receiving account in a transaction.
That way an account becomes activated without having executed any transaction yet.
This application/service does exactly this. One of the most frequent asked questions is: How do I get my public key?
We pointed out that a public key is part of a set of keys derived from the passphrase. So, the public key is available once the passphrase generated.
For security reasons, the activation service does not ask for the passphrase, because of the risk of a man-in-the-middle attack.
The Phoenix wallet activates your account automatically on creation, but also offers the option to activate imported accounts
If you have any question, don't hesitate to contact us on discord, or open an issue
Once you got the code, you can install dependencies and run the project in development mode with:
npm install # or yarn
npm run init # to create a default `.env` file
# now change the passphrase of your activation account in the generated `.env` file
npm run devOpen up localhost:3000 and start clicking around.
To build the application (build that static files) run
npm run buildThe static files are stored under __sapper__/build
Once built, the application can be deployed on any static file server
Vercel is a pretty cool "serverless" deployment service. This project is configured to be hosted on Vercel
- Create an account on Vercel
- Having a Signum account, which will serve as activator account (the one that sends the welcome messages)
On first time deploy the deployment might fail as you need to set up the environment variables. You can do it using the Vercel CLI tool or on the Vercel platform itself (recommended)
- Deploy a testnet (staging) version:
npm run deploy-testnet - Deploy a mainnet (production) version:
npm run deploy-mainnet