Crypto-friendly e-commerce giant Shopify has launched a blockchain trading tool to improve the user experience of its web3-focused stores hosted on the platform.
Announcing the move via Twitter on February 9, Shopify’s blockchain team designer @ryancreatescopy noted that “we’ve launched some new tools to help you build tokengating apps for Shopify merchants.”
In particular, the expanded crypto wallet connection feature and the “tokengating” application programming interface (API) tool have been highlighted. The latter has been in early access beta mode since June 2022 and was previously only available to select merchants.
With tokegating, all applicable Shopify merchants can now set up their store to dictate who token holders can and cannot get access to exclusive products, NFT drops and benefits.
The tool verifies user eligibility through connected wallets, and is said to be a practical way for NFT Merchants to reward certain users or increase exclusivity for certain products.
In terms of expanded crypto wallet support, Shopify has integrated Sign-In with the Ethereum SIWE protocol led by the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and the Ethereum Foundation.
SIWE essentially enables secure user login and authentication of Ethereum and ENS Domain accounts without providing personal identifiers to third parties such as name, phone number and home address.
The topic of personal user information has been an unsavory area for Shopify in the past. In April 2022, a group of disgruntled users filed a class-action lawsuit against the company and hardware wallet provider Ledger over a massive leak of user data originating from the duo in 2020.
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ENS Labs community advocate @sadaf.eth highlighted SIWE’s integration with Shopify via Twitter on February 9, and linked to a developer document explaining how to build the tool into a Shopify store, much to the delight of some from the Ethereum community.
Lfggg pic.twitter.com/sjfptLkPwL
— broke.eth (@Melvininho) February 10, 2023
“Prop statementGenerator allows you to customize the statement displayed in Sign-In with the Ethereum message. The function accepts the address of the connected wallet, allowing you to expand and customize the message statement to better match your brand,” the document says.
At this stage, if the merchant connects the SIWE feature in the Shopify wallet, it appears that the user will be able to click the “sign in with Ethereum” button to connect the address through SIWE partner intermediaries such as Coinbase, Fortmatic, WalletConnect. , Portis and Toros.