Few and Far — Message from Our CTO
It has been a while since I’ve personally addressed the Few and Far community but given our longer than expected interval since our last major product release I wanted to share some of what our engineers have been working on.
A subset of our community have continually run into issues connecting their wallets to Few and Far. We’re painfully aware of these problems as a company and a couple of our engineers labor at resolving these daily alongside myself and our new quality assurance hire. The issues present in a few different forms.
First is an “endless loop” of connecting. This was determined to be an issue when users have disabled cookies or are using “private browsing” in which case the cookies are wiped out. You may ask what we’re using the cookies for — the cookies are a key component of storing wallet connection state between NEAR’s web wallet and our servers. It’s as simple as no cookies = no connection. A forthcoming update addresses this issue immediately upon loading Few and Far and informs the user of the requirement of cookies to proceed with wallet connections.
Second is an issue with “wallet verification” when connecting a wallet. Our current implementation of verification has proven to be finicky in certain use cases and as such we’re eliminating it for the time being until we can either produce a more robust version internally or NEAR wallet authentication signing becomes viable via open source efforts.
Third is an issue with having multiple wallets connected to a user account. The official NEAR javascript library we rely upon on supports only a single active wallet in the user’s browser session. In short we’ve had to pair back our multi-wallet support to only linking a single “external” wallet to your Few and Far user account. This wallet can be changed at any time but there is now a hard limit of connecting only a single “external” wallet (we still support multiple F&F generated wallets).
In addition to resolving the above issues we’ve now added the ability to export your encrypted wallet keys for users that created a wallet during our onboarding process.
Beyond wallet concerns we’ve implemented lots of improvements to our API for our enterprise minting partners along with an array of additional features to become a full-service API provider creating a one-stop shop rather than requiring a patchwork of solutions for “Web 2” companies joining the fray.
Likewise we’re revamping our entire login and onboarding process alongside a full redesign of many of our most-trafficked pages as part of an effort to standardize and streamline our UI development to increase developer productivity and more importantly improve end-user experience.
Finally I’d like to highlight some of the extensive engineering efforts of our team building a bespoke indexing solution for NEAR. The time and monetary investment in this cannot be understated and its stability and scalability are paramount to our success. The latest round of updates drastically enhances our capabilities to support multi-collection contracts improving the capabilities for creators minting on our platform while also extending our support for Paras collections.
In the last few weeks we’ve added over 12,000 new users to our platform and we hope to continue that trend with a long list of improvements queued for release succeeded by an astonishingly large list of improvements/features/products that we’ve yet to announce.
To stay in the loop on future updates, please join us on Discord or follow our Twitter.
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