The development team behind Stellar issued an official statement yesterday announcing they were investing in the Keybase project through the partnership grant program of the Stellar Foundation. Keybase is an open code platform for encryption of online identity created by the co-founders of OKCupid.
The Stellar Foundation is in charge of the partnership grant program whose goal is to promote the development of high impact project within the Stellar ecosystem. However, according to the official statement, the alliance with Keybase presents a special instance of the program, but no more details have been published regarding this agreement.
Keybase is a company that deals with mapping out the online identities of the people (for example, social networks) with cryptographic keys through a publicly audited process. The company was launched by the co-founders of OKCupid and SparkNotes and has more than 200,000 users at the moment.
The Stellar team is interested in the development of cryptography of the identity in the real world and hopes these advances would allow to make payments in Lumens in the future only by knowing the receiver’s social media identity. This way, it would connect the financial interaction with the social interaction and offer a process of sending funds much simpler and more friendly for the users.
The team also announced it would offer new products focused on Stellar in the future, in alliance with Keybase, although no details were published about this.
The Stellar team said: “Our agreement with Keybase entails many practical Stellar-centric deliverables. Rather than giving out a list now and spinning up yet another crypto hype-cycle, we’ll announce products jointly with them as they’re completed or near completion. We know the Keybase team very well and expect they will create critical Stellar ecosystem components over the coming years.”
The amount invested in Keybase was not announced, but the companies participating in the partnership grant program of the Stellar Foundation can receive up to two million dollars. This program was launched last September and it rewards its beneficiaries in Stellar Lumens (XML), the Stellar’s cryptocurrency.
Stellar Lumens grew considerably during last year and it is currently located on the seventh position on the ranking of the cryptocurrencies with the highest market capitalization of the CoinMarketCap.
