IPFS Signer

Sign, store, and verify user-signed messages with IPFS and Ethereum wallets in the browser. Mostly local-first. It also explores common IPFS patterns in the browser:

• Verified retrieval of UnixFS CIDs with Helia
• Packing and unpacking CAR files in the browser
• Trustless gateway retrieval (with Helia and other libs)

Who's signing?

User signatures (that is require some notion of user identity. In its first version, the app uses the WalletConnect standard and SDK for signing arbitrary messages using crypto wallets. This has the benefit of tapping into the already existing EVM userbase which already has a crypto wallet set up.

However, WalletConnect requires a connection to their servers which gets in the way of signing being a purely local operation.

Identity is much broader than crypto wallets and exploring alternatives would be useful. Examples include:

• Web Authentication API (WebAuthn) as a building block for signing arbitrary messages.
• Web Crypto API as a lower-level building block for non-extractable keys
• Passkeys

Getting started

To get up and running locally:

npm install
npm run dev