Internet passports

Passwords are like the headphones that used to come with your new iPhone. No one really wants them. They do the job when you have no better option, but they otherwise offer bad sound and a bad experience.

Security experts hate passwords too. At the tail end of last year, we met a new competitor in the authentication space called Stytch. Julianna Lamb and Reed McGinley-Stempel had worked together on authentication features at Plaid prior to launching their new startup, which uses APIs and SDKs to provide multiple passwordless methods that are easy for companies to integrate into their products.

Just five months later, Lamb and McGinley-Stempel are back with a new product, stepping further into the user experience of logging in (which so happens to come a week after a big update from1Password). The idea for Vessel was guided by the idea of a “passport for the internet,” relevant for web2 and web3 environments.

Vessel lets you manage both your “digital identity and crypto assets” in a secure browser extension. In other words, there’s no need to create passwords or fill out forms again and again. For crypto holders, Vessel’s fully non-custodial Ethereum and Solana wallets (more blockchains to come) eliminate the need for seed phrases. And if you haven’t delved into crypto yet, a secret or seed phrase is a really long stream of random words you’re expected to hold on to safely for life, because passwords weren’t enough already.

“Vessel is our imagination of what authentication would look like if Stytch designed that root account and provided benefits for consumers and businesses across both Web2 and Web3,” Lamb shared.

More and more large companies are experimenting with web3 integrations to help their crypto-holding users. We’ll be watching to see if and how much Vessel helps to onboard more companies into web3, which could accelerate overall adoption.

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