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<h1>We’re Partnering With Busy!</h1>

We are happy to announce a formal partnership between the Busy Team and Steemit Inc. to further develop SteemConnect. The Steemit Team has been assisting @ekitcho and @fabien, founders of Busy, for months in an effort to take SteemConnect to the next level, and we’re now happy to announce that they are close to launching a major upgrade to SteemConnect with our official support!

*The goal of SteemConnect is to make signing into any application that leverages a Steem Account as easy and intuitive as signing into any ordinary website.*

SteemConnect is the ideal solution for making it easy and *safe* for users to sign in to 3rd party Steem applications and for developers to build and scale these applications. It’s a layer built on top of the Steem blockchain that allows you to connect to authorized apps and transact in a secure and convenient way. And it's about to get even better.

<h1>A Brief History of SteemConnect</h1>

It has been more than a year since Steem and Steemit have launched and a whole ecosystem of applications is forming on the Steem blockchain. These new projects show the enthusiasm and dynamism of Steemians but raise the issue of data security for both users, developers, and entrepreneurs of our ecosystem.

Security is key for the Steem ecosystem. After identifying the security challenges, we started working with the Busy team. SteemConnect will be the infrastructure that lets any developer or entrepreneur build on Steem without having to worry about security or the signup process, making it that much easier.

And rest assured, SteemConnect is a community project. That’s why it’s open source under MIT license, for anyone to use (and contribute to) as they see fit!

<h1>What SteemConnect 2.0 Will Offer Users</h1>

The next version of SteemConnect will let you secure your private keys while interacting with any service on the Steem blockchain. Through SteemConnect you will be able to trust these domains with your credentials, reputation and eventually money. SteemConnect will make it easier than ever to handle delegations, signing transactions, exploring Steem applications, and authentication. 

SteemConnect will also serve as a hub for your Steem account. Not only will you be able to sign in and transact in one place, SteemConnect will give you access to the full suite of Steem services and apps at your fingertips. This ‘app store for Steem’ will be explored in a future post.

<h1>What SteemConnect 2.0 Offers Developers</h1>

For developers, SteemConnect dramatically simplifies authentication for users. It lets you focus on your app development without having to manage user private key security. 

This makes dealing with Steem apps much safer. As a dev, you no longer have to blindly trust the code of Steem apps you integrate with, where reviewing app code multiple times is a challenge. SteemConnect handles all that in a trustworthy, transparent way and the next version of SteemConnect will be even safer.

<h2>Closed Applications</h2>

Even if you’re not looking to create an open source application, SteemConnect will add security to your service, as Steemians will never have to give you their private keys.

<h1>What SteemConnect 2.0 Will Offer ANY Website</h1>

SteemConnect won’t *just* be a layer that streamlines the user sign up and sign in processes, it will also enable developers to add Steem features to their *existing* websites. Using SteemConnect, web developers with no history of blockchain development will be able to conveniently and securely add features like: tipping, voting, and comments.

We are happy to announce both our progress as well as our official partnership with the Busy Team and are working as hard as we can to help deliver the next iteration of SteemConnect as soon as possible, while guaranteeing the highest security standards. 

You can join the mailing list by going to https://v2.steemconnect.com if you would like to be an alpha tester or receive progress updates. Follow up posts on the project details will be handled by the excellent Busy Team (@busy.org), so please follow along @steemconnect and resteem this post!

Thanks for reading!

*Team Steemit + Busy Team*