How to setup Hive Keychain with Ecency

I was asked recently by a newbie that I have onboarded if they need to keep putting their password into Ecency each time they log on and my answer was no, you can use Keychain. But how to do that?

I had to think as it was such a long time ago that I set up Keychain with Ecency, so I thought it would be helpful to make a short guide.

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The first step is to go to the Hive Keychain website and from there you can click on download or scroll down to the bottom of the page.

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So from here you can download the mobile versions onto your phone, but today we are interested to install the browser version for your laptop or desktop PC, so select Chrome. If you use Firefox or Brave, you can select those instead and the process is quite similar.

After clicking Chrome, we then get the option to Add to Chrome the Hive Keychain extension. This means that it will sit in your browser running in the background if you need it. When you click it, you will get a confirmation that it can read your website information. You can agree to this.

Once installed, you will get a window pop-up confirming this. To then view this, you can click on this jigsaw icon in the top right.

This will then allow you to click on this pin and once you click it, it turns blue as shown. That means that it would then be visible as shown on the browser bar with the green tick.

To see the Hive Keychain installed in Chrome, you can click on the 3 dots in the top right, more tools, and then extensions. This will allow you to deactivate or uninstall if needed.

Once your little icon is there, Hive Keychain is installed in your browser and you are ready to set it up. To do that, first click on the new little icon and you will be faced with this screen:

Here you should check or uncheck if you want to share usage data with Keychain. I usually don't share my data. Then you can click on save.

The next screen will then allow you to give a local password for someone to access the keychain in your browser. This means, for someone to use your hive keys, they still need to enter a password in the browser locally.

The great thing about Keychain is that it allows you to use a more human rememberable password instead of a huge blockchain-encrypted one. Therefore, you can then enter a password that you like and repeat it for security and press submit.

Make sure to write this password down or that you know it off by heart as you will need it when starting new computer or browser sessions.

The next screen will give you the option to enter your hive keys or import a previously saved Hivekeychain encrypted file. We want to enter our keys so select the first option.

The next screen will ask you for your hive account username. So in my case, this is @mypathtofire and my private key. Again, in my case, I store my posting key and active keys in Hive Keychain so that I can make posts but also perform wallet transactions.

Therefore, I enter my hive username and posting key, and then the key will spin for a moment before giving me an account update.

If you do not get a view like this, then something has gone wrong and you should try to repeat the last step.

Now we have added only the Posting Key so far. To add the Active Key, we should click the three lines button and then Accounts, then Manage Accounts and we will come to the last screen that you can see above.

Here you should be able to see your posting key already. Next we want to add the Active Key, so you should click there on the plus sign.

When you do that, you get the same screen as before where you can enter your active key and press the import button. Once done, you will get a Successful Import message showing up and both keys should now be visible in your keychain.

We are now finished configuring Hive Keychain and it is ready to use!!!

Configuring to use with Ecency

Now we can go to ecency.com and configure to use the Hive Keychain. Here we first click on Login as shown above.

Here you will get the familiar options to login. Instead of entering your username and private key, now you can instead click Login with Keychain.

You will then see the option to enter just your username. Here I put in mypathtofire. You do not need to put the @ sign in front of your username.

You will then get a pop-up from Hive Keychain as above where you can click on confirm.

You could also get a message with a checkbox beside it that says to do not prompt again to verify keys on ecency. If you want, you can click this to always login to ecency with Hive Keychain.

You will then get a login successful message and you will see that your profile is now visible in the top right corner.

You are now ready to use Ecency with Hive Keychain and do not need to enter your private keys to login anymore.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

Credits:
The title image was created in Canva using image from source by
robert1029 and clipart used under license with the free to use version of Canva.

Screenshots from Hive Keychain website source and Ecency website source and from the Hive Keychain tool.

Let's connect : mypathtofire