GUI for Seed Neurons

We are working on this for Stoic wallet - importing a seed key AND supporting neuron management.

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it’s a little unclear but David’s reply in the link below indicates that it won’t ever be possible to transfer ICP or disburse from seed neurons from GUI but only to manage seed neurons from GUI. Transfering and disbursing would require CLI. Is that in line with your understanding. Also in David’s reply there doesn’t appear to be any reference to hardware wallet support and ledger live influencing this, being in the works, or being a blocker for this functionality in Stoic (which you had previously mentioned): https://www.reddit.com/r/dfinity/comments/o4zdy6/we_are_david_johan_nicolas_and_ryan_ask_us/h2odtzp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

If it can be done from CLI, it can be done from a GUI no worries

He specifically said “This is the one thing that manage neuron doesn’t allow: disbursement. Disbursement must be done through the cli with the original keys.”

and

“I can say that, as far as I know, there was no decision made about this. It’s just a product of the technical context, and one that we’re working to remedy: the seed neurons have pre-created keys while the GUI’s auth system (II) creates a new principal for each site, even if you managed to re-use the same key (which would still be unadvisable) it wouldn’t produce the same principal that the neuron expects.”

Maybe I am mistaken, or maybe you want to clarify that with him because it doesn’t seem to be the case.

Yeah so what we are working on is the ability to import your PEM key into Stoic to you can manage the neuron with our GUI. This does make your seed key a hot key if using stoicwallet.com

oh interesting, so just to confirm that when you say : “this does make your seed key a hot key”. does that mean it would allow you to disburse seed neurons from gui and also send icp from gui in addition to all the other manage neuron functionality?

Great to hear that! Managing 49 neurons separately via CLI is really cumbersome. Voting would be so much easier with a GUI!

Yes, you can load your key into stoic and use it as a wallet or to manage staking. Neuron management is pretty simple at the moment, pretty much create neurons, disburse unlocked ones, spawn rewards, increase delay and that’s it. Neurons will auto follow dfinity foundation, but no manual voting for now. We have both Neuron management and Seed import working if anyone wants to try it out let me know and I’ll msg you when it goes live (next few days)

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Nice let me know when it’s ready. Looking forward to it.

Thanks very much for the tools that you are working on. Forgive me though, but I’m not understanding how this approach is acceptable even according to Dfinity’s own recommendations. Dfinity repeatedly recommends the use of air gapped setup in order to protect private keys, yet the solution you are describing is completely bypassing this and suggesting we just put our private key directly on an internet connected machine (importing the PEM). Am I not understanding this correctly? I’ve been expecting that hardware wallet support would arrive at some point where we could then safely access GUIs and sign transactions in secure element. Is this for some reason technically impossible? Why do the seeds that were given to seed investors seem like they are completely incompatible with the existing Internet Identity system and all dApps? Can we transfer our neurons to a different system where we can control them better? I’m still very confused by all this even after all this time.

for those in the seed round, is there anyway for them to add a backup private key via CLI; or will this be possible in the future on stoic wallet once seed mnemonic is imported?

Regarding hardware wallet they have plans to have a ledger app but it won’t let you manage neurons or even send transactions from seed neurons using the hardware wallets from what I can tell. See here

I think their were plans for Coinbase to do custodial services and charge a yearly fee for this. And it was said that would include ability to manage neurons. But i haven’t heard anything about that for awhile.

They discuss the technical challenges here

Loading any private key into an internet connected device is at the users own risk - some people may prefer not to, which is fine, others may be OK with the risk if it means that they can use a GUI. We build things, it’s up to people if they want to use them but I prefer to provide the option and let users decide on if they want to use something as opposed to not building something at all. A PEM file is the same as a mnemonic seed phrase/private key hence the incompatibility with an internet identity.

It looks like eventually we can use a hotkey to do most of the control of the seed neurons and that the hotkey would have access to GUI. This solution would be acceptable to most security conscious seed holders I would think. If the hotkey became compromised, not much damage could be done and the hot key revoked and renewed from CLI. I suppose the worst that could happen is an attacker could trigger dissolve on all your neurons and you would lose all accrued age bonus and you would have to start aging over from zero.

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Yeah hot keys is a good example of a different way to access these, Stoic will also support this as well (so you could create an account with II, add the principal as a hot key, and then load your neurons into Stoic). Allowing PEM import extends further than just assisting seed investors, it allows anyone who generated a key with keysmith to be able to access a hot wallet too.

In future we do have an airgapped solution - downloading Stoic was a desktop app to run on a non-internet connected machine, loading in your key (could be either a PEM or mnemonic seed), generating signed txs which can be displayed as QR codes and sent to the blockchain using a secondary connected device. This is further down the track, but something that would give users more security if they want it

any update from you side? thanks!

We added support in StoicWallet - you can import your seed PEM file and manage your neurons

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Good work!

Is it also possible to claim and re-stake the ICP earned from dissolving neurons via Stoic?

Yeah, you can dissolve and disburse (returns back to your main account), and then restake all in Stoic

Thank you for all this, very interesting and valuable!
Do you have maybe any progress on the air-gapped solution?