Introducing Log in with ZBD – A new standard for moving money on the Internet

Getting paid and paying someone online needs to be easy. Whether it’s a person paying another person, a game rewarding its users or even an app sending a payment to another app, money online should flow as seamlessly and instantly as information. But to achieve that, we need interoperable systems that follow standards already familiar to app developers. Enter Log in with ZBD.

Log in with ZBD is the world’s first standardized integration for instantly moving money between any online platform and its users. To achieve that, it uses ZEBEDEE’s Bitcoin Lightning payment rails. If Sign in with Google is how you connect your email to online apps, Log in with ZBD is how you connect your wallet. Connect once, transact freely forever. Or until you decide to delete access to that app. Your call.

With Log in with ZBD, developers can rely on a single standard to send money to and from users in their app and in the wider digital world. And users benefit from it too, as we can tap into this potential using very simple methods that everyone on the Internet is already familiar with.

Finding an answer to an Internet-age-old problem

When you want to sign into an app, launch a program or play a game, you usually need to authenticate yourself somehow. Provide some credentials, choose a username and password, or simply use a verified account like Google or Steam to enter. Why do we do that? Well, the next time you come back, you’ll probably want to access your data and progress. Signing in ensures you can access that and, just as importantly, that others can’t.

But the problem with this is that you then have to keep track of numerous credentials for various independent sites and platforms, and none of them will be able to recognise you as the same person, since they can’t exchange information between one another. You may be called SatoshiNakamoto on two different sites, but for all these sites know, it could be two completely different people.

We’ve had fixes for this for a while. Solutions such as Sign in with Google have been offering us a way to sign in in many different places using the same account and move information from one place to another much easier than before. But for what we want to achieve at ZEBEDEE, we need to be able to move more than just information – we want to move money. And this is where Log in with ZBD comes in.

Building our solution for a connected future

At ZEBEDEE, we’re huge fans of standardizing the Bitcoin Lightning environment through projects such as Lightning Address, and now we felt it was time we gave our users and partners a standard of our own, in the form of a universal log-in and payments information sharing system – Log in with ZBD.

"We are not building a walled garden of proprietary tech, we are breaking down those walls by creating elegant, simple, yet powerful tools to move money through every part of the Internet."
— André Neves, ZEBEDEE CTO & Co-founder

Standardization is a huge advantage for both developers and gamers. Independent developers and large studios no longer need to worry about their own authentication flows – they can simply use Log in with ZBD and our APIs and skip a ton of time-consuming work that used to be required to set up a payments system in their app. Once integrated, this opens the door to a world of possibilities for how to move money online just as easily as information.

Gamers will have a far easier and friendlier experience too, not to mention all the exciting payment-related mechanics that only become possible with a nano-payment provider like ZEBEDEE. Now you’ll be able to log in using the same credentials in any game or app that supports Log in with ZBD and start enjoying the benefits of fully-programmable payments. Beat a boss and the game automatically tops up your wallet with the loot. Stack some sats in a mobile game, then shop for thousands of gift cards in the ZBD app. All this achieved through a single, familiar flow.

Based on a universal standard

The magic of this new integration is that it’s based on the widely-used OAuth 2.0 standard. OAuth 2.0 (meaning "Open Authorization") essentially allows different apps to authorize each other to access user data. This is commonly used to enable apps to share information, such as a user’s email address. But in our case, we’re using it to communicate money.

Now you can simply sign in with your ZBD account in any game or app that supports the integration, grant the app the necessary permissions and enjoy seamless movement of money without any clunky scanning of QR codes or entering complex payment information. Most importantly, the integration allows the app to pay you, enabling the seamless two-directional flow of funds that is a prerequisite for the transition from our current Internet of Information into the coming Internet of Value.

Try Log in with ZBD now

We just released Log in with ZBD, so it’ll take a while for developers to integrate it into their apps. But you can already see it in action in the classic Bitcoin mobile game SaruTobi, with more integrated titles coming soon. The only thing you need to access this feature is the latest version of the ZBD app! So make sure you've updated your app and give SaruTobi a spin!

P.S. If you’re a developer interested in integrating Log in with ZBD into your app or game, get in touch with our team or read the documentation.