Well, its official. LynxChain has finally launched on the EOS network.
I have registered one account of my possible three that are allowed. The process is free and fairly straight forward. Although there are a couple of things that I have learned in the process so thought it a good idea to inform anyone interested so that they don’t make the same mistakes as I did and find yourself stuck.
The Incentive
Coming across the LynxChain Is Live Medium post by Fred Kruger pretty much gave me the incentive to sign up straight away. As noted in the article, there are a number of features about the LynxChain that seem promising.
- Users can create 3 Free accounts with a phone number.
- Every user has a short account name (as short as 4 characters: example “fred”), and a display name (example “fred krueger”). The account name cannot be changed, the display name can be changed at any time
- Users can upload an avatar which is saved on-chain (and can be changed)
- Users have a unique referral link that they can use to invite friends and family. For every person you invite, you get 1 LNX token (maximum total supply 21 Million)
- We have moved two games: “Alien Invasion” and “BombSweeper” to the “Explore” section of Desktop and Android wallets. You can play these games to win more LNX coins.
- There is no RAM, CPU, NET, or Staking.
- The Desktop App has been significantly improved with automatic updating, streamlined UX etc..
Image Source: http://lynxwallet.io
The Registration Process
As I had previously downloaded the desktop wallet, all I had to do was upgrade it. Upon doing this the registration process was very simple, however in retrospect I do wish I would have done things a little differently. But more on that in a bit.
First off when you open the desktop app, you’ll notice a very simple interface. In the bottom left you will see a small menu tab which will bring up options for both EOS and LynxChain accounts.
Of course yours will look a little different than this as I have already created one account. Open the menu and pivot over to LynxChain then to create account. This will bring you to the below screen whereby you can select your country and import your mobile number to receive a SMS text for registration verification. However, this is kind of where I went wrong. Having already had the wallet and not thinking I just went straight in from here. The process works but, the LNX token is NOT YET tradable on any exchanges and the port for the LYNX EOS token is not yet ready. What this means then is that even though I have an account, I have no LNX tokens so cannot at present interact with any of the dApps currently live on the network. So, in hindsight I wish I would have slowed down a bit and found someone’s referral to use so that both they and I could get one LNX for registering an account. Hopefully someone out there will throw me a bone due to this post so that we both can get online and play around with the network. Should you feel inclined here is my referral which should work from both desktop and mobile: https://create.lynxwallet.io/jimmyd
After entering your country code and phone number on the next screen, you will be prompted to enter the code sent to your phone, your name (which can be changed at any time), followed by your desired Lynx address which will be locked for life. Please note that your Lynx address must be 4-12 characters in length, and can contain a-z (lowercase) and 1-5. The second and third account you create should you choose to will follow the same process, except for the fact that you will not have to verify the phone number code again.
It is very important that once you have created your account that you navigate back to the bottom left hand menu into the account settings and save your private key. If you loose access to the device that you are on at present there is no way to recover your account. That said, because of some issues that I and others had due to a glitch in the system, the Lynx team is working on a fix for account recovery in the future.
Troubleshooting
This by no means is meant in a negative way towards the Lynx team. In all actuality they dealt with the launch really well despite a couple of mishaps. This is just a warning to those that have yet to sign up so that maybe you can save yourself a little time and worry should these problems present themselves to you as they did to me.
For a short time the phone verification was inactive. Lots of people jumped into telegram and were stressed about not being able to get it to work. The telegram team was very patient and very helpful and dealt with the issue very professionally informing users to just be patient while the problem was being fixed. Unfortunately for me, the second issue that I seemed to have took place around about this time. I’m not really sure what happened to be sure, but for some reason the first account that I created was not reflected in the wallet even though it had been reflected on the bloks.io explorer. It seems as though this has happened to a few people, some of which are quite proficient in the space, and very possible that because these accounts did not show up in the wallet and their private keys could not be copied that they will be unable to be accessed by the users that created them. It’s crypto and I have learned to roll with this kinds of punches without getting too stressed or angry about it, but I’d being lying if I said I wasn’t a little sad as this was a great account name that I really wanted to use.
On that note then, here are my suggestions:
- Make sure that no matter what you do not close the wallet or app before you can see your account and have copied your private keys down
- As every user has the ability to create 3 accounts, maybe save the account name you really want for the second round to ensure if you do mess up that you wont lose the ability to use that one
- If something should go wrong and you cannot see your account in the Lynx wallet, head on over to bloks.io and check if your account actually got created or not before you start to panic – and better yet, don’t panic and understand that all in all the team did a really good job of getting this thing off the ground with little issue, and what issues they had they are working actively already to improve and solve.
LynxChain dApps
Considering it is very early days there are not so many apps yet listed in the wallet, although I expect in the future for this to change quite rapidly. Of the three, two are really simple free games (Bomb Sweeper & Alien Invasion) and one is a social app (Chirp). Accessing these couldn’t be easier – simply click on Apps in the wallet menu and viola, you’re in. Looking forward to seeing what other apps pop up in the near future, as in the LynxChain Is Live Medium post mentioned previously it was noted that there are “a LOT of ideas for games… [with already] over 20 EOS dApps in the pipeline”.
Final Thoughts
Thus far I have to say I’m pretty impressed. The clean interface of the wallet and smoothness of the registration process despite my minor mishaps has been relatively easy and in a way, less like crypto and more like any other kind of app you may download from a non crypto project. As of right now its pretty calm in LynxChain world, but I do expect all that change very quickly as people start porting in EOS based LYNX when the time is ripe and more applications get launched on the chain. All in all, I’m looking forward to playing around with the wallet and various apps that pop up and seeing what energy the developers and community can bring to the EOSIO families newest chain.
LynxChain Links
- Mainsite: https://www.lynxwallet.io/
- LynxChain Telegram: https://t.me/LynxChain
- Lynx Wallet Telegram: https://t.me/lynxwallet
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lynxwallet
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lynxwallet/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lynxwallet/
*If you found this article useful and are not already a member of LynxChain, please consider using my referral link to get a LNX token to play around with until the ability to port or purchase the token becomes available: https://create.lynxwallet.io/jimmyd
