The wallet ecosystem on EOS is evolving. There are three main wallets that are very good and have been widely recommended, SimplEOS, Greymass and Scatter, which is strictly speaking not a wallet but you can use it to safely sign into other services without revealing your private key.
The Problem
As I wrote in my last article, EOS is a bit different than other blockchains when it comes to wallets and accounts. On blockchains like bitcoin, you download your wallet and it automatically creates an "account" for you. That account really is just a public key which you can use to receive transfers. There is no limit on the number of public keys you can have.
EOS Accounts on the other hand can only be created by other accounts. In fact, there is only one account that was not created by another account and that's eosio, the genesis account. All other accounts were created by eosio or descendents thereof.
EOS Accounts also need to buy at least 4KB of RAM from the system and stake a small amount of EOS for CPU and NET, which means EOS Accounts are not free. In fact, EOS Accounts are between $5 and $10 at the moment, depending on current RAM and EOS prices and how much of the resources you want to buy initially.
This means, wallets like SimplEOS or Greymass cannot simply create an EOS account for the user. Someone needs to pay for it.
Account Creation with SimplEOS
With their new release, SimplEOS introduced the "Request new account" feature. SimplEOS asks you for your desired account name and generates the owner and active keys for you as shown in the screenshots below.
At the end, users will get an account creation code that they can send to a friend who already has an EOS account. This friend can then use SimplEOS to create the account. Of course the price of the account will be deducted from the friends' EOS wallet. So either the friend treats you to the account or you're gonna have to pay them back somehow. And what if you don't have a friend who already has an EOS account or you don't want to bother them?
EOS Account Creator Integration
You can now use the SimplEOS account creation code to create an account on EOS Account Creator.
You just append ?d={{your account creation code}} to the account creator URL like this:
When visiting that URL, you will see your account name, owner and active key already filled out. You can then immediately purchase the account with credit card or crypto.
Let me know what you think! Should SimplEOS integrate this link into their wallet to make it easier for new users to create an account?