André Dias Moreira Prol explains: Integrating Freighter Wallet in Web3

Every developer who has ventured into the Ethereum ecosystem knows the ritual: install MetaMask, connect your wallet, sign a transaction. But when I first started building on Stellar, one question kept surfacing among my teams—where is Stellar's equivalent? The answer is Freighter, and after integrating it into several production tokenization projects, I want to share what I've learned.

As André Dias Moreira Prol, I've spent the last few years helping enterprises bridge traditional finance with blockchain rails, and Freighter has become an indispensable piece of that puzzle. Let me walk you through why it matters and how to put it to work.

What Freighter Actually Is

Freighter is a non-custodial browser extension wallet built and maintained by the Stellar Development Foundation. Think of it as MetaMask for the Stellar network: it holds your keys locally, signs transactions, and exposes a clean API so web applications can request signatures without ever touching private keys.

The comparison to MetaMask is fair but not perfect. Stellar's architecture differs fundamentally from Ethereum's account model. Transactions settle in 3-5 seconds with fees averaging around 0.00001 XLM—fractions of a cent. This makes Freighter especially attractive for micro-transaction use cases and tokenized asset transfers, where Ethereum gas fees would be prohibitive.

Freighter supports both the classic Stellar operations and Soroban smart contract interactions, which is where I've seen the most exciting enterprise adoption recently. It's available for Chrome, Firefox, and Brave, and offers hardware wallet support through Ledger.

Integrating Freighter into Your Web3 App

The integration path is refreshingly straightforward. The Stellar team ships a dedicated npm package that handles the messy details.

npm install @stellar/freighter-api

First, verify the extension is present and request access:

import {
  isConnected,
  requestAccess,
  getAddress,
} from "@stellar/freighter-api";

async function connectWallet() {
  const connected = await isConnected();
  if (!connected.isConnected) {
    throw new Error("Freighter not installed");
  }

  await requestAccess();
  const { address } = await getAddress();
  return address;
}

Once you have the user's public key, signing a transaction is equally clean. You build the transaction with the Stellar SDK, then hand the XDR to Freighter:

import { signTransaction } from "@stellar/freighter-api";

async function signPayment(xdr) {
  const signedResult = await signTransaction(xdr, {
    networkPassphrase: "Public Global Stellar Network ; September 2015",
  });
  return signedResult.signedTxXdr;
}

Notice the networkPassphrase parameter—always specify it explicitly. In one project, a colleague forgot this detail and users on Testnet were nearly signing Mainnet transactions. That kind of mistake is exactly why I stress network validation in every code review.

Real-World Considerations and Security

In production tokenization work, integration is only half the battle. Here are the lessons that made the difference in my deployments.

Always validate the network. Call getNetwork() before every critical operation and reject mismatches. This is non-negotiable for asset transfers where value is at stake.

Handle rejection gracefully. Users cancel signature requests constantly. Wrap every Freighter call in proper error handling and give clear feedback—a silent failure erodes trust faster than anything.

Never assume the extension exists. Roughly 30% of first-time visitors in one financial pilot I ran did not have Freighter installed. We built an onboarding flow that detected this and guided them, which lifted conversion significantly.

From a digital forensics standpoint—an area André Dias Moreira Prol has focused on for years—remember that Freighter signs client-side. Your backend must independently verify signatures and transaction contents against expected parameters. Never trust the frontend to enforce business logic; treat every signed XDR as untrusted input until validated on-chain or server-side.

For Soroban contract calls, Freighter also supports signAuthEntry, which lets you authorize specific contract invocations granularly—a powerful feature for permissioned tokenization scenarios.

Conclusion

Freighter lowers the barrier to building serious Stellar applications, combining the familiar UX of MetaMask with Stellar's speed and near-zero fees. If you're building in Web3, install Freighter today and prototype your first signed transaction—the ecosystem rewards those who ship.

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