It covers aspects (think pareto principle) of email, linkedin, slack, github, dropbox, whatsapp, online banking and probably more core use cases that I don’t have on top of my mind.
That is now, today. With a decent user experience that keeps getting better (see recent improvements @ user profiles).
=> all of that end-to-end encrypted and delivered in a way that it is accessible and usable and fun with a long-tail of users in mind.
[I have no idea what an equivalent would be right now, not even as combination of multiple separate projects. Think about that.]
Soooo... A centralized solution for everything? ;)
A lot of trust is rooted in their centralized proprietary walled garden API and to make matters worse they actually silently bypass hardware security modules in favor of keys exposed to system memory!
They even encourage users to expose their PGP private keys to their browser and didn't even bother to isolate it to a service worker so browser plugins can't steal it (or just supporting hardware tokens which GPG already did just fine)
Almost everything they do is non standard, not interoperable with anything else, not distributed to keyservers. They are the internet explorer of cryptography.
They did this in the name of UX but it turns out you can have super easy PGP UX AND follow standards as OpenKeychain has demonstrated.
Keybase introduced lock-in and their own protocols for problems that did not at all need them. They are 2 steps forward on UX and one huge backwards step for security.
They have been focusing on a per-device key system and its not really a gpg front-end. NaCl is a well known library and what they do is based on it. Saltpack is an open library they use and they use other open libraries as well. I happen to like the how the keybase security system works and I think it has advantages over the GPG that I like.
If you don't want to use the evil centralized system at least spamming the same issue every-time Keybase comes up. If Keybase is not the solution you like then just move on with your life.
There is integration with Stellar in keybase. I can use the app as a stellar wallet and send/receive lumens.
All these little quality-of-life improvements on top of that can only be a good thing, IMHO.
You're an idiot if you believe that.
(Still agree?)
(Sorry if this sounds harsh or rude, there's no point in sugar coating the truth. Hopefully the keybase teams reads this criticism and does a little soul searching.)