What is Flare Wallet?
Dear Flare Community,
With great excitement, we are happy to be bringing forward the initial release of the Flare Wallet Beta soon. In regards to this being released, it is important that the features, long term goals/roadmap, and benefits are all highlighted, so it can be better understood of why Flare is important for financial freedom. Flare is pushing to give power back to cryptocurrency holders/users in a simple, easy-to-use experience.
Overview
Flare is a multi-asset privacy focused cryptocurrency light wallet. All keys are managed locally and completely secured and encrypted by the end-user with a simple 12 seed mnemonic phrase backup. There are no servers that manage your wallets for you — you control everything. We believe it is important to create a wallet interface that is both fashionable and simple to use while giving it as much power as possible. Being a multi-currency privacy focused wallet, it will also include and focus on several privacy/security features:
- Networking privacy: Flare will have the option of being routed through Tor networking to give users the best possible network privacy when sending/receiving/swapping.
- Coin-Control support (after beta): Flare will give users the ability to control their inputs for each transactions for coins that utilize UTXO sets. Benefits of this will be outlined below.
- Decentralized privacy swaps (after beta): Flare will allow users to swap their coins within the wallet using decentralized methods while using the NIX protocol to break linkage between swaps.
- Hardware wallet support (after beta): Being able to use your Ledger/Trezor for supported coins within the wallet to ensure highest possible asset security.
For users who value their privacy, Flare will give the best support possible in any multi-currency wallet available. For users who are just looking for a secure wallet that supports/will support many popular coins for them to store their holdings, Flare will do just the job. No tricks, no signups, all decentralized.
UTXO Coin-Control
In many coins that mimic Bitcoin and its protocol design, all coins sent and received create inputs/outputs for the network. Every time you receive coins to addresses, that balance creates an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) amount which is there for future spending. The issue of privacy comes when you go to spend your coins down the line.
If you have received coins several times to several different addresses, many wallets combine these addresses and link their transaction history thus rendering your privacy useless and letting everyone on the blockchain see that those addresses all belong to the same wallet/user.
With proper coin-control, you will be able to select your UTXO inputs when sending so you can avoid linking your addresses and compromising your anonymity. This will be an optional and advanced feature in the wallet for users looking for privacy features.
Decentralized Privacy Swaps - How does it Work?
With the lack of options for swapping coins without true privacy, Flare is introducing the first of its kind service - an integrated Decentralized Exchange Manager. This will allow users to create swaps from one coin/token to another without needing to go through a centralized exchange by pulling the best sourced liquidity from all decentralized exchanges built in.
The decentralized exchanges will be built into the wallet and usage will be completely automated. When a user swaps Coin A for Coin B, the wallet will source the best liquidity and fetch the best possible price that can be offered. Already using decentralized order-books and exchanges gives users massive privacy when it comes to cryptocurrency holdings. However, we have decided to make sure these swaps are 100% private and secure by integrating the NIX Protocol and utilizing it to break swap linkage.
When a user conducts a typical swap, a 1 step process occurs: Coin A is trustlessly swapped into Coin B users wallet address and vice versa. However; with Flare, another step will be added to this process to ensure this swap is protocol-leveled private. Flare will use the NIX protocol as a middle man to break the privacy swap linkage between Coin A and Coin B — this works by swapping privatized NIX back and forth from locations. So now, Coin A is swapped for privatized NIX, then privatized NIX is swapped for Coin B. Using NIX ensures swaps cannot be traced back to their origin and brings true privacy and decentralization to the process. This entire process is automated, and all the user needs to worry about doing is selecting which coins they want to swap.
Conclusion
The Flare Wallet Beta will include support and testing for the multi-currency aspect part of the wallet with built in networking Tor support. Simple features such as send/receive for the supported currencies/assets will be available. The latter features are an ongoing development, and we confidently hope to release them into the wallet later this year in 2019.
It is important that we add as many coins/tokens as possible within Flare to make it a one-stop wallet for many users who want an easy to use application with powerful features.
We encourage you to join our Telegram & follow our Twitter to find out more information regarding Flare and its upcoming Beta release.
