IOTA: The new wallets (yes, plural!)
Admittedly, the current IOTA wallet is not one which is going to win a community prize for its posh-and-shiny beauty.
But as the developers have promised there is more to be revealed soon and I would like to sum up what we know so far.
1. Trinity
What most of us have come to know as UCL wallet has now been renamed “Trinity”. This wallet has been developed by a team at the University College London (UCL) Centre for Blockchain (hence the former name “UCL wallet”). Leading devs are Charlie Varley, IOTA Foundation member, Umair Sarfraz and Rihards Gravis plus many contributors including Rajiv Shah.
Trinity has come to be the most badly needed wallet, at least to the community. This is mainly because of the details that have been revealed over time, especially the screenshots from last October:
There will be desktop versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and mobile versions for iOS and Android.
Of course, the worst case would be a wallet fiasko like with Ethereum’s Parity wallet. So there will probably be a full security audit as Navin stated on Thursday (Jan 25th,2018) on Discord:
We may need full code audit before even public beta. External audit.
As has been confirmed by one of the devs already, the new wallet will include:
- Automatic transaction promotion & reattachment = no need to reattach all the time anymore; wallet promotes outgoing and incoming transactions
- Multiple outgoing transactions
- Cached Addresses and Balances
- Automatic seed generation and storage = no hazzle with phishy seed-gen-sites anymore
Moreover he said that the following points have almost been completely integrated:
- Automatic node selection
- Seamless snapshots = no 0-balances after snapshots anymore
Moreover, there will be a form of two-factor-authorization (2FA) in this wallet. Since it is supposed to be a wallet running in a decentralized fashion, it will be realized via TOTP using Google’s Authenticator/Authy; this is the most decentralized way to do it.
Of course, the question remains when this wallet will be released. The most concrete release date is for the mobile beta which is rumoured to open at the end of January. But as described above, security is pivotal and devs will not 3hesitate to postpone releases if security is in any way at risk! Thankfully!
IMPORTANT NOTE: After publishing this article, the IOTA Foundation published this blog post about Trinity with official information:
- currently 150 Alpha testers, 100 new spaces will be given to interested people via Discord.
- public beta release this quater
- code will be open-sourced
- desktop wallet will have a private alpha within the next 4 weeks
- more information on #trinity channel on Discord on Monday each week
2. Nelium
Nelium was a surprise to many because nobody had heard anything about it until this video was released:
As the developers state on their homepage:
Our goal is to eliminate such activities as: manual re-attaching, manual re-broadcasting, manual node changes, manual sender address generation, connection losses, asking for recipient addresses, checking if address is unused.
As stated on their homepage, the Nelium Wallet will be audited by an experienced third-party security company and the code regularly reviewed by the IOTA Foundation. Moreover the seed is stored only on your device and NOT sent to any other server. Also, they will set up about 15 nodes to support the network and connect the wallet to; however you will not be able to connect to these nodes with a different wallet than Nelium.
This wallet is for mobile phones only and not being developed by the IOTA Foundation but the Nelium team works closely with the IOTA devs to ensure the best possible user experience.
At the moment you can subscribe for beta testing the wallet.
Release?There isn’t a firm date yet . “But security audit might delay things.” One of the people involved in development said on Discord last Thursday (January 25th, 2018):
[…] hopefully by the end of February we will be able to engage folks in private testing.
3. CarrIOTA
Another project in terms of wallet which is currently being developed is called: CarrIOTA (including an inside-pun linking carrot and IOTA). However, this is not a normal wallet as we all know it; instead:
CarrIOTA can be used to manage your single wallet, a complete household or an entire business with thousands of users and IoT entities! It can be run as a stand-alone app on your computer or a web-app on your home server, a single-board computer (SBC) in your safe or a cloud service accessible from anywhere through a virtual private network.
To get an overview, here are some pictures:
To put it short and concise, here are some features:
- you can manage several wallets in this single application (for family, business or wallets for saving/shopping/ etc.)
- user administration (admin vs users with limited wallet access)
- accessible from anywhere without typing seeds on potentially insecure devices
- automatic transactions (periodically or debits by third party via API layer over the IOTA tangle)
- IOTA / FIAT conversion
- “absolute security” = seeds can only be seen by the owners
- can be standalone-app or 24/7 service on a server (browser access)
- can be run on any computer with linux installed, no plans for a mobile app at the moment
What is especially interesting is the developers’ goal to make this work on tiny mini-computers like the Raspberry Pi which you connect to your router at home and start the whole software by plugging in an SD-card and start using it:
The CarrIOTA is being developed by Roman Semko and his team; Roman has already contributed very useful software to IOTA such as Nelson and Bolero so he and his team have already delivered great things which leads to the conclusion that they can and will do so again. Again, this is not a IOTA Foundation team, but they are supportedby the core devs to realize their goals.
Release date? Difficult to say, Roman told me “Summer 2018 would be great”. The more help (see help-section on the project’s homepage) he gets, the faster the project will proceed, obviously.
Conclusion
As can be seen from these projects, IOTA is on a VERY good way to improve the user experience with regard to its wallets. If you encounter people these days who tell you that IOTA cannot even come up with a working wallet, please send them here and let them read what will be reality really soon.
As always, I would be really happy about donations (you may also read my other articles):
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