What’s In A Wallet?

New metaphors for understanding and designing crypto wallets

The crypto wallet is a user’s portal to their assets on the blockchain — and could act as their identity, trophy case, and access card all at once. How might we create new ways to understand and unlock the potential of wallets on the distributed web?

A World of Possibilities

When you think about a wallet, you likely think about the piece of leather or plastic that you carry around with you in your bag or pocket, something that allows you to take your money with you. But when you compare that piece of leather to a crypto wallet, you start to see that there is so much more in MetaMask (a browser extension that is an Ethereum wallet) than what’s currently in your back pocket.

For example, when was the last time you could pull out your wallet and both personally and digitally store and prove your rights to a digital piece of land in a shared global VR world? Since when did my wallet allow me to manage assets in a shared game world at the click of a button? Though it’s a starting point, the idea of a “wallet” is a very limited metaphor, and doesn’t capture all the possibilities and realities that make the crypto wallet a totally new type of interface.

Crypto opens up an ocean of possibilities for both technological and human systems and, in the years ahead, crypto’s user base will only continue to grow. At IDEO CoLab, we believe it will be the responsibility of designers to ensure that these new apps and tools are actually good for humans — and that users’ experiences are fulfilling, empowering, and intuitive. It’s important that even creators with non-technical backgrounds, such as artists and illustrators, understand crypto’s potential so that they can be a part of building better experiences. This is what it means to open up this ecosystem — creating tools so others may elevate the network’s value for a broader audience.

Going Beyond What Fits in a Pocket

The crypto wallet is a dynamic tool that allows users to access everything in the crypto ecosystem, and its potential hasn’t been fully explored yet. Here are three new metaphors that can help us imagine new ways to design wallets that are better for humans.

The Wallet as a Spell Checker

Any seasoned crypto nerd will tell you that the most colossally stupid (yet surprisingly easy) thing to do when starting out in the space is to send money to the wrong address. Since all the address are cryptographic hashes (eg. 0x1b15b6656a736a181da4b09a40d25a6dd6d6f439c7aaf3b42e377dcefa5e411d), it means that getting even one of these characters wrong gets all the money you sent in that transaction lost forever.

This is a huge opportunity to improve usability. Imagine a wallet that keeps an address book of frequently used addresses and runs through it to help ensure you aren’t making silly copy-paste errors, similar to the way your phone’s list of contacts helps you verify the number you’ve just typed in. Perhaps your wallet checks your target address against a Token Curated Registry of trusted address for ICOs and exchanges. Designing an interface to forgive a human mistake is a critical part of what it means to make this technology accessible for a wide range of users.

The Wallet as a Safety Net

Once you step outside of the box (or leather rectangle, as the case may be), it’s easy to see new possibilities for wallets. One possibility is a simple design principle of building a wallet that accounts for human error. This could manifest in a few ways but my personal favorite is the idea of an undo button.

Now I am well aware that undoing a transaction is actually not possible on a blockchain, but the reality of this can be obscured to the end user of a wallet. There is no reason that the wallet can’t delay a transaction by 30 seconds, or just long enough for someone to realize they fat fingered the amount and meant to send 1 ETH, not 11 ETH. Think of this as the crypto version of Gmail’s “undo send” feature.

The Wallet as a Digital Trophy Case

Another example of this future wallet lies in the management of crypto assets. Now you may say, “Well hey, that’s exactly what wallets do now,” and you would be right in that they store assets like a bank account — which is an important first step, but not the only step. For instance, take the Decentraland plot of virtual land you own. Right now your wallet only really shows you this plot of land when you go into the Decentraland land management portal. There is no way to see it outside of this singular context, let alone see it next to all your CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties that you bought last year. Right now the only way to see all the assets a wallet contains is by going to Etherscan and reading (and understanding) all the smart contract transaction data to create a mental picture of what your crypto estate looks like.

That is a real shame because I want to show off my weird collection of CryptoKitties with sailor hats. But I can’t. How can I show my mom the new piece of art I just bought on Fan Bits? I could screenshot it and text it to her but that’s a bit anticlimactic, so what’s the point of owning them? There really is no consideration for sharing and reflecting on all the NFTs and Dogecoin Lite my wallet holds — but there could be! Why not have a wallet that can display in some cohesive way all the content I have collected in a space I can hold up to others and say, “Hey! Check out my sweet Dracula-cat!” There is a huge opportunity to create wallets that fulfill a social need of reflection and sharing.

Even if I have no interest in showing off my CryptoKitties collection, I may want to at the least display it for myself everytime I go into the web, or perhaps floating throughout my Tumblr feed. Perhaps I want to see them every time I open my wallet. Just how my mom keeps a picture of me in her wallet, I want to keep a picture of my CryptoKitty in mine.

Think Outside the Billfold

There is no reason to limit our thinking when it comes to the new internet that is forming out of the ether(eum) and we should embrace the creative freedom it provides. Still, if the tools we have don’t allow those who don’t have technical depth to participate, then we miss out on what they have to offer. It’s time we build beautiful new ways for people who aren’t technical or involved in this future yet to join in and set sail on this big blue crypto ocean.