Wallets and Exchanges for CKB, the Native Token of the Nervos Network

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NervOS CKB Israel

7 min readMay 26, 2020

Nervos Network is a unique project in the crypto smart contract space. Great team, solid design, great investors.

Drawing on many of the concepts that make Bitcoin and Ethereum valuable, Nervos addresses two major concerns around security, block subsidy reduction and state bloat. For a more detailed explanation of how Nervos differentiates itself from the rest of the Layer 1 community, take a look at our post on why we invested in Nervos, and the Nervos Positioning Paper.

I first started researching Nervos about a year ago. It has amazed me to see the growth of the platform and the community over that time period. The introduction of User Defined Tokens, the focus on building out a DeFi community in China, and the grant and incubator programs for developers are all clear signs that the future of Nervos is bright.

After explaining the Nervos Network to many friends and colleagues, I have often heard back the question of “where do I buy Nervos? And what wallets support this”? While this information is readily available in Chinese, I felt there was a need to give an update on the state of Exchanges and Wallets that support the network’s native CKB token.

As of this writing (May 26th, 2020), CKB has a market cap of $73M, and a 24 trading volume of $8.5M.

Exchanges

Nervos is currently listed on 17 different exchanges. Let’s take a look at some of the more noteworthy ones.

Huobi

Nervos has reached a partnership deal with Huobi, a popular Chinese exchange, to support the creation of a decentralized exchange, built using Nervos technology.

Huobi has roughly $300K worth of trading volume between the CKB/USDT and CKB/BTC pairs, and a coinmarket cap liquidity rating of 113 (the higher the number, the more true liquidity).

HotBit

HotBit has the largest daily trading volume, at $2.5M daily, but only has a liquidity rating of 37. It supports one trading pair of CKB/USDT.

Bilaxy

Bilaxy is an exchange that focuses on having early access to a wide range of tokens. It is not surprising they decided to be one of the first to list CKB. They have a daily trading volume of roughly $800K and a liquidity score of 64.

Here is a complete list of exchanges that support buying and selling CKB.

CKB Wallets

There are a surprisingly large number of quality wallets that already support CKB. Because of Nervos’s popularity in the Asian markets, which are home to a number of wallet development teams this makes a lot of sense.

While you can store your CKBytes on an exchange, you should always remember that

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Neuron

Neuron is the native wallet produced in house by the Nervos team. The wallet is available for both Windows and Mac users. This is currently the most popular wallet to support deposits and withdrawals from the NervosDAO.

The Neuron wallet is easy to install, but does require you run a full node (which you should be doing to help decentralize the network!)

Neuron only supports CKB.

Unfortunately there is no support for Android or iOS at this time.

ABC Wallet

ABC Wallet is my personal favorite. It supports mobile and desktop and just about any coin you could want.

The ABC Wallet team is also a grant recipient for Nervos, building out two killer utilities, an SDK to make integration with Nervos easier for future developers, and a Web Auth Kit.

The Web Auth Kit will be a game changer for Dapp developers looking to create DeFi products on Nervos.

This description is pulled from the grant proposal.

CKB Web Auth

We will extend a set of open source embedded wallet services from ABCWallet-lite and name it CKB Web Auth, which will bring to the community:

A standard protocol for communication between Dapp and wallet, and an SDK based on this protocol that can communicate with iframes.
An iframe wallet development framework, with which Dapp developers can customize their own iframe wallet.
A server that supports OAuth login via Twitter, which mainly provides social platform accounts for iframe wallets. These accounts will be combined with user-defined passwords to generate public and private key pairs.

ABC Wallet is also in talks with WalletConnect to discuss potential integration of WalletConnect to the Nervos Network. While this may not reach mainnet, I would love to see this happen. WalletConnect is my personal favorite way to connect to dapps in the Ethereum ecosystem.

imToken

imToken is another popular wallet from Hangzhou, China. They support a number of tokens and include an in wallet dapp browser.

In addition to storing your coins on your phone, imToken sells an optional hardware wallet which can be connected to the app. It’s worth noting that they also support interest bearing accounts via the integrated lending platform in the app. At the time of this writing they do not support lending of CKB, but this may come in the future.

Ledger Nano S

Ledger is the king of hardware wallets, and it is great to see their support for Nervos. The Ledger app is still a work in progress, being built out from a grant by the Obsidian team, creators of CKB Studio. (You can learn how to mint your own custom Nervos Tokens, called a UDT)

They are making fast progress and recently hit their first milestone. Mike Rinehart from Obsidian systems published a video walkthrough showing how to hold CKB on a Ledger Nano S.

The Ledger app will also support deposits to the NervosDAO!

Bitpie

Bitpie is a feature rich mobile wallet with support for many top coins, integrated trading, and bluetooth powered optional hardware wallet.

Bitpie recently announced they are working on a plan to provide a 1: 1 cross-chain transfer service of stablecoin assets like USDT on Ethereum to stablecoin assets on Nervos CKB.

To quote their announcement:

1. Supports mapping of ERC20 stablecoins like USDT on Ethereum to Nervos CKB at any time in Bitpie Wallet APP;

2. Supports withdrawing the original assets on Ethereum from the mapped assets back to Nervos CKB network at 1: 1 ratio any time (A small fee will occur while transferring cross-chain assets to the original chain assets) in Bitpie Wallet APP;

This means we should see the first version of stable coins coming to Nervos in a few months, just in time for the first NervOS DEX, UDT Swap.

CKB PW

This is by far the most interesting and novel approach at building a Nervos Wallet.

CKB.PW is a web wallet that connects to my MetaMask account. Yes.. you read that correctly. Now anyone with a Metamask wallet instantly has a secure CKB wallet. And it has support for the NervosDAO!

The UI is mobile friendly, so that means any mobile ethereum wallet with a dapp browser can now hold CKB!

This complete act of witchcraft was part of a grant to the Lay2 which includes not only this slick wallet but also an SDK for building Nervos Dapps.

To Quote from the Grant Paper:

Fortunately, the Cell Model and the RISC-V based VM of CKB have brought unprecedented flexibility and extensibility, which makes it possible for Nervos to open a new path. There is no need to wait for facilities such as wallets, DApp browsers, to complete the long process of developing, launching, accumulating applications and attracting users. Instead, Nervos can quickly get access to a large number of users by directly adopting other blockchains’ infrastructure, which means that it could enter the application development stage directly without struggling with the bilateral cold start problem. Lay2 is providing CKB with this capability by originally designed product, pw-sdk.

Math Wallet

Math Wallet supports over 45 different blockchain tokens. That’s a lot. I don’t think I can even name 45 different blockchains. They have their own token, called…….. MATH, which you can stake and get rewards from their app. They also have access to trading directly from the app, with support for various automated quant strategies.