Novasama Technologies 2022 Roundup

With the year soon coming to a close, let’s take a quick look back at what Novasama Technologies has achieved over the course of 2022.

We have concentrated our efforts entirely within the Polkadot ecosystem, which itself has experienced monumental growth over the past year, even in the face of greater market uncertainty. Here are some of our personal standout highlights for Polkadot this year include:

• Growth of parachain projects — we are now drawing close on 80 total parachains connected to the Polkadot and Kusama Relay Chains.
• The rapid increase in the number of XCM channels — true interoperability.
• The implementation of Light Clients not just on the Relay Chains, but for parachains also — the benefits of this technology cannot be overstated.
• The introduction of Nomination Pools — removing the heavy capital requirements in order to stake certain tokens.
• The introduction of the OpenGov model to Kusama — improving upon our ecosystem’s decentralised governance model.

We would like to express our gratitude for the incredible amounts of hard work and ingenuity displayed by everyone in our beloved ecosystem. We truly are, as a collective, driving web3 forward with the shared principles of transparency, decentralisation and trustless technologies in mind. We are amazed by the level of support and cooperation provided by the vast majority of participants in our ecosystem — interoperability at its finest in all aspects.

Novasama Technologies Company Objectives

As we continue to grow as a company, we have further refined our core goals and objectives. We have identified that there is a clear positive feedback relationship between the growth of our products, and the growth of the Polkadot ecosystem as a whole. As such, our company objectives are:

• To help to grow the Polkadot ecosystem’s user base by creating amazing, high-quality and feature rich client applications:
• For consumer cases — i.e. Nova Wallet
• For enterprise cases — i.e. Codename: Omni
• To assist in improving the Polkadot ecosystem’s infrastructure
• To expand our product portfolio based on opportunities in the market such as collaborations and new applications

What we delivered in 2022

2022 will definitely go down as a significant year for Novasama Technologies. We not only continued to develop the leading mobile application for the Polkadot ecosystem with Nova Wallet, but we also expanded our product lineup to include our second application, an enterprise focused desktop application currently known as Codename: Omni.

The main repos for Novasama Technologies have seen a tremendous amount of development over the past year, with over 3,600 commits introducing over 230,000 new lines of code.

Nova Wallet

During the course of this year, there were numerous examples showcasing the absolute importance of decentralisation. There is clear evidence that there is a significant need for secure & feature-rich wallet solutions with a user-friendly interface.

Our work developing Nova Wallet has never stopped, our team has been consistently updating the application on both Android and iOS — with 2,789 pull requests this year alone!

Core Features

We started this year off strong, as Nova Wallet was already the first multichain mobile application for the Polkadot ecosystem, with support for DOT & KSM staking, crowdloans, and the ability for users to interact with their token balances for the majority of available parachains.

One of the team’s core goals for this year was to greatly improve the user experience for the entire Polkadot ecosystem through Nova Wallet, and further solidify the app’s flagship status — to achieve this we have updated our branding to provide a more elegant user interface to provide a premium experience, and we have also further expanded the feature set of Nova Wallet — making significant steps towards ensuring that mobile users can access all the features of web3.

Cross-chain asset transfers — we exist in a rather unique ecosystem with Polkadot, one where the average user expects to be able to interact with multiple bespoke chains, interacting with potentially hundreds of tokens — even expecting the ability to effortlessly & seamlessly transfer tokens from one chain to another.

As such, we have spent an enormous amount of time and effort to ensure that Nova Wallet provides the ability to interact with the majority of networks in the Polkadot ecosystem. We have implemented the best interface for conducting cross-chain transfers, and currently support over 200 cross-chain channels, and hundreds of different tokens — more recently we have also added the ability for users to add custom ERC-20 tokens, see their balances, conduct transfers, and view their transaction history for the Moonbeam and Moonriver networks.

Expanded Staking Support — In-app support for the staking of 11 tokens DOT, KSM, AZERO, CAPS, GLMR, KMA, MOVR, PDEX, TUR, WND, ZTG. Users can additionally interact with any staking DApp in the Polkadot ecosystem to be able to stake any token they desire.

Users can also use the DApp browser to gain access to Nomination Pools, significantly reducing the financial barrier to entry in order to begin staking.

The World’s First Polkadot DApp Browser — Nova Wallet is the first mobile application that allows users to interact with any DApp using the combined power of Polkadot JS and Metamask (EVM). This incredible functionality is not available on any other mobile application. We have finally created a true web3 experience for mobile users.

Hardware Wallet Support — Nova Wallet now supports both Parity Signer and Ledger hardware devices, adding an extra layer of protection for your crypto assets by never exposing your private key. We also are hosting the metadata and chain spec portal for Parity Signer devices, which allows anyone to update their Parity Signer for many different networks — greatly improving the user experience when using Parity Signer.

Watch-only Wallets — One of our favourite updates! A powerful feature that allows users to; experiment with all the features of Nova Wallet; access a powerful portfolio management tool; and to be able to track the activity of any wallet.

NFT Support — Nova Wallet supports multiple community favourite NFT standards, such as: RMRK 1.0, RMRK 2.0, and Uniques pallet NFTs (such as those on Statemine), and we hope to expand our support for ERC-721 and ERC-1155 NFTs in the future.

Governance Support — Shape the future of your favourite networks! One of our newest features, we have added support not only for Gov v1, but also the new OpenGov system, with more updates to come!

Community Requested Features — It is only because of the amazing feedback and suggestions from the community that Nova Wallet is able to be the absolute best mobile application for the Polkadot ecosystem!

We have implemented lots of community requested features, such as: 49 additional supported currencies; breakdown of crowdloan contributions, including token unlock countdown; the ability to search for tokens by network; improved UX for conducting transfers across your own accounts; and the ability to view your wallets total asset breakdown.

If you would like to suggest any other features which you would like to be added to Nova Wallet, you can submit your ideas over at our Canny Page.

Grants and milestones

We focus all of our efforts into providing the best possible experience for users within the Polkadot ecosystem. In order to be able to create and continually develop these user-orientated products, we collect feedback from the Polkadot community. We use all of your suggestions and fantastic feedback as the basis of the inputs for our treasury proposals.

The Nova Wallet team have consistently delivered above and beyond the stated deliverables for each treasury proposal.

Polkadot / Kusama Treasury Grant #1 — Awarded at the end of 2021, this treasury proposal included the development of the DApp browser, Statemine & Statemint token integration, NFT integration, and improvements to the staking module and overall UI.

Polkadot / Kusama Treasury Grant #2 — Awarded close to the middle of 2022, this treasury proposal included the integration of hardware wallets, cross-chain transfers, OpenGov, and the top community requested features.

Polkadot / Kusama Treasury Grant #3 — Awarded in December 2022, the feature set of this treasury proposal includes: the first feature set for the management of OpenGov agile delegations, something which is completely foreign to the average user right now; improvements to the user experience when staking tokens; and the implementation of community requested features. The grant also includes reimbursement for work done to implement Governance v1 for not only relay chains, but also parachains in the ecosystem.

Moonbeam Foundation Grant — Awarded at the end of 2021, this grant included the implementation of crowdloan support for Moonbeam and Moonriver; staking for GLMR & MOVR tokens; the integration of cross-chain transfers between Moonbeam/Moonriver and other parachains in the ecosystem, and the implementation of EVM capabilities within the DApp browser.

Moonbeam Treasury Grant — Awarded in November 2022, this grant was for the implementation of ERC-20 token integration & management.

Aleph Zero Grant — For the implementation of token management capabilities and in-app staking.

Turing Grant — For the implementation of staking functionality and for creating a UI for scheduling/removing tasks for the auto compounding of staking rewards.

SubQuery Grant — Covers 3 milestones: M1 covers the creation/use of a common API; M2 for the implementation of cross-chain transfer history (in-progress) and M3 is for hosting a portal with SubQuery projects & documentation (portal is available, and the documentation will be released once M2 is completed).

Codename: Omni

In 2022 we started development of our second product, an enterprise focused desktop application — Codename: Omni.

This product is primarily focused around the needs of power users (Validators & ecosystem experts), and enterprises (DAOs & companies), however the feature set of this product will still be of benefit to individual enthusiasts also.

For those who are unfamiliar, at a high-level, some of the planned core functionalities of Codename: Omni include:

• Auditable funds management, with support for multisigs, as well as proxy accounts and their various combinations.
• Support for ecosystem features including Staking, Governance, DApps, and more.
• Secure and robust: Light Client integration, parachain data verification and hardware wallet compatibility.

Features of Codename: Omni which we have publicly demonstrated thus far include:

• Hardware Wallet compatibility — Pairing with Parity Signer
• Parachain Data Verification
• Network Management
• Transfers of different types of assets
• Display network balances
• Add Watch-only Wallet
• Multishard Staking Info Dashboard
• Operating a multishard wallet

We are excited to share more about this product with you over the course of 2023, and if you would like to learn more about Codename: Omni, we have recently had 3 public demos of the product:

• Codename: Omni Demo #1 — Enterprise Wallet — Roadmap & Milestone Updates
• Codename: Omni Demo #2 — Enterprise Wallet — Parachain Data Verification & Features Overview
• Codename: Omni Demo #3 — Enterprise Wallet — Multishard Wallet Structure

Other Highlights

As the world slowly began to open up over the course of 2022, the Polkadot community, and the greater web3 community as a whole, was once again able to participate in events, conferences and meetups — many of which we were fortunate to be a part of.

• In June we gave a presentation about Nova Wallet at Polkadot Decoded.
• In September we attended token2049 in Singapore, and met up with other builders!
• In October we attended GITEX in Dubai, and met some familiar faces!
• In November we gave a presentation about Polkadot XCM at Sub0!
• We have also taken part in numerous interviews, panels, and discussions, some of which you can find over at the Nova Wallet YouTube Channel!

Additionally, our social media pages have experienced significant growth! The Nova Wallet Twitter account has more than doubled its amount of followers this year, and is now closing in on 10,000 followers, and the Nova Wallet telegram group is getting close to 2,000 members — and we have plans to open up the Nova Discord server in early 2023!

As previously stated, one of our company objectives is to assist in improving the infrastructure of the Polkadot ecosystem, as such we have consistently contributed to the Polkadot ecosystem by providing open-source SDKs, design assets and infrastructure. Examples of how we have contributed to the ecosystem in these ways include:

• Substrate SDKs for iOS and Android development
• Nova Utils GitHub — metadata & configs for networks, crowdloans, DApps, cross-chain transfers
• SubQuery API projects developed and hosted by Nova Wallet team
• Nova Assets Figma — Polkadot eco tokens, networks, DApps

We are constantly looking for new ways in which we can contribute to the Polkadot ecosystem, and will continue to seek more opportunities in 2023.

Going Forward

Even in the face of a lot of geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainties, we have continued to deliver our amazing, high-quality and feature rich products. In fact, we have expanded the size of our team from 8 people at the start of 2022, to a total of 16 people at the time of writing. This increase in the number of personnel will enable us to continue developing our existing products to meet the demands of our users, as well as enable us to expand our product line up when new opportunities present themselves.

To Wrap Up

The entire team at Novasama Technologies would once again like to extend our gratitude to everyone in the Polkadot ecosystem for your continued support and cooperation, and would like to wish all of you a festive holiday season, and we sincerely hope that you stay safe, healthy and have a fantastic New Year!