Project Showcase: Leap Wallet

In this regular series, we showcase projects that are currently participating in the Interchain Builders Program. Today we have an interview with Sanjeev Rao, the founder and CEO of Leap Wallet. He has been in the crypto space for 4–5 years, actively building since 2021. Prior to this, he started his career at McKinsey and spent several years working in operations, marketing, and product roles at high-growth consumer startups, including a founder’s office role at one of India’s largest unicorns.

What is Leap Wallet?

Sanjeev: Leap is a non-custodial super wallet for the Cosmos ecosystem, with a host of features to let users make the most of their interchain journey. Across the 55+ Cosmos SDK chains we natively support, users can manage their assets securely & seamlessly; easily perform in-wallet staking, IBC swaps & transfers, participate in governance, manage their NFT collections, claim airdrops and much more; all with intuitive everyday features like accurate currency conversions, push notifications, and detailed transaction history.

You can get Leap Wallet as an iOS or Android mobile app; as a browser extension on Chrome, Edge or Brave. And you can even use our web-based Leapboard — with any interchain wallet — for a more focused & detail-rich dashboard experience. And with our Snaps integration, even MetaMask users can manage their interchain-native assets with ease.

What features are supported on Leap Wallet?

Sanjeev: Leap Wallet offers a comprehensive suite of features including:

• Wallet Setup: Easily set up a wallet using various methods, including Ledger support.
• Portfolio Tracking: Track portfolios with tokens automatically fetched and displayed on the Home Page, along with their respective USD values.
• Governance Participation: Actively and easily participate in governance. View and vote on proposals, and access details like the current vote division, all with user-friendly filters. We’ve also integrated ChatGPT to provide a quick 5-point summary of governance proposals.
• Staking: Get a clear overview of staking balances, rewards, a list of delegations, and one-click options to stake, unstake, and redelegate.
• Transaction History: Simplify the process of viewing transaction history for vital transaction types, eliminating the need to visit a Blockchain Explorer.
• IBC Transfers: Streamline IBC transfers from the source chain to other ecosystems, abstracting out channel IDs for ease of use with the ‘Send IBC’ feature.
• In-App Browser: The mobile apps include an in-app browser, enabling seamless access to any decentralized application (dapp) within the Android and iOS wallet.
• NFT Gallery: View NFTs from various chains in the interchain, like Stargaze, Omniflix, Injective, Archway and Migaloo.

Why the interchain?

Sanjeev: The interchain stood out to us for several reasons. First, its technology is way ahead of other ecosystems. We’re big believers of the appchain thesis — where sovereign blockchains can function autonomously yet interoperate smoothly using IBC. It’s a transformative concept. The ecosystem is home to some of the brightest minds in crypto, who are constantly innovating and pushing boundaries. We’re incredibly bullish on the ecosystem and foresee it attracting significant interest from builders and users alike in the coming years.

That being said, the interchainhas a gap. It needs people who can translate this revolutionary tech into something easy for everyone to use. That’s where we come in. Our expertise lies in crafting user-friendly front-end experiences. We’re dedicated to enabling everyday users to navigate the the ecosystem effortlessly. We believe we’ve built out the best interchain wallet experience, set to be the primary touchpoint for users as they explore this rapidly expanding ecosystem.

What stage is the project in?

Sanjeev: We’ve been live in Cosmos for over a year now, making continuous improvements to our wallet products -

• Our browser extension (Chrome, Brave) — the first product we launched with, supports 55 chains today, with over 200k installs. We’ve been adding new features almost weekly.
• Mobile wallets — iOS and Android apps were released a few months back with over 30k installs — close to feature parity with the extension + interesting app-specific features like notifications and dapp browser have been released.
• And we’ve also launched a web dashboard Leapboard — which is a portfolio manager for Cosmos chains along with core wallet capabilities like staking, send/ibc, etc. The vision for it is to become the hub for the entire interchain- one place to manage your entire portfolio, aggregated views for assets, governance proposals, and notifications on Telegram and become the home for features like airdrop & dapp discovery

What are you looking forward to?

Sanjeev: We aim to become a super wallet for Cosmos — bringing Defi, staking, NFT & more as native experiences into a one-stop gateway for the interchain. Our goal is to be the friendliest, easiest, and best-designed wallet for the ecosystem.

Wallets are a critical part of any web3 ecosystem — they’re the passport to web3 and the first user touchpoint. If we want Defi to grow, if we want to shift activity from CEXs to Defi, a good wallet experience is a make/break when it comes to onboarding new users. When we saw the web3 landscape last year, the current wallet space was underserved when compared to best-in-class web2 products. And this needs to change to onboard the millions of users coming into crypto and help them deal with the complexity of the space.

Right now, our wallet is in a stable place when it comes to the features people expect. But we want to go beyond this. We’re working on simplifying user experiences, and relooking how users think of a wallet. Think account abstraction, social logins, and more…

We also want to make the interchain at large better. We’re building bits & blocks that dApps across the interchain can utilize to improve their UX. Some of this is already in action, with Elements, our onboarding kit. Soon, you’ll also see a gas station and embedded wallets available for any Cosmos SDK builder to integrate into their offerings.

Overall, we’re all in on the interchain, and we’re most excited to see our efforts and those of countless other builders in the space come together to grow the Cosmos pie.

The Interchain Builders Program provides mentorship and guidance for Web3 founders looking to navigate the Interchain. We help teams with incorporation strategies, fundraising, token economic design, technical support, validator bootstrapping and going to market. If you’re a founder looking to build on top of the Interchain Stack, we encourage you to apply to the program now!

Disclaimer: the information presented here is made available solely for general information purposes and is not investment advice, nor a legal or financial recommendation of any sort. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of this information. Any reliance you place on such information is strictly at your own risk. We disclaim all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on such materials by you or any other reader, or by anyone who may be informed of any of its contents.

By mentioning any specific project, business or other organization in this information, the Interchain Foundation does not express endorsement unless explicitly stated.