Announcing EtherKit

Last week, we were very excited to learn that Vault was selected as a recipient of a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to open source and continue work on EtherKit, our swift-based iOS development kit for building native applications on the Ethereum blockchain network.

Long-term, we hope EtherKit can grow into a framework that facilitates the building of a generation of blockchain applications built mobile-first. Building apps leveraging Ethereum should be just as easy as building apps communicating with traditional internet services.

Towards that goal, today we’ve taken the first step by open sourcing a very early version of EtherKit. This initial release includes some basic but crucial functionality including:

• A spec-compliant JSONRPC layer for communicating with Ethereum nodes over websockets or https.
• A KeyManager that leverages the Secure Enclave in iOS devices to derive Ethereum’s private key.
• Proper transaction signing with a Swift-Native layer for RLP encoding.

We believe the best companies give back to the communities that help them grow, and even now, before Vault’s first public release, we think it’s important to do our part.

Please check out EtherKit on GitHub, and keep an eye on this space for updates about our long-term plans for the project!

Interested in helping out with EtherKit, or becoming part of the Vault team? We’re hiring!