Bither Wallet, the most common used wallet by the veterans in the cryptocurrency community, the widely recognized Bitpie Wallet and the emerging BITHD Hardware Wallet all come from a team. The product developed by this team manages digital currencies worth around USD 15 billion and serves more than 2 million users worldwide.
As an early pioneer from 2013 to the present, the company COO Wang Chao said that focusing on making a Wallet is not a good business. What kind of trials and hardships have they experienced? What choices did they make?
Struggle & Compromise
Wang Chao joined Bitpie Team in 2017. He has been following Bitcoin closely since 2013, over these years he has been looking for opportunities with the purpose of joining this field. He used to work on advanced trading tools, he has been in touch with exchanges, and participated in industry-level Blockchain applications as an IT Service Provider. Finally, in 2017 he decided to join Bitpie Team.
He told Blocklike that he appreciates the team’s high-level Technology and he also admires the team’s original intention, which is: the main duty of any wallet is to ensure the safety of users assets.
According to Wang Chao, the founder of Bitpie, Wen Hao, is an experienced programmerwith a deep research on cryptography, that is why 90% of the entire Bitpie Team are programmers. Before Bitpie got known, the Team also made a more professional Wallet: Bither.
Bither Wallet is the first product developed by the Bitpie Wallet Team and it is known as the exclusive wallet by the veterans. Since Bither is an open source and free wallet, plus it supports large amounts of cold storage, many users have been using Bither to store large amounts of cryptocurrency for years.
“Actually, it does exist many digital asset security loopholes, exchanges and wallets have frequent cryptocurrency hacking incidents. Chinese users have little experience in digital asset security whereas foreign users care about the asset security.” Wang Chao said that these kind of incidents also happened in large exchanges such as MtGox, Bitstamp, Bitfinex, etc.
At the same time, the well-known foreign wallet Blockchain.info had a random number problem due to a code update which caused the repetition of the private key in that period of time, this meant user´s currency assets might got lost. Ethereum’s official wallet “Parity” had two multi-signature vulnerabilities in the last half of the year, causing losses to some ICO teams.
We consider the experience before, and the team has been studying on how to design a safer wallet. However, because the design of Bither wallet is too professional, it is quite hard to pick up by newbies. Although the early participants in the industry praised this wallet highly, with the development of the industry, Bitpie Wallet is too complicated for those users who are new in the cryptocurrency world. “Chandler Guo and Vincent Zhou were taught by us particularly about how to use Bither Wallet”.
At that time, Bitpie Wallet arrived at an important crossroads — whether to continue making high-quality professional wallet, or develop a more user-friendly Wallet.
“The world must be simplicity overcoming complexity, so we made strategic adjustments.” In the middle of 2016, Bither Wallet Team experienced a transition, we began to develop a more convenient Wallet: “Bitpie”, later on we also created BITHD hardware wallet.
In consequence, company’s all products transferred from a hard-core technology wallet to a professional wallet structure composed of both hot and cold wallet products.
Missing ICO wave
What really makes the team go into ordinary people´s life is the design of Bitpie Wallet. Compared to Bither wallet, Bitpie is more user-friendly; it supports convenient asset sending and receiving, integrate third-party transactions in the wallet, OTC Trade and javascript; Instant Tradeservice.
However, in the security aspect, Bitpie has maintained a consistently rigorous style, setting some security safeguards: not supporting screenshots, rigorously following RFC6979, multi-layer signature verification mechanism, and in the process of introducing third-party services we also did sufficient safety work.
Wang Chao said that Bitpie is the world’s leading multi-chain wallet, supporting more than 30 Blockchain networks such as Bitcoin, EOS, Ethereum, USDT, ZEC, Bytom, Tron, Qtum, etc. in terms of the storage amount of assets, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Litecoin, Tron, Bytom, ZEC and other assets are among the highest in the world. However, when the Team got immersed in the development of the Bitcoin system, they inadvertently miss the ICO wave.
“When the ICO was emerging, our team were optimizing the existing products, and the support for Ethereum was, somehow, late.” Wang Chao said that Ethereum ecosystem wallet, like imToken had risen rapidly with the trend of ICO, and they took with them a large number of users.
During the ICO wave, users needed to pay ETH through the Wallet in order to get Altcoins, the Wallet was also useful to store new cryptocurrencies. Aforetime, only a few wallets in the market could meet these requirements, and imToken was the first one to do so.
It is also in the last round of the bull market, when many people joined the wallet market. According to Wang Chao, the wallet development threshold wasn´t high, an ordinary developer could develop a wallet in a week following the online development protocol. However, highly perfected wallet development is difficult, development team must have deeper understanding of cryptography. Nowadays, there are innumerable products on the market but most of them are just small fishes in a huge ocean.
“In the last round of the bull market, also appeared several wallet products, but after 2014–2015 under the bear market, the only decentralized wallet Team that survived for Chinese people was Bitpie. This winter will be also hard to go through and the incoming wallet teams may not be able to hold up until next spring.”
“Founder Wen Hao has a deep research on cryptography, the team technology is relatively solid, and our wallet security performance will definitely be polished before launching it.” Wang Chao said that now a lot of new teams lack of basic cryptography knowledge, therefore many security issues are lurking, and once they appear, they will bring huge losses to users.
DApp, the next trend
Bitpie has always been promoting themselves with “Buddhism” style: relying on products to attract users, in one hand to maximize the security of user assets, and in the other hand to continue developing and supporting new features.
Today’s Bitpie is different from the earliest layouts . At the present the Wallet contains industrial news, advertising and DApp portals. Although we missed the ICO, Wang Chao believes that Cryptocurrency Wallet field has great prospects for the future.
It’s hard to imagine that the original “Use when needed” wallet can now keep some users captivated. Wang Chao said that users can play DApp games directly in their wallets. Outstanding wallets can establish contact between wallets and DApp accounts, which reduces the trouble for users to re-register accounts and transfer coins.
At the same time, the EOS account system is not easy for ordinary holders. But the duty of a good wallet is to help new users to enter the field easily, not only providing access to DApps, but also making users understand rapidly some concepts that are difficult, such as CPU resources, and integrate more fool-type services to make user experience more smooth and unhindered.
It is not easy for most DApp players to find a wallet that allows them deposit coins. Wallet development still lags behind the whole industry development. “What we see is that when a new trend comes out, the wallet function can’t keep up. For example, almost all EOS wallet users today have suffered from insufficient EOS network CPU resources. So we will optimize user’s experience and DApp experience.”
Bitpie will launch many innovative features soon, our mission is to strive to be the “friendliest” wallet for new users and promote more users to get into the DApp world, especially for those users who always held assets such as Bitcoin. Guide them into the DApp world!
Chief editor / Qiaojie Feng
Topic Planning / Yun Meng
Editor / Jiao Song
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