2018 might be a breakout year for cryptocurrency wallets. The Bitcoin.com wallet is set to reach 2,000,000 downloads soon and has integrated Shapeshift into its platform. More recently, San Diego-based Edge released its wallet from a three month long beta, going fully live 15 February, providing what it claims is “a private, secure, open-source, and easy to use multi-asset wallet.”
Edge Wallet is Live
“After over a year of intense development and over three months in a limited release beta, our highly anticipated multi-asset wallet is now available for all to use,” deservedly excited Edge CEO Paul Puey announced.
Most bitcoiners recognize Edge already as Airbitz, a popular wallet and bitcoin directory created in 2014. By 2015, the company had “packaged up the tools that make the Airbitz Wallet awesome into a software development kit (SDK) that developers could use for their own applications. Our ‘Edge Security’ SDK has since been integrated into top-tier blockchain projects such as Augur, Wings, and Openledger.” That SDK reliance caused the company to focus more on security, and by Fall of last year it announced the name and emphasis change.
Mr. Puey is a well-known institution himself within the ecosystem, and is typically a top speaker at cryptocurrency conferences around the world. Wallets are a sincere key to cryptocurrency adoption, and he views his company’s efforts as a way to simplify user experience while maintaining security. And with user holdings very often in the many thousands of dollars/fiat, confidence in the storage platform is really everything.
Nicehash, Parity, and to a degree the exchange Coincheck are all recent glaring examples of costs involved in not having the security side of hot, even multi-sig, wallets down. “Edge is an integration of three core offerings: a hyper-secure and private personal vault, a friendly usable interface for blockchain networks and services, and a single sign-on solution for decentralized applications,” Mr. Puey insists.
More Wallets Doing More
To that end, Airbitz/Edge has a stellar security record. Edge will have native support for bitcoin cash, wings tokens, ether, bitcoin core, litecoin, dash, and augur REP. “We’re also the only multi-asset mobile wallet that allows users to manually add ERC-20 tokens that we don’t natively support,” alongside including “support for Segregated Witness (SegWit) transactions for both Bitcoin AND Litecoin,” a feature bitcoin core supporters have been advocating. In addition, and like the Bitcoin.com Wallet, Edge has “tightly integrated support for Shapeshift! This will allow users to seamlessly convert funds between the various digital assets and tokens we support.”
Their roadmap includes incorporating some of the very user-friendly Airbitz wallet features, “such as fiat exchanges and mobile top-ups.” The company’s hope is with Edge, “a hypothetical user with no digital asset of any kind will be able to download our application for free on iOS or Android, exchange their fiat for Bitcoin, Shapeshift their Bitcoin into Ether and Augur REP, and finally use our wallet to login into Augur- a decentralized application. Within Augur the user will see and transact with the same Ether and REP that they hold in their Edge Wallet,” for example.
It is an exciting time for the cryptocurrency ecosystem with regard to wallet technological advancements, as a great many high quality platforms are increasing user autonomy while helping to further decentralize the community.