Some Thoughts on Wallets (Part 1)

On January 10 2025 he starts a quick whiteboard video on wallets, previewing a bigger one and a new presentation style built in hand-coded HTML and CSS.

Presents an ecosystem-wide view of Cardano's wallet architecture broken into interactive layers: user interface, wallet logic, network, data storage, security and cryptography, indexing, and additional services.

The UI layer abstracts blockchain complexity for balances, sending, and staking, citing wallets like Nami, Daedalus, Lace, Typhon, and Eternl as examples.

Foreshadows alternative clients at varying maturity: Blink Labs' Glow client, TxPipe's Rust client, Harmonic's TypeScript client, and the reference Haskell node.

The Haskell full node connects over IPC to the cardano-wallet layer and then the UI, with conventional options like REST, JSON-RPC, and GraphQL or the exotic Ouroboros mini protocols.

Cites a dcSpark video by Sebastien on node approaches and says Cardano should copy Ethereum's common test suite that validates every implementation regardless of backend.

Ethereum's suite spans EVM clients like Mantis, which he helped build in Scala in the Ethereum Classic days making him an Ethereum core developer, plus Besu, Geth, and Parity.

Wants a suite plus blueprints from the still-incomplete formal specs, so a user could pick a wallet like Vespr, Lace, or Eternl and then choose a remote or self-hosted backend.

A remote backend could run on Blockfrost or Maestro, while self-hosting offers a menu of options like the Haskell or Go node, all certified against the shared test-suite standard.

He met TxPipe representing Pragma to discuss an Intersect and Pragma working group defining a test suite that Blink Labs, Harmonic, and any full-node builder can self-certify against, as Ethereum did with Mantis.

Parallel workstreams including Mithril fast sync and network contribution, where a node relays transactions and blocks without validating, with room for more sophisticated contributions.

Introduces the super node that runs Cardano plus partner chains and other layer ones, and service modules like a Hydra node, a proof server, and trusted execution environments.

Shows Nvidia's Project DIGITS, a stackable 3,000-dollar supercomputer with 128 gigabytes of memory, a GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip, and a petaflop, whose AI chips are also excellent at zero-knowledge proofs for Midnight's proof layer.

People could buy such a box to host a full node and connect a phone or desktop app to it for a trustless self-hosted setup, and shows Iagon's roughly 1,600-dollar home-team storage device.

The Iagon device has 8 cores, 64 gigabytes of RAM, and 36 terabytes of storage to run both an Iagon node and a full wallet node, since more self-hosted full nodes mean more network resilience than Daedalus alone provides.

Daedalus will be deprecated by IO in six to nine months and handed to a community open-source project, while Lace builds an open standard to connect a node to wallets like Vespr and Eternl, with a dream of a Mithril node running in the system tray like BitTorrent.

The open node connection standard is a big Lace 2025 roadmap item taking an ecosystem-wide standards approach so solving it once solves it for everybody, creating a practical path to a multi-node world where the user controls the backend.

Making self-hosting simple lets people stop using remote services, and that budget funding for alternative nodes should include funding for certification, since preserving formal methods and high-assurance quality is not free.

Lace's desktop mode will beat Daedalus, with a Mithril node benchmarking a full sync in under an hour versus Daedalus's three days at similar security, requiring standardized cryptography and inter-wallet interoperability.

The effort improves user experience while preserving security and adding decentralization, hoping tens to hundreds of thousands of full nodes run quietly in the background so the hard fork combinator and standards keep working.

This video is the first of a series with a cleaned-up presentation, that the Lace team led by Brandon Wolf will be more vocal, and a dedicated Argentina team will build the Android and iOS mobile clients in 2025.

The DApp store is back on the roadmap after two years in development hell, and that Lace, long gummed up, is now moving fast with an ecosystem-wide approach while living in both the browser and the phone.

The goal is ecosystem-wide standards so wallet providers benefit without migration, citing buying Nami and rebuilding its beta code inside Lace's secure interface while keeping the Nami UX so users move to new infrastructure unaware.

Previews wallet scripts that chain commands like a shell script, enabling advanced modes such as a payroll script running hundreds of transactions, plus shared wallets and multisig.

Calls hardware-enabled multisig the most secure method in crypto, since a three-of-five or five-of-seven mix of hardware wallets has never been compromised without social engineering, with a wave of CIPs coming to improve it.

Says the DApp store is pivotal to the Bitcoin DeFi experience and a massive differentiator, and explains indexing UTXOs, stake pools, and tokens so wallets retrieve history instantly instead of scanning the whole chain.

Hydra looks great, Leios is being prototyped at bleeding-edge speeds, and second and third generation dApps built on extended UTXO are far better than 2021's first generation.

Mass adoption demands a simple wallet experience where users click a backend logo to self-host, producing a diverse ecosystem of three to four full nodes plus an enterprise super node for exchanges.

Says Cardano's unorthodox IPC node communication versus JSON-RPC will require compromises, and describes his own plan to run a self-hosted remote node relayed like a VPN to a multisig Lace phone app, possibly as a progressive web app to bypass the App Store.

Lace ships browser updates every three to six weeks while the node side needs more time since pairing with DB sync uses too much memory, framing it as a six-to-nine-month cross-wallet body of work.

Closes that wallets are a big roadmap pillar alongside partner chains, Leios, and Bitcoin DeFi, with UPLC compilation to RISC-V a priority so Aiken can compile both Bitcoin Script and Plutus, plus multi-chain signatures and TEE support.