/geewallet

geewallet is a non-custodial, minimalistic & pragmatist opensource crossplatform lightweight brainwallet to hold the most important cryptoassets in the same application with ease & peace of mind

Primary LanguageF#MIT LicenseMIT

geewallet

Welcome!

geewallet is a minimalistic and pragmatist crossplatform lightweight opensource brainwallet for people that want to hold the most important cryptocurrencies in the same application with ease and peace of mind.

Repo URL
canonical https://github.com/nblockchain/geewallet
mirror #1 https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/geewallet
mirror #2 https://gitlab.com/nblockchain/geewallet

Licence

Branch Description Build & Test status
stable (v0.6.x) Console frontend (Linux snap pkg name: gwallet) GitHubCI pipeline status badge
master (v0.7.x) Xamarin.Forms frontend: Android, iOS, Linux/GTK (pkg name: geewallet) GitHubCI pipeline status badge

Balances mobile-page screenshot

Features

Comparing our product to other wallets in terms of features, we would want to highlight the following:

Wallet\Feature Multi-currency Opensource Cold Storage Brain seed Truly crossplatform*
Copay/Bitpay No Yes No No Yes
Electrum No Yes Yes No No
Bread Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Samourai No Yes Yes No No
Wasabi No Yes No No No
Mycelium No Yes Yes No No
Jaxx Yes No No No Yes
Coinomi Yes No No No Yes
ParitySigner No Yes Yes No Yes
imToken Yes No Yes No No
status.im No Yes No No Yes
Edge Yes Yes? No No No
WarpWallet No Yes No Yes No
YES YES YES YES YES

*=With truly crossplatform we mean Mobile (both Android & iPhone) & Desktop (main OSs: Linux, macOS & Windows)

As you can see, geewallet is a good mixup of good features, which others never manage to get together in the same app. I should add to this that geewallet's future maintainability is very high due to:

  • Using a functional programming language.
  • Having lots of automated tests.
  • Employing a single code base for all frontends, requiring much less manpower and specific expertise.

Principles

This is a wallet that prioritizes convenience & security over privacy. Examples:

  1. Convenience (I): it is a lightweight/thin wallet (you don't need to download whole blockchains to use it, unlike with fullnode wallets).
  2. Convenience (II): there are no pre-generated seeds, this is a brainwallet that uses your passphrase as a seed phrase, so that you don't need to keep backups anymore (and if you have any doubt about the security of this, understand that a hacker will always want to try to solve the WarpWallet challenge rather than target you directly).
  3. Security (I): it's a desktop/mobile wallet, not an online/web wallet like others (e.g. web wallets are easy targets: https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/988830652526092288 ).
  4. Security (II): it has cold-storage support (you can run it in off-line mode and import/export transactions in JSON files), but not hardware wallet support. Remember, cold storage is not the same as 'hardware wallet'. This is a software wallet, but which works in air-gapped devices (computers/smartphones) thanks to its cold-storage support, which means that it's safer than hardware wallets (after all, bugs and security issues are constantly being found on hardware wallets, e.g.: https://saleemrashid.com/2018/03/20/breaking-ledger-security-model/) and you may not want to trust USB (see: https://x.com/stephanlivera/status/1831196410777051359/ ).
  5. Convenience over privacy: it's a wallet that can handle multiple cryptocurrencies, so its UX needs to be as generic as possible to accommodate them, therefore only contains minimal currency-specific features. For example, given that the concept of "change-addresses" doesn't exist in the Ethereum world (a concept initially thought to help privacy in the bitcoin world, but which doesn't achieve much of it in the end), then it is not used even when sending bitcoin, to avoid cluttering the UI/UX with currency-specific features/complexities (e.g. see https://twitter.com/NicolasDorier/status/1195181085702774784 ). We will still be investigating the support of more robust privacy features such as the ones provided by TumbleBit or ConfidentialTransactions.

In the development side of things, we advocate for simplicity:

  1. We will always be standing on the shoulders of giants, which means that we should not reinvent the wheel, thus we have a complete commitment to opensource as way of evolving the product and achieving the maximum level of security/auditability; unlike other multi-currency wallets (cough... Jaxx ...cough).
  2. We will try to only add new features to the UX/UI that can be supported by all currencies that we support, and we will prioritize new features (Layer2: micropayments) over support for new currencies (no shitcoins thanks).
  3. Thanks to our usage of Xamarin.Forms toolkit, our frontends are based on a single codebase, instead of having to repeat logic for each platform.

Roadmap

This list is the (intended) order of preference for new features:

Anti-roadmap

Things we will never develop (if you want them, feel free to fork us):

  • ZCash/Dash/Monero support (I don't like the trusted setup of the first, plus the others use substandard privacy solutions which in my opinion have been all surpassed by MimbleWimble/Grin).
  • Ripple/Stellar/OneCoin support (they're all a scam).
  • BCash (as it's less evolved, technically speaking; I don't want to deal with transaction malleability or lack of Layer2 scaling).

How to compile/install/use?

The easiest way to use for non-technical people is to install it from the Android AppStore: Get it on Google Play

Or if you use Linux, from the Snap Store: Get it from the Snap Store

To install via the command-line in (Ubuntu) Linux, do it this way:

snap install geewallet

(For the command-line client, use the name gwallet instead of geewallet.)

Other platforms: coming soon.

If you're an advanced user, you could clone it and compile it yourself this way (in macOS or Linux):

./configure.sh --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

Or this way if you're on Windows:

configure.bat
make.bat

Thanks

Special thanks to all the contributors (we recently surpassed 10! if you count the contributions that are in review at the moment). Without forgetting as well the amazing developers that contribute(d) to the great opensource libraries that this project uses; some examples:

  • @juanfranblanco: Nethereum
  • @nicolasdorier, @joemphilips: NBitcoin
  • @redth, @EBrown8534, @mierzynskim: ZXing.Net.Mobile, ZXing.Net.Xamarin
  • Xamarin.Forms: @mfkl, @stanbav, @AndreiMisiukevich, @melimion, @z3ut
  • JsonRpcSharp: @lukethenuke, @mfkl, @jerry40, @mierzynskim, @winstongubantes and again @juanfranblanco
  • ...and all the Xamarin/Mono/.NetCore community in general, of course

If you want to become part of this distributed team of brave disruptarians, check our CONTRIBUTING guideline first, and start coding!

Feedback

If you want to accelerate development/maintenance, create an issue and pledge funds with gitcoin.