Overview:
New development and bug fixes will be done in order to cover most wanted and needed functionalities as requested by our user base, most of them being our growing developer community.
Features:
- Refactor wallet's core to switch the private keys management from the storeless model (like AdaLite) to a storefull spending password model (like Yoroi) mitigating mnemonic exposure on keyboard and screen. Some PoCs has been developed here but this requires much more development efforts.
- Rewrite the internal wallet API for better working with this core refactor while gaining more compatibility with upcoming hardware wallet, smart contract support and other complex DApp connector requirements. (See <https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/GameChanger-HW-support/383546-48088> and https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/GameChanger-smart-contract-support/383537-48088))
- Staking: delegation and reward withdrawal. Playground access to this functions. Multi-delegation support
- DApp connector: bypassing the DApp Cart at will by insta-executing the request using the spending password of the storefull model.
- UX: New creation / importing / spending UI flow. Mnemonic input and rendering mitigation. Staking UI, delegation, rewards. Better wizzard UI, more recognizable buttons and steps on Smart Send and NFT Creator interfaces. Relocate donation buttons.
- Playground IDE Demos: add staking and adapt demos to the new API changes if needed.
- CIP-30 transaction signing-like solution adapted to our JSON based URL dapp connector approach. Optional open source tooling development if required.
Bug fixes:
- <s>Upgrade to cardano-serialization-lib to 9.1.2 or 10.x.x to fix some bugs related to heavily token-populated UTXOs with small ADA values preventing running CNFTs or token drops at scale on single transactions (Thanks ALDEA for spotting it on your drop).</s> Recently done.
- Normalize some internal data serialization/encoding to fix related bugs, for example with some asset names.
- Mitigate randomly truncated URLs connections on some browsers with retries
- Address endpoint bug that sometimes is not returning the current wallet address
- Improve current error messages. Provide alternative options for IPFS pinning to mitigate third party service downtime errors. We have taken care of this downtimes by manually pinning NFTs in such cases.
Generic use cases that will benefit from this:
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Once implemented, the storefull model will allow users to mitigate mnemonics exposure through keyboard or rendered on screen, driving more liquidity between wallets and at the end helping the developer ecosystem forming around the wallet to benefit from this metrics. We started with an Adalite like UX approach but is about time to finally move on to what users desire most.
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With this spending password flow, all dapps integratig GC will benefit from a better UX for their users, allowing bypassing the Dapp Cart at will, for a faster, instant, and password protected transaction execution.
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With the core rewrite, effort that will be made in conjunction with HW support implementation, users will feel more secure don't having to rely exclusively on mnemonic flow.
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Dapp connector API improvements, with staking API exposure, will provide our developers with a more rich set of features to build Cardano Dapps with the ease of low-code scripting (JSON).
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As always, new demos listed on our integrated IDE covering these new features will help onboard developers at the speed of a button-click.
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The more features we integrate into Playground IDE (that means enrich our JSON based dapp connector API), we will gain more usage as an alernative web version of cardano-wallet-cli.
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Besides legacy features like opening testnet and mainnet wallets in read-only mode to debug service wallets for example, recent upgrades allow developers to import/export signed cbor hex transaction files, parse transaction cbor structure and review the most in dept Cardano node rejection errors fully in-wallet. Also full transaction submit state management has been put in hands of our users as well as internal UTXO management, all this in a pure graphical/gamified UI. The power of <s>viewing</s> touching the UTXO model plus the ability to craft transactions with JSON is priceless for a junior developer to be onboarded on Cardano.
> We need extra time and effort to develop this overly friendly UI and API, this different wallet concept that self construct complex transactions and manages UTXOs instead of delegating those powers to external dapps, but we do all of this because we care for Cardano users, students and developers as well.
Use cases and customers:
All this backlog has been constructed after obtaining user feedback on real life use cases and requirements. Some examples are:
- Our "GameChangers": users, supporters, our Gimbalabs, ALDEA friends, and many more. Gimbalabs project based learning spaces that are using GCWallet for didactic purposes.
- Gimbalabs products such as Password Chaos integrating "Pay with GC" buttons. Many other websites integrating this simple URL dapp connections for payment requests.
- M2Tec Hardware - Maarten Menheere's Paypad device, amazing first ever hardware integration with our wallet that blowed our minds; and current Cardano Totem development.
- ALDEA CNFT drop. 500 unique NFTs minted with GameChanger Wallet. Other big drops made with the wallet.
- SPOs running loyal delegator reward drops using Playground IDE scripting or Smart Send
- CNFT community using our built in NFT Creator to create collections, make decentralized drops on single transactions,earn some referral income and care for a pure self-sovereign minting solution - Thanks for inmortalizing your artworks with us!
- Cardano Sevilla Summit 2021 website, first IDNFT-based auth and decentra-minting CNFT website using GC
- Project Catapult, first full featured dapp using GameChanger connector and IDNFT support
- AIM - developing to turn on chain the CA/VCA Catalyst UX, using GCWallet
It's important to clarify that unlike other wallets in the ecosystem, GameChanger Wallet offer users the ability to combine several Cardano features at once into single transactions since day one, for sustainable blockchain usage and reduced fees. The wallet builds this complex low level transactions, not the dapps. We take the hard work to allow dapp builders focus on building faster and easily they projects and to protect user wallets against external dapp ability to generate transactions and incur in unproductive anti-concurrency UTXO management. Sometimes we have been referred as an easier (low-code and automated) cardano-wallet-cli web alternative.
Multi-output sending with multi-asset support for each of this outputs, plus native asset minting plus metadata, all at once and at users hands through SmartSend and NFT Creator UIs, the Playground (our integrated IDE) and the dapp connector. We have a more complex codebase in order to combine all the protocol features in such a free and creative way for our users. This is why our development efforts are not trivial, and every single decission we make, affects the overall project in complex ways.