Cardano Mobile Wallets

Yoroi

Yoroi is definitely the OG in the house when it comes to Cardano mobile wallets, and it’s the only one we looked at that is proudly open-source. When I was first learning about Cardano almost 3 years ago, it was the obvious choice, if perhaps one of the only choices. It still holds up as a simple wallet that might be a good starting place for new users.

Things I love are that the NFT gallery is beautiful, and the main screen is really easy to navigate for basic wallet needs. Yoroi is one of only TWO mobile wallets that I can use to register for Project Catalyst Voting. If I want to easily exchange Ada for other Cardano Network tokens, there is a really nice interface for doing that, enabled by WingRiders.

On the flip side, lots of features that I have started to expect from a Cardano wallet are missing, or not very good. In the staking center, I can see that I am staked to a pool, but it oddly doesn’t show me which pool, or anything about its performance or rewards. The staking center does offer an adequate search option to find a pool to stake to. Yoroi does display the dollar value of my ADA holdings, but not for fungible tokens or NFTs, which is becoming something I expect to see. Of the mobile wallets I evaluated, Yoroi is the ONLY one that does not support sending ada to $AdaHandles; due to this alone, anyone who gets very involved in Cardano is going to graduate from the Yoroi wallet sooner rather than later! Yoroi does not have a browser or DApp connector on mobile, so if you are hoping to interact with Web-based DApps from your phone, Yoroi can’t help you do it.

Eternl

Formerly known as CCVault, Eternl is a super popular wallet. It won the people’s choice award at the 2022 Cardano Summit in Switzerland, and it was my go-to wallet for a long time. The staking center is great; it clearly shows where you are staked, and has a searchable list of all stake pools, with relevant stats, linked to CardanoScan for more information. You can register to vote in Project Catalyst, putting it in a class apart from every other mobile wallet except Yoroi. It supports AdaHandle AND AdaMail. You can exchange with more than 2000 unique assets.

Eternl does not have a connected browser option, but what it does have is a list of DApps that you CAN use through the app. These are grouped by category, including NFT marketplaces, DeFi, games, and more. There are a total of 25 connected DApps as of this writing, which is just a start in my opinion. However, if that number continues to grow, the Eternl DApp explorer could be a really exciting way to explore Cardano DApps.

There are other areas where I think Eternl is lagging behind. The NFT gallery is anything but pretty. NFTs are displayed as tiny thumbnails, with the asset and policy IDs prominently displayed. I’d rather see a pretty gallery of my NFTs, and be able to click in to see the IDs and metadata on the rare occasion that I need them. It shows the fiat value of my main ADA holdings, like every wallet I checked, but not for anything else. Of all the mobile wallets I tried, it’s the only one without a security layer on the app itself; if someone can open your phone, they can open your Eternl wallet. Eternl was also the only wallet I looked at that didn’t have some user-friendly customer service option - like a form or email address. Instead, the main support channel is discord, with “limited” support offered through Twitter and Telegram. Discord is popular indeed in crypto/dev communities, but it’s notoriously not user friendly. I wouldn’t expect a casual user or newbie to feel comfortable accessing support this way.

Flint

A glance at the prominent line of green dots on the chart for Flint suggests that Flint might be the winner today, based on the things I evaluated. One of my favorite features of Flint is that is shows the fiat value of ada, network tokens, AND NFTS! No other mobile wallet makes it quite so easy to see the value of all your holdings - not just ada. The NFT gallery is beautiful. Best of all is the Web browser/ DApp connector, which is the best I have seen in a mobile wallet. It has 8 suggested DApps that offer a good place to start, plus the ability for the user to create their own persistent links in the app. On top of that, I can just type any website in the URL bar and interact with any of my favorite DApps that way. I have used the Flint browser to participate in the Lido Nation Every Epoch quiz and collect rewards, for example! Although it doesn’t have a separate “Token Exchange” page, it’s really not necessary, because with the browser option you can just navigate to any Cardano DEX to exchange tokens.

You can’t register for Project Catalyst voting using Flint, so you will have to use another wallet to do that. My only real complaint about this wallet would have to be that the app has been a bit buggy recently – especially around what I just said were my favorite features – the fiat value display for ada, tokens, and NFTs. I submitted a ticket through the support form on the Flint website, and 24 hours later I have not heard back. Let’s hope it’s because they are busy working out this bug! I’ll pop into the comments below with an update when this is hopefully resolved.

Gero

Gero wallet is clear on their goals to be the most secure, the most user-friendly, and the most innovative wallet. I can say from personal experience that they are friendly and responsive to inquiries from users, which is amazing. It does display the fiat value of ada and network tokens, but not NFTs. Gero does seem to be very secure… it is the only one (besides Eternl) that doesn’t let me use biometrics to log in. Instead, I have to have a separate, long passcode to open the app. This makes it so secure that I sometimes can’t get in myself. Once I’m in, it is really easy to start navigating around.

With that said, there are still some noticeable areas for growth. The mobile app does not yet support staking, which is a serious gap in my mind. It means it cannot be anyone’s “main wallet” if they are primarily a mobile user. The other thing is that I felt that the page layout was cramped for a lot of things. On many pages, half the screen is occupied by a huge icon representing my wallet. So in the NFT gallery, for example, I can only see 2 NFTs at a time, squished in the lower inch of my screen. They do have a DApp connector, but it currently just supports 2 NFT marketplaces, so lots of room to grow here. They also offer a token exchange service, but when I tested it the fees seemed really high – a 5 ada swap for some SNEK turned into a 10 ada price tag once fees were added. (I do think that 2 of those ada were refundable.) Maybe this tool makes sense for big swaps, but logging into a real DEX would offer a much better deal.

Vespr

Vespr has a lot of the same things that I am enjoying about Flint! It displays the fiat value of ada and network tokens, and the ada value of NFTs, which is a little different. It also has an open web browser where you can search and connect to any DApp that works with Vespr. I was able to search and connect to Indigo Protocol, for example. Unlike other wallets, there are no suggested DApps to get you started… you need to know what you are looking for and be able to type it into the URL/search bar. Using the browser, you could exchange tokens in any Cardano DEX.

A small complaint about Vespr is that the NFT gallery just shows tiny thumbnails – although it’s not as cluttered as Eternl. A big complaint is that from the app, you can only stake to VESPR pool. This might make sense from a business perspective if they hope for the pool to support their work, but it does significantly reduce the usefulness of the app. For this reason alone I would not recommend it to anyone as their primary mobile wallet.

CWallet

There’s still not a lot of mobile wallets in the Cardano space, so I wanted to try them all. That’s how CWallet ended up on the list. When I tried to load an existing wallet in Cwallet, it showed a zero balance and no NFTs. That wasn’t right! An alert appeared: “Not all wallets have been updated - retry?” but when I clicked retry, nothing happened. The page that was supposed to display the price of Cardano reported that it was having trouble connecting to the blockchain, which is definitely a problem.

I considered adding a different wallet to see if I could get a different result, but I couldn’t find any option for adding a second Cardano Wallet.

The customer support link took me to Google.com. Ha! When I looked for CWallet online, I found…. what I think is a website for a DIFFERENT wallet named CWallet? But I’m not sure.

When I tried looking at the coin swapping options in the app, the only apparent swaps were Ethereum and BItcoin - which, if the rest of it worked, would be interesting. No Cardano native tokens, which I would like to see, but it seems like CWallet is perhaps trying to be a cross-chain wallet. Conceptually, I think that’s great.

For now, I won’t recommend CWallet, but we hope to see good things in the future.

A note about buying ada

You’ll note that none of the apps got a GREEN score from me for the ability to buy Ada in the app. Yoroi, Gero, Flint and Vespr do have “Buy Ada” options in the app, all of which are routed through partner third-parties (Banxa, Moonpay, Topper) and allow you to buy ada with a credit card. In every case, the price of ada was anywhere from 5-8% higher than the current exchange rate, plus other fees. Eternl is a confusing case where the official app store version DOES NOT have a buy ada option; there is apparently a different “progressive web app” that you can get a different way that DOES have a “buy” option in the app.

In any case, I’d encourage someone to find a different way to buy ada if at all possible – for example, through a reputable exchange. If you buy ada on Coinbase, for example, you will get a fair exchange rate, and the fees are overall lower. From there, you just need to send your ada to your Cardano wallet. All of this can be done on mobile, too!

Can I get a roadmap?

The other area with lackluster scores across the board was product roadmaps. In the BEST-case scenarios that scored a “yellow,” I found roadmaps that were 1-2 years out of date. In the case of Eternl and Vespr, I couldn’t find anything.

I suspect this is at least partially due to the moment we are in: 2023 was a bear market by any reckoning. Projects have kept the lights on and are putting out new features, but there certainly hasn’t been the influx of new users reading all the documentation and inspecting roadmaps with excitement. Discord chats are where the committed insiders have been cloistered, waiting, and it seems like that is the place to go dig up information on many of these projects.

As it looks like we are heating up for a more exciting market in 2024, I’d encourage projects to spiff up their websites for the new recruits. And just for me, include a roadmap that you can update once a year or so!

What’s missing? What’s next?

As a user, this kind of analysis is really valuable to me. I love it when someone else spends a whole day doing all the leg work, figuring out what the best tools are, and helping me figure out which one is best for me. (You’re welcome!)

With that said, there are still a lot of gaps and risk when you rely on this kind of review. I chose to evaluate these 6 mobile wallets, but there might be a 7th that deserves to be on the list. If not today, then perhaps coming out in the near future! And speaking of the near future, each of these mobile wallets is an active project, building and publishing new features and updates regularly. This analysis might be out of date before the month is out.

Another risk is that, if you choose to believe these findings, you are just taking my word for it. If I say that this feature doesn’t exist, it’s either because it doesn’t exist – or because I just couldn’t figure it out!

Teams who are busy building these wallets probably have some opinions too. I hope they are gratified to see what I liked about their app, but they might be annoyed if there was something I didn’t like, or if it seemed like I missed something important. I bet they’d REALLY like it if I did circle back later to let you all know what’s new and shiny after a few more releases, and who my new favorite is a year from now.