GUI Wallet Release: v2.3.1

Over the last few months the IOTA community has seen a major influx of new users. Our Slack channel alone has grown to more than 11000 members at this point, with more users joining daily. With every new user that joins the community, the time it takes for on-boarding and getting setup is critical.

Thanks to the feedback that we’ve received, we have prepared a new GUI release which includes several improvements which increases the overall usability, simplicity and introduces some long-awaited features.

You can get the latest GUI from Github: https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases/tag/v2.3.1

The new GUI Wallet features for the first time translations, making it incredibly simple for international users to use the wallet. Switching between languages is as simple as clicking a button.

In total, some 15 languages are currently supported. All of the translations were community-created and we are looking for more active supported who are interested in assisting with the effort of translating the GUI in more languages. You can find a tutorial on how to do so here: https://forum.iota.org/t/tutorial-contribute-to-gui-wallet-translations/2508

Probably the most requested feature:double spend warnings. A successful transfer in IOTA has inputs and outputs — which means that you can only spend inputs once. The new GUI gives the user a warning when inputs are being spent multiple times, which would normally lead to conflicting double-spend transactions and only one of the transactions getting confirmed.

In addition to that, if a transaction has been confirmed, the reattach and rebroadcast buttons have been removed.

A pre-loaded list of light wallet providers are made available to the user, making it even easier to get started without even having to search for a provider anymore. It should be noted that this is a community-lead effort, and none of the light wallet providers are endorsed by the Foundation.

To protect the user from entering invalid encoded seeds, we have added some more rigorous input checks. For one, by default seeds shorter than 60 characters are not accepted (Note: This setting can be changed in the “Preferences” section of the wallet). In addition to that, only seeds with valid characters (uppercase latin letters and the number 9) are accepted.

As a further protection, we have also added a 3 character checksum for seeds. This means that you can now validate if the seed which you have are trying to login with is the correct one. All you need to do is to remember the 3 character checksum and validate upon each login.

As the title indicates, this is a quest that we have just begun and there is still a lot of work to do before we can claim that IOTA is user friendly. In an upcoming release we will include automated re-attaching and major performance improvements for POW generation and querying the account state. Additionally, several community members have begun work on a complete redesign of the GUI wallet which we are very much looking forward to begin testing with as soon as possible.

As a last reminder, I would like to emphasize the point that the GUI wallet should evolve more and more into a community project which is maintained and further developed by a group of dedicated developers. We have already begun this transition, but are very much looking forward to further input from interested developers.