IOTA Trinity Wallet: Next Steps

Update: The IOTA Trinity wallet is deprecated with the Chrysalis upgrade and will be replaced by the new Firefly wallet. You can easily transfer your tokens following these instructions.

The Trinity wallet, previously known as the ‘UCL Wallet’, was a project started as a Master’s thesis by University College London student Charlie Varley. The intention was to develop a cross platform mobile application that would serve as an alternative IOTA wallet for the community. At the time there was only the Official Desktop wallet and a third-party Android wallet.

Over the past few months, developers from the community have joined Charlie in the development of the wallet. This has allowed for a number of additional features to be included and has increased the speed of development significantly.

The initiative taken by these developers is something we aim to encourage within the community. One avenue through which we are supporting this is the Ecosystem Fund, regarding which we will have more information soon.

IOTA’s vision is to enable the machine to machine economy. This focus on m2m is evidenced by our protocol design choices and, most commonly noted by our community, the basic desktop wallet we officially provide.

As our community grows and the project becomes more visible to those with a less technical background, we recognise that the community needs a wallet that is not only more user friendly, but works across different platforms.

Therefore, we are excited to announce that the IOTA Foundation will be absorbing the Trinity Wallet project and hiring the main contributors to the wallet. While we have provided support in the background, Trinity has until now remained very much a community project. This new approach enables us to put the resources of the Foundation behind the project to help deliver the best experience possible.

The project initiator, Charlie Varley, has already been announced as an IOTA Foundation developer and another two developers will be announced following this post. Hiring these developers enables them to focus completely on the development of the wallet.

As with the current GUI Desktop wallet, the code for the Trinity wallet will be open sourced. In order to do so we are refactoring the codebase (clean up & simplify); ensuring documentation is up to scratch and tests are well-integrated. Open sourcing the code enables two main things: transparency and community engagement. Transparency is an issue with any wallet application. Opening the code up will allow the community to explore and contribute to the wallet’s development.

Additionally, we will generate a Javascript module from the Trinity Wallet’s seed handling logic. This will be a great resource for community members looking to add an IOTA wallet to their web application or backend infrastructure.

The development of the wallet has progressed to a point where there are 150 Alpha testers across both iOS and Android diligently reporting bugs and collaborating with the developers. The response from them has been overwhelmingly positive, reinforcing the feature and design choices taken.

In order to assist the team in finding and squashing all the bugs, we are opening another 100 spaces (total) in the Alpha to those who will actively contribute feedback to the project. There will be a link posted in our officialDiscordtomorrow at 5pm CET with more info.

Taking ownership, onboarding the new developers and making the changes described above will take some time to complete. We are fully aware that the community has been waiting months for this project to be released, and we can understand that some members will be very disappointed with a delay. This decision was not taken lightly, and we hope that this process gives the community greater confidence in the wallet and its governance.

The mobile wallet will have a public beta release this quarter, with the code being open sourced at the same time. We will be more transparent with the work we are doing, including the progress and setbacks. This will be posted in the newly created #trinitychannel on Discord on Monday each week.  

The desktop wallet’s private alpha testing will begin within the next 4 weeks. There will be a signup link for testing in the#trinitychannel when the wallet is ready for this.

However, as is the nature with software projects we could be a little under or over this estimate. We will endeavour to get this project in the hands of the community when it’s ready for public consumption.