September Check-in

Last week, we had a Community Check-in and AMA with our CEO/Co-founder Emile and our UX/UI Lead Jason, led by our community manager Cygnus. We covered a number of topics, including sneak peeks of upcoming features and integrations.

In case you missed it, here’s a summary of our conversation on September 24th:

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Hello and welcome everyone to our XDEFI Wallet community check-in! Today we have two guests, Emile, our CEO, and Jason, our UI/UX Lead.

Several months have passed since our last community check-in and we have seen the wallet evolve a lot, notably with:

• LEDGER support for Ethereum
• Polygon integration
• LEDGER support for THORChain
• new NFT interface (with some things that are currently being fixed)
• enhancements and new features
• bug fixes

How was the summer for each of you? We imagine you have been very busy!

Emile: Super busy although it’s been a lot of fun! The team has grown quite a bit too.

Jason: Well, it’s been an exciting few months, but probably the most exciting bit has been joining the team at the beginning of August.

Emile: Jason has been cooking crazy stuff for us guys. It’s been really cool to work with him since he joined.

Awesome! In my first question, I was talking about the LEDGER hardware wallets. The LEDGER support for Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon, and THORChain also corresponds to an omnipresent desire at XDEFI Wallet to offer users the possibility of a maximum level of security.

Good security practices have always been part of XDEFI Wallet’s philosophy.

Emile, I know it’s important for you personally to be able to instill this idea, right? And can we expect the LEDGER support for Bitcoin soon?

Emile: We’ve started working on it and it should be ready in October. How important is it for you to have Bitcoin, guys? Is it more important than supporting Trezor for Ethereum?

[After a quick vote…]

Well, Emile, it seems that people REALLY want BTC.

Emile: Ok, ok, we will take this into consideration.

Fantastic! There’s a lot of new features that are constantly being added, but the wallet still keeps its very clean look and its simplicity of use, making it open to everyone.

This is obviously an important concern for the XDEFI Wallet developers.

Can you tell us more about it, Jason?

Jason: Sure, I think this is probably the critical and most difficult challenge we will face as a team now and moving forward, which is simplifying complexity. Especially as a cross-chain wallet, in a rapidly-changing industry, our job is to really just strip things down and abstract that complexity into something easy and approachable for the user. We’re focusing a lot on that here. Lately, it’s been an iterative process, speaking with the audience and users and redesigning our thoughts around that feedback.

All that’s missing is a dark mode…

Jason: It’s coming guys; we’ve focused a lot on bettering the UX and implementing new features that we had to slow down before completing and shipping dark mode, but it’s next on the docket.

Ahah can’t wait!

NFTs have become a very important part of the crypto ecosystem.

I know Emile is an NFT lover. A number of platforms and communities revolving around NFTs have emerged.

Emile, Jason, could you tell us anything about this new NFT interface?

For example, the feature available to organize your NFTs as you wish, the future possibilities of sending and selling, the fetching time which will hopefully be improved, etc.

Emile: Right now you can see your NFTs in the wallet across 3 chains (Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon) — we’re focusing on improving the time it takes to fetch NFTs at the moment.

Soon you will be able to

- send an NFT easily

- sell an NFT in one click (integration of NFT-20)

- deposit an NFT as collateral to borrow from within the wallet

- and a few other cool features I’ll unveil in time

What you can be sure of is that we’re going to make XDEFI Wallet the Instagram of NFTs; as a wallet we believe we’re best placed to do so.

Indeed, it’s a very cool feature!

Jason: XDEFI might rebrand to XNFT Wallet the way we’re thinking about things…I’m joking of course, but we’re very aware of what’s happening out there, and we’re going to roll out features that will be unique to the XDEFI experience.

Emile, Jason, let’s talk about Ethereum, please.

The London hard fork introduced 5 EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals).

The EIP 1559, which changes the fee mechanism on the network, has been the subject of much discussion.

A part of the fee, the inclusion fee, goes to the miners, while another part of the fee, the base fee, is burnt by the network.

This tends to make Ether a deflationary cryptocurrency and leads to its intrinsic revaluation.

Firstly, would you like to add anything to this very brief summary, and secondly, can you tell us what this means for XDEFI Wallet and for a user carrying out a transaction?

Jason: As I spoke about earlier, a part of our job has been simplifying and abstracting away a lot of the complexity that one faces in crypto to the point of a simple but cogent user experience. Through the course of designing, we’ve even found that our audience (and we consider our audience to be highly sophisticated degens — and I mean that in the best sense) had a fairly basic understanding of what was actually happening under the hood. So, we’ve been designing (and iterating) to reflect that. In reality, we found that the best route is making sure that the user is able to complete transactions without noticing that there has been an EIP-1559 change on the technical level.

That’s a long-winded way of saying, we want the users to gain the benefits of 1559 (less overpaying and more consistent time estimations), but it’s been a fun challenge to make sure that the user didn’t need to be burdened with the knowledge of it. Also, we’ve got a little present in store for the APES that need to get into the next block.

Something that I personally find fantastic is the feature that will be integrated within XDEFI Wallet and will allow cross-chain swaps! Please tell us more about it, and how it will work?

Emile: We’ve finished working on a cross-chain swap functionality powered by THORChain. You will be able to swap BNB against BTC, ETH against BNB, etc.. from within the wallet pretty soon. When the THORChain network is fully back up and running.

We will also add inter-Ethereum swaps and we’re also working on an EVM bridge aggregator.

This is just incredible honestly! Some team members recently posted some kind of messages coded with emojis: 🌖 + XDEFI = ❤️

Do any of you know what this means or is it still too early to talk about it?

Emile: We’re all big fans of Terra (I think we can say it by now) and we’ve been working closely with their team. We just finished integrating it and Ledger support. It will be ready for public use sooner than you think.

BOOM! It’s the 9th blockchain, right?

Emile: Correct!

A question that comes up in every community check-in:

Will XDEFI Wallet now consider having a token Emile? And if so, where will the IDO take place?

Emile: Haha…for now we’re still focused on delivering the public release of the wallet, which is going to happen very soon! As in very very soon…

I know you’ve all been wondering about whether we would have a token or not. I can’t really answer this at the moment. You’ll be the first in the know (in Discord) if we issue a token.

Ahah, alright, alright. We’ll see. 🙂 The Discord server has also expanded.

We have seen for example the arrival of a blockchain channel dedicated to the ecosystem surrounding each blockchain that XDEFI Wallet supports,

and another one dedicated to video tutorials for the wallet.

The educational aspect you bring through the community space is important for you, isn’t it Emile?

Emile: I think it’s absolutely key. As a wallet provider, it’s our role to support users from the first time they download the wallet and until they’re ready to go full ape mode and navigate through all the available DeFi apps. We’re planning to create an entire educational framework to make sure our users can learn about the DeFi and have fun while doing so. And even maybe be rewarded for it.. 😋

Very interesting. Many, many people are hoping for the integration of the Solana blockchain — any estimated time of arrival? Can we expect it before the end of the year?

Emile: It should be there in Q4.

What about Haven Protocol Emile? Any chance for 2022?

Emile: I love Haven and really like everything they stand for. It’s very hard to integrate though. So yes, we will definitely look into it but not just now. It will probably be in the first half of 2022.

Great. I have one last question for you guys.

Will the XDEFI Wallet be supported on Firefox in the coming days/weeks?

Emile: Yes definitely, we’ve actually tested it recently and it works but. There is quite a bit of work to do around Ledger and it takes time — we had to prioritise a few other things. But yeah I promise it will be there in Q4 for sure.

Awesome, awesome! Thank you very much for the time spent with us Emile and Jason.

Emile: Thanks everyone, stay tuned! A lot is coming soon and we’re looking forward to your feedback.

Jason: Yeah, it’s been fun, and I’m sure I’m going to be speaking with more of the community in the following few months.

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As Emile and Jason mentioned, we’ve got lots of big things coming up: Terra integration, Solana integration, dark mode, Firefox support, and more. If you want to be the first to know, join our Discord for the latest news and updates.

Thanks again to our community for the participation and tune in for another check-in next month!