ReadMe.md

geewallet

Welcome!

geewallet is a minimalistic and pragmatist crossplatform lightweight opensource brainwallet for people that want to hold the most important cryptocurrencies in the same application with ease and peace of mind.

Repo	URL
canonical	https://github.com/nblockchain/geewallet
mirror #1	https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/geewallet
mirror #2	https://gitlab.com/nblockchain/geewallet

Branch	Description	Build & Test status
stable (v0.6.x)	Console frontend (Linux snap pkg name: gwallet)
master (v0.7.x)	Xamarin.Forms frontend: Android, iOS, Linux/GTK (pkg name: geewallet)

Features

Comparing our product to other wallets in terms of features, we would want to highlight the following:

Wallet\Feature	Multi-currency	Opensource	Cold Storage	Brain seed	Truly crossplatform*
Copay/Bitpay	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Electrum	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
Bread	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Samourai	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
Wasabi	No	Yes	No	No	No
Mycelium	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
Jaxx	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Coinomi	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
ParitySigner	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
imToken	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
status.im	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Edge	Yes	Yes?	No	No	No
WarpWallet	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES

*=With truly crossplatform we mean Mobile (both Android & iPhone) & Desktop (main OSs: Linux, macOS & Windows)

As you can see, geewallet is a good mixup of good features, which others never manage to get together in the same app. I should add to this that geewallet's future maintainability is very high due to:

• Using a functional programming language.
• Having lots of automated tests.
• Employing a single code base for all frontends, requiring much less manpower and specific expertise.

Principles

This is a wallet that prioritizes convenience & security over privacy. Examples:

1. Convenience (I): it is a lightweight/thin wallet (you don't need to download whole blockchains to use it, unlike with fullnode wallets).
2. Convenience (II): there are no pre-generated seeds, this is a brainwallet that uses your passphrase as a seed phrase, so that you don't need to keep backups anymore (and if you have any doubt about the security of this, understand that a hacker will always want to try to solve the WarpWallet challenge rather than target you directly).
3. Security (I): it's a desktop/mobile wallet, not an online/web wallet like others (e.g. web wallets are easy targets: https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/988830652526092288 ).
4. Security (II): it has cold-storage support (you can run it in off-line mode and import/export transactions in JSON files), but not hardware wallet support. Remember, cold storage is not the same as 'hardware wallet'. This is a software wallet, but which works in air-gapped devices (computers/smartphones) thanks to its cold-storage support, which means that it's safer than hardware wallets (after all, bugs and security issues are constantly being found on hardware wallets, e.g.: https://saleemrashid.com/2018/03/20/breaking-ledger-security-model/) and you may not want to trust USB (see: https://x.com/stephanlivera/status/1831196410777051359/ ).
5. Convenience over privacy: it's a wallet that can handle multiple cryptocurrencies, so its UX needs to be as generic as possible to accommodate them, therefore only contains minimal currency-specific features. For example, given that the concept of "change-addresses" doesn't exist in the Ethereum world (a concept initially thought to help privacy in the bitcoin world, but which doesn't achieve much of it in the end), then it is not used even when sending bitcoin, to avoid cluttering the UI/UX with currency-specific features/complexities (e.g. see https://twitter.com/NicolasDorier/status/1195181085702774784 ). We will still be investigating the support of more robust privacy features such as the ones provided by TumbleBit or ConfidentialTransactions.

In the development side of things, we advocate for simplicity:

1. We will always be standing on the shoulders of giants, which means that we should not reinvent the wheel, thus we have a complete commitment to opensource as way of evolving the product and achieving the maximum level of security/auditability; unlike other multi-currency wallets (cough... Jaxx ...cough).
2. We will try to only add new features to the UX/UI that can be supported by all currencies that we support, and we will prioritize new features (Layer2: micropayments) over support for new currencies (no shitcoins thanks).
3. Thanks to our usage of Xamarin.Forms toolkit, our frontends are based on a single codebase, instead of having to repeat logic for each platform.

Roadmap

This list is the (intended) order of preference for new features:

• Migration from Xamarin.Forms to MAUI (in progress, see the PR#199 or its successor).
• Make native-SegWit (Bech32) be default for bitcoin (right now this is the case for the beta version of our snap package).
• Support for payment-channels & state-channels (in BTC/LTC via lightning, see 'lightning' branch; and in ETH/ETC/DAI via Connext?).
• Explore better stablecoin approach than L1-DAI because DAI is not 100% decentralized (e.g. LUSD better?) and because L1 is too high fees (e.g. sDAI better? see https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1736766570825654630 ).
• Automatic reminders for Seed/password checks to make sure user has not forgotten them (see https://twitter.com/takinbo/status/1201529679519330305 ).
• I18N/L10N (maybe via https://github.com/adams85/po ).
• NFC support.
• WearOS/WatchOS frontend for Samsung&Google&Apple watches: no QR scanning due to missing camera in most Tizen watches, but could use NFC.
• Passwordless login infrastructure (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7hn3fq/using_your_blockchain_identity_for_passwordless/ ).
• flatpak packaging.
• In mobile, allow usage when camera permissions have not been granted, by letting the user redirect him to his camera app and take a picture (see https://youtu.be/k1Ssz1dvcpk?t=63).
• Use of 'bits' instead of BTC as default unit (see https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/sdhtz0/this_woman_has_resparked_the_sats_vs_bits_debate/ and https://twitter.com/ericyakes/status/1708876421081465078 ). (See: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7hsq6m/symbol_for_a_bit_0000001btc/ or in case we end up using sats, this "1 over 2" idea is interesting: https://twitter.com/Parman_Public/status/1603698639947599873 )
• MimbleWimble(LTC) support (WIP, see nblockchain/NLitecoin#2 ).
• Multi-sig support via Threshold signatures (or asynchronous ones? see https://twitter.com/real_or_random/status/1523964246945636352 ) with Canary wallets (https://twitter.com/_benkaufman/status/1788601994451562695).
• Use deniable encryption to allow for a duress password/passphrase/pin.
• BIP352: Silent Payments (as an extra justification against BIP32: e.g. gap limits), see https://twitter.com/reardencode/status/1788577217884364861 .
• Bech32m support, see https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1794014556513046721 .
• Fee selection for custom priority (so that our RBF support becomes actually useful).
• ETH gas station (to pay for token transactions with token value instead of ETH).
• Crosschain atomic swaps (via comit network? more info here and here).
• Decentralized naming resolution? (BNS/ENS/OpenCAP/...), ideally adding this feature in the browser-extension frontend (in the same way MetaMask enables ENS). As an example, this wallet seems to build on BNS: https://twitter.com/markymark/status/1625458698243166210 , https://wallet.hiro.so/ , https://github.com/hirosystems/stacks-wallet-web
• identicon (e.g. https://jdenticon.com/) support to identify recipients/channels/invoices
• TapRoot support?
• Consider Vitalik's 1wei wallet-funding idea in case the community adopts it.
• UI testing with Selenium+UnoPlatform (see https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/uno-platform-announces-version-2-0-of-cross-platform-development-platform-300921202.html).
• Blazor frontend (for browser extension?), which could enable Playwright/Selenium testing.
• Support for Stratum protocol over SSL.
• Decentralized currency exchange (e.g. thorchain?).

Anti-roadmap

Things we will never develop (if you want them, feel free to fork us):

• ZCash/Dash/Monero support (I don't like the trusted setup of the first, plus the others use substandard privacy solutions which in my opinion have been all surpassed by MimbleWimble/Grin).
• Ripple/Stellar/OneCoin support (they're all a scam).
• BCash (as it's less evolved, technically speaking; I don't want to deal with transaction malleability or lack of Layer2 scaling).

How to compile/install/use?

The easiest way to use for non-technical people is to install it from the Android AppStore:

Or if you use Linux, from the Snap Store:

To install via the command-line in (Ubuntu) Linux, do it this way:

snap install geewallet

(For the command-line client, use the name gwallet instead of geewallet.)

Other platforms: coming soon.

If you're an advanced user, you could clone it and compile it yourself this way (in macOS or Linux):

./configure.sh --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

Or this way if you're on Windows:

configure.bat
make.bat

Thanks

Special thanks to all the contributors (we recently surpassed 10! if you count the contributions that are in review at the moment). Without forgetting as well the amazing developers that contribute(d) to the great opensource libraries that this project uses; some examples:

• @juanfranblanco: Nethereum
• @nicolasdorier, @joemphilips: NBitcoin
• @redth, @EBrown8534, @mierzynskim: ZXing.Net.Mobile, ZXing.Net.Xamarin
• Xamarin.Forms: @mfkl, @stanbav, @AndreiMisiukevich, @melimion, @z3ut
• JsonRpcSharp: @lukethenuke, @mfkl, @jerry40, @mierzynskim, @winstongubantes and again @juanfranblanco
• ...and all the Xamarin/Mono/.NetCore community in general, of course

If you want to become part of this distributed team of brave disruptarians, check our CONTRIBUTING guideline first, and start coding!

Feedback

If you want to accelerate development/maintenance, create an issue and pledge funds with gitcoin.