Nami Wallet

Nami Wallet Overview

The wallet is an indispensable tool to any blockchain. Without a wallet, it is not possible for the user to communicate with the blockchain to give orders and perform transactions.

Cardano has two official wallets to manage your ADAs, Yoroi https://yoroi-wallet.com/#/ or Daedalus https://daedaluswallet.io/.

Daedalus is a full node wallet, which connects directly to the blockchain. It is only possible to install it on a pc, because of its resource demand. Yoroi has two versions, one is Yoroi Mobile that runs on a cell phone (Android or IOS), and the other is Yoroi Desktop Extension for Chrome or Firefox browsers. It allows us to develop the interface faster as it is a lightweight wallet because it does not store the entire blockchain. The advantage is that it requires little computer input and network connection. The disadvantage is that to operate you connect with servers of the company Emurgo, its developer, which although it is a serious company, responsible for the commercial development of Cardano, it is still an intermediary.

Having a variety of products is important to satisfy the demands of each user. Today, both official wallets do not allow the minting of non fungible tokens (NFT), although they can store them, although they will surely be updated with the imminent arrival of smart contracts.

There are other wallets that allow minting NFT, created by community developers, such as Nami Wallet, which is a lightweight wallet, completely free to use and open source, which you can see on Github.

Nami Wallet is already a working product, is a chrome-based browser extension wallet, and can be downloaded from the Google Chrome store here, and already has over 3,000 users.

Its creators clarify, on their website, that while Nami is compatible with Daedalus and Yoroi, so you can restore wallets from those two applications, there is a limitation, as Nami will not track all the addresses associated with your imported wallet, and could result in a partial mirroring of assets although it does not result in loss of funds. Why does this happen? Because Daedalus and Yoroi use the concept of multiple addresses per wallet, while Nami only uses a single address.

Nami also allows you to create sub-accounts from a single seed phrase. All but the first account are hidden from Daedalus/Yoroi. The authors do not recommend using Nami and Daedalus/Yoroi simultaneously, but use the seed phrase to migrate from one wallet to another. If you want to migrate from Daedalus/Yoroi, you must send all your funds to the address you see in Nami after importing the seed phrase.

Therefore, it is preferable to create a new wallet for Nami, to avoid confusion and maintain the user experience.

Only one seed phrase can be imported, but sub-accounts can be created from it. Each account is its own wallet independent of the others. There is no reference to the other account on the blockchain, which gives Nami some kind of privacy and anonymity, when distributing funds across multiple accounts. With each account it can be delegated to different pools.

The Proposal in FUND6

The developers present Nami as the solution for a wallet with a very intuitive, easy and playful interface, as well as a high flexibility, to unleash its full potential for dApps. A chrome-based browser wallet extension, which is highly dynamic, yet very simple and intuitive.

Nami Wallet is a chrome-based browser extension wallet, and can be injected into the browser context to interact with dApps (decentralized applications).

The wallet uses the https://github.com/Emurgo/cardano-serialization-lib serialization library for wallet key creation and transaction construction. 

Blockfrost is used to get the information from the blockchain, which makes the wallet a thin client wallet, but it can also become a full node wallet, as you can connect your own node.

The wallet can handle thousands of assets, which displays them with images and allows you to quickly search through them.

The goal is to allow users to interact with Cardano in its full capacity, to have smart contract support, while the interface is easy to use, and keeps the barrier to entry low. This way, people can join the ecosystem without having much prior experience with blockchain or cryptocurrencies.

The Roadmap

Milestones:

• Develop a feedback survey on the current wallet and see user demands.
• Contribute to existing libraries, such as the serialization library and standards
• Support smart contracts
• Design real use cases, e.g., implementing Nami in the SpaceBudz marketplace
• Create tools and libraries to make it easier for developers to interact with Nami
• Design a website for tutorial on wallet functionalities and tools
• Extend Nami with hardware wallet support 
• Develop a mobile version
• Improve Nami API documentation and provide code implementation examples

The Team

Alessandro Konrad, German, computer science student at LMU Munich. He is related in the cryptocurrency environment since mid-2018, and has been involved in Cardano since late 2019. Interview by Charles Hoskinson.

Pascal Lapointe, lives in Quebec, Canada, software developer, web and connected technologies. 

Alessandro and Pascal launched SpaceBudz and are the operators of Berry Pool.

Funding requested: 40,000 USD

You can view the proposal on Catalyst for FUND6 here.

The official website: https://namiwallet.io/ 

This article has been written in the REFINING STAGE and the proposal may undergo changes from its developers until the ASSESS STAGE.