Wallet Working Group Introduction

A Tezos Wallet Working Group Introduction

In the interest of improving collaboration and delivering more efficient and maintainable solutions, wallet developers in the Tezos ecosystem have formed a wallet working group.

The Tezos ecosystem is a decentralized global community of individuals and teams working to improve the network across many different areas. In the course of delivering solutions for the ecosystem, teams often find themselves working on public goods; these benefit significantly from standardization and collaboration on libraries, documentation, best practices, etc. This compliments Tezos’ unique approach to governance on-chain, as an evolving protocol also presents challenges since teams are required to frequently update or reconsider their solutions.

Wallets are a critical area for any crypto network as they are a primary interface by which many people interact with the blockchain. Developers will continue to be expected to deliver new types of functionality and it is important to foster an environment where they can innovate quickly while adhering to best practices.

The overarching goal is to provide resources in the form of functional requirements, testing guidelines, and UX guidelines for wallet developers. The intended effect of these resources is to help establish wallet best practices and norms that give Tezos users a consistent and positive experience while reducing the burden on the wallet development teams. We aim to do this while encouraging creativity, openness, and contribution from the community.

Specific objectives of the working group include:

  1. Improve communication to reduce friction and duplicative efforts, and to increase the speed at which new features get implemented
  2. Increase the focus on UX, bring more product focus to user-facing tools such as wallets
  3. Reduce community support burden as well as the wallet specific support channel burdens
  4. Improve maintainability across protocol updates

Intended work products the group will pursue:

  • A catalogue of well defined functional requirements
  • Technical recommendations, where appropriate for each functional requirement
  • Testing outlines for each functional requirement
  • UX patterns and anti-patterns for each functional requirement
  • Working group process for capturing and refining proposed additions or changes
  • Technical bulletins relevant to wallet developers on upcoming protocol changes

The group had an initial video call in which 23 people participated to better understand how this effort can be beneficial to both the teams as well as the broader ecosystem. Specifically, the output from the wallet working group should also benefit smart contract and Tezos dapp and solutions developers as they often need to integrate wallet services into their projects. The working group will be using this public gitlab repo for publication, discussion and issue tracking. Additionally, updates will be posted on Agora, and TZIPs will be created as needed.

Decentralization can be challenging, but Tezos has always been a community of people committed to valuing the security and sustainability that comes from decentralized participation. Tezos sets itself apart from most networks in this regard, and working groups are intended to increase openness, participation, and decentralization while also enabling better collaboration and communication.

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Thanks for posting - I am interested in updates on calls for grant applications around wallet functionality. We (Lunie) have several upcoming product enhancements which would cover all of the requirements set forth and then some, but want to make sure there’s demand from the Tezos community and foundation side to build an integration.

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