Will There Be any Crypto Wallets in the Future?
At the very core of any technology, and blockchain, in particular, is a simple fact that it’s constantly developing. What used to be a unique solution yesterday might be out of date tomorrow when several other companies create something even better. Although a lot of wallets are currently competing with each other, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them will exist in the future. But before we settle down to think about it, let’s answer one popular question.
What Do We Need a Wallet For?
It’s really simple with a physical wallet — you lose it and your cash is gone as well. But the situation with a crypto wallet is quite a different story. Crypto wallets do not contain any coins. Of course, you can argue that the loss of your debit card is not that big of a deal either. That might be true, however, there is one important difference. Your bank has full access to your money and you are not 100% in charge of it, but with a good crypto wallet you’re gonna be the only boss of your funds (if that’s what you really need). A wallet helps you manage the keys and addresses, check the balance, as well as execute transactions. In the case you lose your phone with your android wallet, as with a debit card, the funds are not gonna go anywhere; they will always be there waiting for you. There’s a chance that you might never see them again though, but that’s another story.
Despite the fact that wallets have been created to make your life easier, newbies often struggle when using them and this needs to be fixed once and for all.
A Decentralized Future
We’ve come across an interesting Medium post where the author is thinking about the same problem.
Apart from the certain complexity that some of the users experience, she points out one important fact. While a wallet plays almost no role when using a traditional app like Uber, you won’t be able to do anything without it in a dApp.
What does this mean?
Currently, when you’re choosing your next cozy travel apartment in Airbnb, you have to follow a few simple steps: browse through the options, choose the right one, pay, and check-in. The future, however, might change a lot. So the steps would be as follows: you open a dApp, browse through the options, choose the right one, read the instructions about how to pay in coins, follow the instructions, exchange your BTC to ETH because the homeowner only accepts ETH, make sure you have enough patience for all of that, sign the transaction, pay, and… if there was no mistake done, finally check-in.
Shouldn’t it be a whole lot easier?
The author of this article brought up an interesting opinion on the future of dApps’ functionality. He talks about “dApp Relationship Management” where your personal information stays hidden but your activity with the funds in the wallet is visible. It will be about your relationship with the protocol and the clues for where the value is created and destroyed will be in the usage data.
If we think of existing solutions, there are a few that come to mind. MetaMask has developed a browser extension while Mist & Brave have decided to aim higher and have created their own browser instead. All of these are really awesome projects, but a decentralized future requires something a bit more seamless.
The solution for performing “invisible” transactions without involving the user has yet to be found. The whole process of making transactions needs to stay unnoticeable. In a perfect world, a customer has to know only how many coins he is paying for the item or service he needs and everything else would be done automatically. No private keys and addresses involved. One idea that we can think of is to use a sort of a master key that will unlock all your wallets, as long as all the coins are compliant with the system.
So will wallets disappear?
Not necessarily. In some cases, you might still need a wallet to take care of your funds or simply take a look at your balance from time to time as you do with banking apps. It will probably come in the form of a super simple and convenient interface that can be used for investment purposes, holding, and other activities where speculation is involved. Therefore wallets will not disappear completely, but there might be fewer of them left.
The Lumi Wallet team is constantly working on improving our user experience and making our interface more comprehensible. At the moment we’re releasing our Lumi Collect SDK (software development kit). Lumi SDK, once integrated into a dApp, allows users to sign transactions smoothly and securely, almost as smooth as booking an apartment on Airbnb) It works as simple as this: a user clicks on a transaction button, confirms the transaction details, gets instantly redirected to Lumi Wallet, presses the sign button, and goes right back to the app. It might sound a bit complicated until you try it yourself.
In case you have some other ideas on how transactions will work in a decentralized world, you can always share them on our Telegram public chat. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit to get the news first.
