How many times have you heard someone ask this same question?
So where did you go after you first asked it, and what did you expect to find when you got there?
Several times in the last five years, I’ve needed a Bitcoin wallet with a particular feature for reference in a blog post, for personal use or for a recommendation. While there were many services out there that appeared to help me in my quest, I always found them lacking in some way: Limited or non-existent search capabilities, very technically oriented content with an absence of help or tips, stale data or UI’s that left a lot to be desired.
To this day, despite an apparent increase in the availability of such services, I still observe with some regularity the same old question being asked on Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.
In case you’re wondering, the real answer to this question is of course it depends. A Bitcoin wallet is something unique to you. Its utility is relative to the privacy, security and usability features you’d like to see in your own personal financial transactions.
It’s been clear to me for some time that a de-facto resource for finding wallets by feature is completely missing from the Bitcoin ecosystem. So over 2019 and 2020 I decided to build one and named it WalletMatrix; a platform for people to do detailed research over dozens of Bitcoin wallets.
But WalletMatrix is more than just a simple wallet feature discovery service. Its philosophy is predicated on decentralised content management where wallet vendors maintain their own product as structured data, following a common standard which is open to ongoing change and iteration.
Why? Because scraping and manually requesting information from vendors and their websites really sucks.
Scraping isn’t sustainable because of the sheer pace at which wallets and their features are being developed and because of the complexities involved in consistently extracting text from hundreds of frequently changing websites and their github repositories.
WalletMatrix wants to be a key component of the on-boarding process for people new to Bitcoin and to play a significant role in the lives of those with more advanced requirements. To this end WalletMatrix consumes data directly from vendors and features a REST API for consumption by 3rd party applications, vendor data that can be digitally signed for independent data-verification, while also feature a content-managed glossary of terms and of course a feature-rich search UI.
I imagined wallet vendors maintaining their own information which when processed by WalletMatrix, meant that services like bitcoin.org could use the REST API to drive its “Choose your Bitcoin Wallet” feature instead of maintaining its own separate database. Perhaps the WalletMatrix URL would be pinned to popular Bitcoin resources like lopp.net (Update November 2020: It is) and /r/Bitcoin.
Coming back down to Earth for a moment: Modern users of the web are more sophisticated than ever before and they expect sophisticated and flexible tools, not clunky spreadsheets, stale, unsearchable tabular data and technical nomenclature with little or no context or explanation.
WalletMatrix is currently in beta and I’m seeking to add a little spit and polish with help from feedback garnered from Bitcoin users and wallet vendors alike (actually, especially from wallet vendors!).
This is where you dear reader, come in.
In August 2020 I reached out to 24 well known Bitcoin wallet vendors (and again in November) scoping for interest in pushing their data through to WalletMatrix. At the time, the Matrix itself was hidden away behind a temporary authentication wall to keep vendors on-side while finalising functionality and the presentation of their offerings, but very little was heard back. Since this time, three well-known wallets are now on board whose data is now maintained by its team — I sincerely hope others will follow — it’s not hard to do.
Are you, or do you work for a wallet vendor? I’d be happy to hear from you, but for the time being, you can find out more here.
For the rest of you, would you have benefited from a service like WalletMatrix when you started out? Would you find it useful now? What else would you expect to be able to see and do with such a service?
The need to authenticate has now been removed, so I invite you to go and have a look around and let me know what you think, I’d really love to hear from you: https://walletmatrix.app/matrix/.
Cheers.
Russ Michell, Kāpiti, Aotearoa New Zealand. October 2020.
