The community around Cardano platform has been crying for a more convenient way to interact with the Cardano blockchain, store and transfer Cardano’s ADA cryptocurrency for quite some time. A few weeks ago, the only option was the official Daedalus heavy wallet. It’s inconvenient to install as it requires to download and synchronize its own copy of blockchain initially and during each startup.

Earlier this year, we at VacuumLabs, as big fans and holders of Cardano cryptocurrency, have decided that we will help the Cardano ecosystem by developing light secure multi-platform wallet. Our goal was to develop a solution that could be easily accessed with web-browser without the need to download anything. Our inspiration came from a popular Ethereum web-based wallet MyEtherWallet.

This is how CardanoLite project was born. Recently, after some discussions, we decided to rename the project to AdaLite wallet. From now on, this project will be accessible on AdaLite.io URL. We’re still working on the new logo that will be representing our brand in the future.

We’ve encountered a lot of technical difficulties early in the project. Cardano was still a young project missing a deeper technical specification and documentation. So, in order to proceed with our project, we had to reverse engineer the Daedalus wallet.

Initially, we’ve decided to provide 2 types of accesses to the wallet: by seed phrase and encrypted .JSON. Both of these accesses don’t provide the required security because they require the handling of sensitive data in an insecure way and are vulnerable to different types of potential attacks. They also require that the user trusts that AdaLite website won’t steal their sensitive data. We, therefore, developed the wallet keeping in mind that our product will be completed and acceptable for our users only if we provide the possibility of trustless secure access through a trusted hardware wallet.

We’re happy that we’ve managed to achieve this. Together with Trezor, we’ll provide the Cardano community a new and secure way to manage their ADA cryptocurrency. The next Trezor T firmware update (that’s expected to be released really soon) will include the support for Cardano. It’ll be immediately ready to use our AdaLite web-based wallet. This way, the user will always store their private key on Trezor model T hardware wallet and it won’t be necessary for them to trust us while accessing their wallet through the AdaLite website. Follow us on Twitter or join our Telegram channel and we’ll let you know when the new Trezor firmware is released.

You can use the wallet on any browser and operating system without the need to download anything. It takes just a few seconds to generate a new wallet or to access an existing one and it is very easy to use. We don’t store any of your sensitive data, your private key never leaves your computer and signing of transactions is done in your browser (or, in case you are using Trezor, it’s done by Trezor). On top of it, AdaLite works on smartphones so you can access your funds from anywhere at any time. As far as we know, we’re the only truly multiplatform wallet on market right now.

AdaLite wallet currently has one limitation compared to Daedalus. It’s limited to 10 pre-defined (sequentially derived) addresses per wallet. The implication of this implementation is that wallets created on Daedalus won’t properly work on AdaLite. The reason is this: after each transaction, Daedalus randomly derives a new address, therefore during wallet recovery, Daedalus scans the whole blockchain for possible addresses that belong to a given wallet private key. This would be extremely difficult to execute for multiple users connected to a single server every time they try to access their wallet, therefore we came up with this restriction as we believe most of the users will be fine with having only a single address (and we provide them with 9 extra). Imported Daedalus wallets will work, but they’ll most likely show zero balance (as we aren’t monitoring the randomly generated addresses), unless you are keeping your funds on the first address that was generated by Daedalus that is identical with the first AdaLite address. It is worth to note that AdaLite wallets can be imported into Daedalus without any limitations.

We’re currently supporting Daedalus address derivation scheme for seeds and JSON created wallets, but the Trezor support will already come with the new (Icarus/Yoroi) derivation scheme. Once the Icarus scheme will become a standard, we’ll switch everything to it. One important blocker for this is that there isn’t a standardized JSON wallet export file format for Icarus yet.

We don’t want to stop with Trezor integration. Our plans are much bolder than that. We’ll definitely integrate with Nano Ledger once it’ll support Cardano. We plan to maintain compatibility and interoperability with all future official Cardano releases so it would be possible to fall back to the official wallet for any reason. We want to support interaction with smart contracts once it’s released. We want to provide an interface for staking delegation and much more. As for now, we’ll be listening to the community and implement whatever feature will be deemed the most useful.

The code for AdaLite wallet is publicly auditable and easy to review on GitHub. This project is developed by VacuumLabs, a centre of excellence for digital design and engineering.

You can read our previous development blog post here.