A group of Bitcoin wallet developers and companies, some of whom refer to themselves as the ‘Bitcoin Wallet Standards Group’, met to discuss the future of Bitcoin wallet standardization this past Saturday in Berlin. Something the biggest names in the space believe is overdue.

S3ND

The meeting, called “S3ND” (pronounced “Send”) to represent how Bitcoin handles push payments, included some well known Bitcoin wallet and service providers in the digital currency space. Armory, BitcoinJ, Ciphrex, Coinomi, Digital Bitbox, Electrum, Green Address, Ledger, Lightning Labs, Mycelium and Trezor were all represented in Berlin over the weekend.

Many current Bitcoin developers (referred to collectively as “Bitcoin Core”), who also run their own wallet software, hardware or services, were in attendance. Discussion about the need for Bitcoin wallet standards and interoperability had emerged during the 2016 Scaling Bitcoin event in Milan, according to S3ND conference organizer Anton Yemelyanov.

“Having a safe and positive end-user experience is incredibly important to Bitcoin’s success, as is ensuring that the wallets themselves are both interoperable and robust,” Mr. Yemelyanov told Crypto Insider ahead of the meeting. “Over the last few years, the Bitcoin ecosystem has been maturing and it made sense that efforts should be made to foster coordination between interested Bitcoin wallet developers so that they can discuss the ways in which they can inter-operate with one-another, discuss the best security practices, take a look at upcoming technologies and answer each-other’s questions.”

Wallet developers laying down foundations for the future of #Bitcoin in Berlin… pic.twitter.com/eYTTCEUk6D — Eric Lombrozo (@eric_lombrozo) April 2, 2017

Mr. Yemelyanov adds: “We believe that at this point the Bitcoin ecosystem has matured enough to require different players to start putting efforts toward establishing standards.”

Jonas Schnelli, a Bitcoin core developer since 2013 and the founder of minimalist Bitcoin wallet Digital Bitbox, wrote a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal paper about standardizing Bitcoin wallet technology last year.

“Generally for hardware wallets, it’s a problem that there is no standard,” Mr. Schnelli told Crypto Insider. “This is a big missing piece to the [Bitcoin] puzzle. We need to have a standard on how desktop applications can interact with hardware wallets.”

Bitcoin Sophistication Creates Need for Interoperability

In short, as Bitcoin evolves to cover more sophisticated use cases, applications need more sophisticated ways to interface one another. “For instance, making hardware wallets easier to use from different software wallets or making it easier for wallets to support more sophisticated contract types,” Eric Lombrozo tells Crypto Insider, perhaps suggesting that Ethereum-esque ‘smart contracts’ might one day be a feature of Bitcoin. “This meeting is an opportunity for different software and hardware wallet developers to discuss ideas face-to-face with the ultimate objective of eventually creating a set of industry standards.”

The meeting was held in the spirit of an open sharing of ideas in line with Bitcoin’s original open-source vision. Despite different wallet vendors in principle competing for market space, and given everyone’s desire to grow the pie, there is a tremendous spirit of cooperation, Mr. Lombrozo says.

“Creating better standards for interoperability will allow all of our tools and applications to make use of each other’s capabilities,” Mr. Lombrozo remarks. “It also helps us better understand how to support a large number of use cases in a general way.”

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