Thursday’s unexpected short squeeze resulted in a sudden and dramatic price spike across the entire cryptocurrency market. With Bitcoin gaining over $1,000 USD in less than one hour, many altcoins have experienced similar stratospheric surges. IOTA, however, is experiencing a prominent return to the positive, breaking out of a long descending price run as investor faith is restored in the flagging market.

Recent IOTA news has seen Fujitsu executive Rolf Werner join the IOTA foundation, which contributed to positive investor sentiment, but the most interesting announcement to come from from the IOTA development team recently is the announcement of the upcoming Trinity desktop wallet launch.

A March update outlined the current developmental state of IOTA’s highly anticipated Trinity wallet app, which is now in a security audit stage.

IOTA developer Navin Ramachandran stated in the update that, while the app project has been hindered by a lack of standardization within coding guidelines exacerbated by a failure to communicate accurate timelines with the IOTA community, the Trinity wallet app is already in an alpha stage of testing.

While the Trinity wallet app may still be awaiting app store approval and security auditing, the Trinity desktop wallet is slated for alpha testing in the first half of April.

According to a recent Reddit post published by Trinity Core Developer Charlie Varley, hundreds of new users are now being registered to the Trinity desktop wallet testing group.

What the Trinity Wallet Launch Means for IOTA

Work on IOTA’s user-friendly wallet application has been underway for several months, with a release expected at the conclusion of the security audit in 6-7 weeks time. Ramachandran, in answer to the question “when Trinity”, posted this response:

“When this audit is complete we can move to a public beta test where everyone can try out the mobile wallet via the official app stores, without any special invitation. At this time, we will also release the full audit report and the complete source code for public review.”

The cross-platform approach the IOTA team has taken in the development of the Trinity wallet app, however, will likely speed up the progression of the Trinity desktop app shift from private alpha to public beta.

The release of both a desktop and mobile IOTA-specific wallet app is set to significantly improve investor sentiment toward the slow-moving IOTA project — the proposed app offers a number of elements that would position it as one of the most feature-rich wallets available.

In addition to standard wallet features such as seed storage and generation, the Trinity wallet also delivers multiple seeds, as well as a “statefulness” feature that records all transactions and balances in order to overcome issues presented by IOTA’s “snapshot” function.

IOTA uses a unique consensus method called Tangle, which essentially causes every network participant to function as a node as well as a user.

This method, while extremely innovative, can cause the “Tangle” to expand in size dramatically — to the point where it becomes unwieldy.

To prevent this from occurring, snapshotting saves all balances, while removing all transaction data and history.

This process is best visualized with the image below — grey addresses represent the “tips” of the Tangle, which function as “new” Genesis addresses subsequent to a snapshot.

The Trinity wallet app incorporates a “snapshot transition feature,” which — according to Charlie Varley — involves simply confirming wallet balance when snapshots occur. After this point users need only retain their seed in Trinity, which automates the transition process.

Other features offered by the Trinity wallet app include paper wallet generation, multi-language support, and QR scanning.

The Future of IOTA

IOTA’s attempt to bring the internet of things onto the blockchain is a monumental task — while the release of a desktop or mobile app isn’t a great milestone in the grand scheme of IOTA’s vision, it will dramatically boost the adoption of IOTA, which will yield a net positive effect on the value of the token.

Providing users with an easy to use, an intuitive wallet is a critical step toward the success of any project — a feature that the IOTA dev team is set to deliver to their community in the very near future.

For more information about IOTA including price, market cap, technical information and social media links, please see our IOTA coin profile.