In our Road to Mainnet article, we highlighted our goal to build the infrastructure and functionalities to support open organizations and borderless collaboration. In December 2018, we launched Inception — the first alpha version of our reference client named ELLD and along with it a test network. Since these releases, we have received feedback from users that have and will continue to help us improve the platform as we build on.

To foster adoption, usability and mainly improve UX onboarding for non-technical users, we’re complementing our CLI-based client with a simple desktop application that enables anyone to interact with the features of the Ellcrys network without knowledge of coding or command line environment.

Today, we’re pleased to announce SafeHold — a desktop app for sending, receiving and mining transactions on our network (currently the test network). SafeHold makes accessing Ellcrys functionalities easy and straightforward.

In the traditional CLI approach to access the network (our test network), you are required to have a certain level of technical experience to run a node from the command-line. You need to know lengthy commands to construct and query transactions or the state of the network. Understanding and operating a CLI-based client may result in time and financial cost for users. All these are not so easy for non-technical users. With SafeHold, we have taken away the complexity so you can interact with our current and future network versions more conveniently. We want your interaction with the Ellcrys blockchain to be simple. Super. Simple. Now, let’s take a look at the features available on Safehold. Shall we?

Beautiful onboarding experiences

We worked extensively on crafting an onboarding experience that helps users get a clear understanding of all the need-to-know information, functionalities and security tips to be able to use the application without confusion. The blockchain technology is popularly known to be complicated; we are here to simplify it. You will love the well-thought-out illustrations designed into each onboarding page to help easy assimilation.

Getting started with SafeHold

Whether you’re on Windows, on Linux or macOS, you can download the SafeHold Desktop app here.

Once you have completed installation, you will be required to input a password. This password will be used to secure your wallet account. Use a password combination you will remember. After this, you will be required to write down your seed phrase carefully — It’s a set of 12 words that allows you to rebuild your wallet and all its accounts in the case where you can no longer access your computer. On the next page, you’ll need to verify your 12-words seed phrase by selecting four correct seed words from a collection of random words. The challenge is to ensure you’ve written down your 12-word phrase. Yay! Congratulations! A new default Safehold account will be created for you. You can choose to rename it to your preferred alias.

☝🏼 PRO TIPS:

Make sure you use a very strong password with more than eight characters. Your password protects your wallet; It is used to encrypt its content before storage on your computer. Do not share your password with anyone. You cannot change your seedphrase. If you accidentally sent it to someone or suspect that scammers have taken it over, then create a new Ellcrys wallet immediately and transfer your funds to it.

Send and receive transactions

Now that you’re officially a SafeHolder 😎, you can store, send, receive and manage Ellies easily and securely. It’s that easy. No technical knowledge required at all.

So now, Let’s take a look at how to send a transaction:

But before that, as a new user, you will need to request for test coins. Here’s how you will go about it.

Sign Up on Ellcrys Suite — A tool for allocating and managing our pre-sale tokens and testnet coins. Make sure you activate your account by clicking the verification link sent to your email. Go back the Ellcrys Suite to log in. Enter your preferred SafeHold account address on the “Request Test Coin” form on the “Overview page”. You will receive an email notification confirming the disbursement of your test coin. Also, you can track the status of your request on “Test Coin Request” log on the “Overview page” on Ellcrys Suite. You may receive this notification before the transaction that pays to you address gets mined; You can track the balance of your request address on Ellscan.

Now that you’ve received your test coins, see how to send a transaction on SafeHold:

Click “Send button” on the “Overview page”. Then, select your preferred wallet account. Input amount to be sent. Type or paste recipient Ellcrys address. Type or select a transaction fee (e.g. 0.22 ELL) Click “Send”. You will be required to confirm the transaction. Boom! The transaction is successful! It’s that easy!

Also, Here’s how to receive a transaction on SafeHold

Click the “Receive” button You can either reveal your QR code to the sender or copy your Ellcrys address. Send this address to the sender or you can experiment by sending some ELL to yourself right on SafeHold. Once the fund is received, it will be reflected in your Account balance. The testnet has a block time of 1 minute.

Mining

SafeHold has an in-built CPU mining engine to enable users to participate in the block creation process and receive newly created ELL coins as a reward. The more processing speed of your machine, the higher your chance of mining the next block and securing the mining reward.

Note: The current test network does not allocate any reward for mining new blocks. Subsequent versions demoing our fully-developed consensus system will support rewards.

You may be wondering about how this works; Take a look at the overview to find out:

Turn on your Miner Engine on the side menu which will change the mining status to ON. Switch to “Miner” page; You will notice changes to your miner hash rate. These changes describe the number of hashes your computer can compute per second. When you successfully mine a block, check your “My Mined Blocks” in the mining activity table section. Boom! The block you mined alongside its details including your rewards will be displayed.

Here’s a quick glossary of the terms you will see on the mining page