New Alliances at Bitcoin Wallet Standards Initiative Roundtable Meetings

This past weekend on April 1-2 in Berlin, Germany, a group of various bitcoin developers met to discuss industry-wide wallet standards. The “Bitcoin Wallet Standards Initiative” had some of the most popular and leading wallet representatives within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

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The First Annual Bitcoin Wallet Standards Initiative

Bitcoin wallets developers share a mutual interest when building the cryptocurrency wallets we all use today. Lots of companies use similar industry standards within the bitcoin wallet environment like deterministic wallet infrastructure, security features and more. This weekend a large group of bitcoin wallet developers met at the popular bitcoin-accepting bar in Berlin, Room 77. The Bitcoin Wallet Standards Initiative (S3ND) had wallet representatives from fifteen different platforms attend among other industry developers.

S3ND included representatives from popular bitcoin wallet companies such as Ledger, Trezor, Green Address, Bitgo, Armory, Electrum, Mycelium and many more. Furthermore, the meeting also included bitcoin proponents such as the Lighting Network developer Olaoluwa Osuntokun (Roasbeef) and core developers Luke-jr, Jonas Schnelli, and Matt Corallo attended as well. The S3ND initiative’s road map also plans to host more wallet standards round table meetings in the future to create better wallet interoperability.

“Developing a common language and the best-practices for wallet design, without preventing competition and the freedom of wallet designers to innovate, is critical to users,” explains the S3ND founding principles. “Bitcoin must be interoperable. Users must be able to choose the wallet software and hardware they want, with the freedom to migrate when they see fit.”

Other Wallet Developers Express Interest

The meeting at Room 77 discussed subjects such as wallet migration, Segwit, Bitcoin Proposal discussions (BIP), multi-sig standards and more. “As the organization matures, working groups will continue to develop standards independently, which will be discussed and ratified at annual meetings,” details S3ND organizers. Furthermore, attendees focused a lot of attention towards privacy standards such as private transaction relays, and common transaction formats. While a significant amount of wallet companies are members of the organization other digital currency programmers are welcome to attend.

Other bitcoin wallet representatives who could not attend expressed their interest in the wallet standards roundtable.

“We would have loved to attend this,” said the developers of Samourai Wallet. “Unfortunately we didn’t see any advanced notice of this event taking place. Looking forward to the outcome of this event.

“I would love to attend (Breeze Tumblebit Wallet), but unfortunately it’s the other end of the world,” explained Adam Ficsor, a contributor to the Tumblebit research paper.

S3ND Summarization and Github Organization

One of the organizers of the event, Lightning developer Roasbeef, explained to wallet developers who could not attend that a summary of the event would be created in the near future. “We will likely prepare a summarization document to be published after the event which goes over the topics discussed, action items, and follow-up work. Keep on eye on this Github org,” Roasbeef detailed.

Organizers seemed pleased with the first annual S3ND and the creation of a forum for wallet standards. Members believe the meeting will lead to better wallet design and “more efficient and applicable standards processes can be developed.”

What do you think about the Bitcoin Wallet Standards Initiative (S3ND) roundtable meetings? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock, S3ND, and Room 77.

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