07 August 2024
We are super excited to announce that Pallad has finally landed on a planet called Mina Mainnet. We’ve been working our asses off for the past year, spending most of our free time outside of our 9-5 jobs to build this wallet. It has been a challenge to keep up with everything and create a product that will raise the bar high enough for Mina Wallets. But look mom, we did it.
Backstory
You may be wondering how it happened that we decided to ship a Mina wallet. The story starts with a part of our team that used to work in the Cardano ecosystem on a completely different wallet called Lace. You may like it or not, but Cardano and Mina have a lot in common. There are quite a few ecosystem builders in Mina that come from Cardano. Both blockchains did something different, both ecosystems use some kind of Ouroboros consensus. At the time, we felt there was a lack of a good quality wallet on Mina and we made a bet that ZK tech was going to change the internet as we knew it.
The process
We started building Pallad by creating a prototype of it with cutting-edge technology stack and some bold decisions. Most software wallets at that time were built using Webpack, Jest and Styled Components. Our decision was to challenge the industry standard and build an ES Modules only application (which is still challenging in the Web3), packed in a monorepo with Turborepo, bundled with Vite, and styled with Tailwind. After we built the prototype and we knew it was going to be an outstanding product, we applied for the zkIgnite3 program and were granted to deliver the Open Beta of Pallad on Devnet (actually Berkeley before it came to it’s life end). The program ended recently and we managed to deliver the promised beta version.
The big preparation
Over the past few weeks, Pallad has undergone a security audit by a blockchain security company, OtterSec. This process ensured that there are unlikely to be any serious vulnerabilities (yes, we’re not going to lie to you and say that the wallet is 100% secure, because there is no such wallet) that could put your tokens at risk, but remember, always do your own research and trust only yourself. We have also improved the web connector of our wallet to make life easier for zkApp developers. We will soon support developers to integrate the first Mainnet zkApps with Pallad.
What now?
Sit back, relax and create or restore your Mina wallet in Pallad. Prioritize your security and consider creating a new wallet with Pallad and then transferring funds to it, but restoring Auro and Clorio works just fine. Creating a new wallet reduces the potential attack vector. Our team will look for community feedback and we’ll start improving the wallet and its performance.
What’s next?
We already have some ideas for the next features, including Hardware wallets, custom tokens and NFTs, credentials attestation, DeFi integrations, on-ramp. Be sure to follow us on X, and consider joining our Discord to be the first to hear about new feature releases.
Acknowledgements
This wallet wouldn’t be able to launch now if it weren’t for the team and community around it. Special thanks go to Mathieu, Teddy, Rafał, Tomek, and all the beta testers who installed the Devnet version and provided feedback.