Walletbeat Walletbeat

About Walletbeat

Walletbeat's vision and mission

Ethereum is CROPS: Censorship-Resistant, Open, Private, and Secure. Walletbeat ensures users actually harness these values.

The Ethereum ecosystem has gone to painstaking lengths to ensure Ethereum-the-protocol embodies these values. However, this only matters if users actually get to harness these values.

For that to happen, every layer of the stack needs to be crafted with them in mind. Other layers are well-served by our peers at L2BEAT, Anticapture, DeFiScan, and others.

Walletbeat focuses on the last-mile wallet layer of the stack; users' gateway to Ethereum.
We ensure Ethereum values make it all the way to users.

We envision a world where Ethereum users enjoy full security, actual privacy, and real self-custody, using one of many transparent and open wallets within an interoperable and competitive ecosystem.

Walletbeat's values

  • CROPS, as current technology and cryptography enable.
  • Opinionated methodology, verifiable data, impartial assessments.
  • Verifiability matters. Fully-open is best, independently-audited is a compromise, closed is a non-starter.
  • Walk the talk. Walletbeat itself has to be the first to uphold the values it wishes to impose on others.
  • Legitimacy is the most important scarce resource. Walletbeat succeeds only if perceived as legitimate.

Creating incentives

Incentives drive outcomes, so let's change the incentives to change the outcomes.

Walletbeat creates incentives for wallets to compete on features and attributes that market incentives alone do not necessarily converge on.

Without such incentives:

  • Security is only a problem after a breach has already occurred
  • Privacy lingers as an afterthought until a user data breach takes place
  • Self-sovereignty remains on the backburner until a wallet's RPC backend or release pipeline gets compromised
  • Open-sourcing remains secondary to achieving maximal user growth metrics
  • Interoperability is selected against by the largest wallets' natural incentives to lock in their users.

Case in point: The Bybit hack was a 1,500,000,000 USD market failure. Many things went wrong, but it would have largely been prevented by having Clear Signing, i.e. the ability for users to understand what they are signing on their wallet. Implementing Clear Signing in an open and interoperable way is a difficult engineering challenge, but it's not a 1,500,000,000-USD-difficulty-level challenge. Yet the market failed to sufficiently incentivize this challenge to be addressed before it was too late. Walletbeat exists to strengthen these incentives ahead of disasters.

Without Walletbeat, CROPS values are not important until the day they are.
With Walletbeat, they're important on a day-to-day level as wallets compete against one another.

Impartial, not neutral

Walletbeat aims to be fair, objective and impartial in its assessment of Ethereum wallets. This means its evaluation criteria methodology is applied consistently across wallets, and is based on objectively-verifiable data to the maximum extent possible.

This does not mean Walletbeat is neutral. Walletbeat is opinionated in its decision of which criteria to use. Walletbeat aims to follow Ethereum's ethos and cypherpunk values as a guiding principle. See Vitalik Buterin's blog post on wallets and the Walletbeat FAQ page for more details.

Commitment to transparency

Walletbeat is committed to transparency. Contributors reveal their affiliation and / or shares in wallet companies. It is an open-source project licensed under the Free and Open-Source MIT license.

Communications transparency

Most discussions happen on GitHub via PRs, issues, and discussions. Community-facing communications are broadcasted on the Walletbeat X account and Walletbeat Farcaster channel. Walletbeat group chats exist on Farcaster and Signal. Communications between Walletbeat contributors and wallet entities have public disclosure requirements and are listed here.

Funding transparency

Walletbeat has received the following funding:

If further funding becomes a necessity in the future, Walletbeat aims to raise funds through retroactive funding, ecosystem grants, and individual donations. Walletbeat will then update the above list to document the date, source, and amount of such funding.

See the treasury transparency report for more detailed funding flows.

Walletbeat refuses and will continue to refuse funding from wallet-related entities.

Walletbeat however was originally created and is currently hosted by Fluidkey, an incorporated company in Switzerland with a wallet offering. In order to maximize credible neutrality, Walletbeat's long-term ownership goal is to become an independent DAO or foundation (similar to L2Beat) once Walletbeat reaches a higher level of maturity and a broader set of regular contributors. Until this is achieved, Walletbeat will not list nor rate wallet software from Fluidkey.

Disclaimer

Wallets listed on Walletbeat do not represent endorsements and are for informational purposes only.

If you find that something is wrong, please help Walletbeat by contributing!