Walletbeat 2025 EF funding grant proposal - 2026-07 update

It has been almost exactly one year since Walletbeat applied for funding (July 16, 2025), and a bit over 9 months since receiving the first funds from EF (September 24, 2025). Since then, Walletbeat has come a long way thanks to the funding it received from Ethereum Foundation.

The primary purpose of the grant was to support Walletbeat’s launch. We are not there yet, but we are close, and our current funding is precisely enough to get us there. However, it poses important questions about what’s ahead for Walletbeat post-launch to ensure project continuity.

What Walletbeat had promised

The below is a summary; see the detailed grant proposal here.

High-level launch markers

walletbeat.fyi → walletbeat.eth
walletbeat.eth → beta.walletbeat.eth
beta.walletbeat.eth → walletbeat.eth (last redirect pending prior to official launch)

What we promised vs what we delivered

First, what we said in the grant application that we accomplished vs not.

Why we are where we are

One of the things Walletbeat didn’t expect is how software wallets rating methodology grew outside of the original list we promised. We see this as a good thing, as our coverage and thoroughness in wallet review grows, which grows the value of the site. Added new attributes include:

Scam prevention measures
Multi-address correlation privacy
Duress resistance
Onchain permissions management
Transaction legibility grew significantly to track Clear Signing & ERC-7730 / ERC-8213

As the ecosystem grows, we should expect Walletbeat’s rating methodology to continue growing too, albeit as a slower pace than the above.

Contributor dropoff

While we are likely still on budget, we are not on time. This can be explained by the unfortunate circumstance that some contributors we had hoped to rely on in our initial proposal did not have time to contribute to Walletbeat. Of the initial set in the proposal, the contributors that remained active throughout Walletbeat’s implementation were polymutex and darrylyeo. The others moved on to other priorities within the EF or their respective companies. New Walletbeat contributors such as 0xMattmatt, lucilapastore, Tere, and johngrantuk showed up and filled in the gaps, but this process took place over the course of the following months. This took time to find them, recruit them, and to bring them up to speed on the project.

Prioritization

For much of this time, the prioritization was on finalizing Walletbeat’s software wallet rating methodology over wallet data collection. This was due to wanting it to be relatively stable prior to sending out calls for data collection. Such efforts may end up redundant or obsolete should methodology later change. Hardware wallet methodology was also set aside, in order to narrow focus to software wallets first.

In retrospect, this prioritization ended up being mostly correct. But it had the drawback of giving the impression that Walletbeat wasn’t capable of Just Shipping Something™, because the site itself would sit with nearly zero rated wallets for most of this time. Meanwhile, Coinspect’s Wallet Security Ranking kept shipping, and vibe-coded alternatives like WalletRadar (which uses Walletbeat’s data under the hood) showed up. Now that the methodology is stable, that the website branding is mostly finalized as well, and that we have started gathering a critical mass of wallet rating data, this is no longer so much of an issue.

Legitimacy

Legitimacy is critical to Walletbeat’s mission. Wallet development teams won’t do anything if no one sees Walletbeat as credible. What we have done on top of the above:

Already secured endorsement & funding from other parts of the ecosystem. Recently, Walletbeat participated in the Giveth funding and secured additional funding.
Recently surpassed 1k followers on X, which we also plan to focus on growing further post-launch.
- This is needed for Walletbeat to succeed, as wallets won’t change if no one cares about what Walletbeat says about them.
Some Walletbeat contributors also attended the recent Berlin Blockchain week and presented on multiple occasions:
- Neocypherpunk summit: Joined a panel discussing privacy in Web3 and hosted a small session discussing Ethereum wallets privacy. Recording.
- Ethereum day: Spoke at the conference about CROPS in wallets. Slides.
- Dappcon: Hosted a workshop discussing & pushing Ethereum standards like ERC-7730 (clear signing) & ERC-8213 (Calldata & EIP-712 digest) helps in improving user experience & security. Slides, recording.
- Brew: Gave a workshop on how to capture a wallet’s network traffic to look for user data privacy leaks. Slides, not recorded.
Created full treasury transparency report.

Key risks & challenges we had anticipated, and whether they happened

Walletbeat is captured by wallet development teams
- Largely didn’t happen. Our only interaction with wallet development teams so far has mostly been on data entry and fielding some methodology questions, no questions of methodology changes. If anything, “capture” has perhaps happened the other way: Ambire has actively implemented a feature because Walletbeat highlighted the problem. MetaMask did the same, but more quietly.
Walletbeat rating methodology is miscalibrated at launch
- Didn’t happen, but at the same time we haven’t technically launched. Still, the lack of negative feedback on methodology and the presence of positive feedback provides hope.
Walletbeat fails to reach ecosystem recognition critical mass
- At 1,000 followers, we are still quite a small shop. We get one-off data entry contributions from wallet teams, but that is generally the exception, not the rule. Many users on X are asking about wallet recommendations, and we are not consistently showing up in these conversations the way L2BEAT shows up in L2 security discussions. More work to do here.
- Planning to partner as part of the launch of Kohaku and Clear Signing onchain registry.
- Also eyeing curriculum mentions in Shefi and Cyfrin courses.
Walletbeat launch timeline slips due to contributor constraints
- The risk that was stated here was around polymutex’s time specifically. In the end, the contributor constraints ended up being from dropoff of other contributors.

Where we fell short

Hardware wallets

Hardware wallets is the big one here. We had promised hardware wallet methodology and data input. This has largely been deprioritized to narrow focus on launching with software wallets only, as the challenge ended up being more than enough.

Hardware wallets are still on the roadmap, and likely deserve their own multi-month push. Hopefully not as long as it took so far, since a lot of the common building blocks are now built (website, branding, data pipeline, contribution workflows, etc). It will mostly be methodology and data entry work. It may also involve taxonomy work to define what constitutes a hardware wallet, since some cases are difficult to adjudicate. Examples include hardware wallets requiring a specific phone or smartwatch app, or different secure elements with different trust assumptions.

Treasury management

We kept grant funds in Ether, with the rationale that we are an Ethereum project and we want to be fully aligned. However, contributors need to be paid in USDC, and as a result of the all-Ether policy, market movements have caused us to lose about 35% of our grant value. In the future, we will adopt a split-asset policy, and low-risk yield strategies.

Where we go next

See 2026 roadmap.