Gitcoin Grants application 2025

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Walletbeat

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The L2BEAT for wallets. Who watches the wallets?

Description

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Walletbeat aims to be the L2BEAT of wallets. It reviews wallets to ensure the Ethereum wallet ecosystem remains competitive, interoperable, and upholds Ethereum values: Security, Privacy, Self-Sovereignty, Transparency, and Ecosystem Alignment.

Website: beta.walletbeat.eth

Still in beta, Walletbeat is in the process of finalizing its attribute set and initial set of wallet ratings prior to public launch. Nonetheless, it has already gathered industry attention at the Ethereum Foundation, and plenty of wallet developers have contributed their own data to the site. Walletbeat is built as an open-source, MIT-licensed public good.

Walletbeat upholds privacy in wallets by looking at, for example:

  • Do wallets integrate privacy-preserving transfers as a default token transfer option (whether through Tornado Cash, Privacy Pools, Stealth Addresses, etc.)?
  • Do wallets create a data trail that allows an external provider to…
    • Link your Ethereum address to other information about yourself? (IP address, online identity, etc.)
    • Link your multiple Ethereum addresses with one another?
  • Do wallets help you keep your activity private across applications?
  • Are wallets’ convenience/security features implemented in such a way that they compromise on privacy? For example:
    • If the wallet implements Transaction Simulation or Built-in Swaps, does it do so in a way that leaks your orderflow data to an external provider (which can then frontrun you)?
    • If the wallet implements Scam Contract/dApp Alerts, is your dApp browsing history leaked to an external service?
    • If the wallet implements Stealth Addresses, is there a central provider that learns about the correlation between your multiple stealth addresses?
  • Do wallets use invasive user analytics that track all of your actions as you use it? (You’d be surprised how many do!)

Answering these privacy questions relies heavily on looking at wallets’ source code and analyzing wallets’ network traffic (we have published a guide on how to do this!). Such analysis takes effort, and your funds help this work and the funding of more efficient tools for doing so at scale.

Impact statement

  • 14 software wallets and 9 hardware wallets so far, some contributed by their respective wallet development teams themselves: MetaMask, Ambire, Gem Wallet.
  • Wallets rated on 33 attributes (5 privacy-related attributes) spanning the range of Ethereum values, with more to come.
  • Part of the Ethereum Foundation’s 1 Trillion Dollar Security initiative and Kohaku roadmap.

Contributions

Walletbeat has and will continue to produce and develop:

  • An open-source, MIT-license, human- and machine-readable database of objective data about wallets.
  • An opinionated rating rubric that turns objective wallet data into specific evaluations on Ethereum-aligned attributes.
  • A website on IPFS to display it all and dig into the data.

Website

https://beta.walletbeat.eth.limo

Payout address

0xc9C8C560BA80e840A71bE2F9409600B6133a119f

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GitHub

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