Dear Hive community,
In March 2023 we announced the development of Peak Vault, a new Hive wallet.
Since then a lot has changed and we have exciting news to share with you.
The wallet itself has expanded significantly, necessitating its own dedicated proposal for further development. And on top of that we created a completely new type of wallet that will allow you to interact with Hive directly from your Metamask browser extension thanks to a new feature added to MetaMask itself: Snaps.
Here we will outline our achievements over the past year and detail our future plans.
Why a new wallet?
Peak Vault is a new wallet for Hive.
You might wonder, why do we need a new wallet? What's wrong with Keychain?
The answer is, nothing is wrong with Keychain. It’s an excellent wallet, which is why the vast majority of Hive users rely on it.
However the reality is that Keychain dominates the market not only thanks to its merits, but also due to the lack of a real alternative. In a decentralized system and a free market, people should have the freedom to choose and access different options. Decentralization provides safety and it encourages options and competition.
That's why we built Peak Vault – to provide users with a choice.
Peak Vault - A one stop wallet for everything on Hive
Peak Vault, even still in beta version, can now fulfill its role of a standalone wallet: it can safely store private keys and sign transactions.
If constructing a wallet were like building a car, this would be like having a robust engine within a basic frame. It's a great starting point and the rest of the work that awaits us is aimed at making the driver as comfortable as possible.
For this reason we built an intuitive interface and started integrating more high-level features, like an NFT page, which is a first for any Hive wallet. NFT support is currently limited to 3 projects at the moment, and we plan to integrate more in the future.
A beta version of the wallet can now be downloaded here.
Features
- Securely import and store private keys
- Sign and broadcast any Hive operation
- Hive core and Hive Engine tokens: show balances and send
- Display NFT collections for selected projects (Splinterlands, Rise of the Pixels and Terracore)
- Full screen view available in a browser tab
Hivehub and Rise of the Pixels already support Peak Vault. We encourage you to test out our new wallet. We want to hear your thoughts, let us know what you love and what you hate.
Hive MetaMask Snap
Recently MetaMask has allowed third party developers to build snaps. A snap is an extension for your MetaMask wallet that adds some sort of functionality. We took the Peak Vault engine and integrated into MetaMask, making it possible to store Hive accounts and sign transactions.
You can find in-depth documentation for snaps here.
It should be noted, however, that a snap is not a replacement for a dedicated wallet: storing keys and signing transaction is all it can do. Even for simple tasks like checking your balances you need to rely on a third-party website.
We don't expect community members to switch to MetaMask, but we believe that leveraging the most popular wallet could be a significant milestone in helping to onboard new users.
Currently, the snap is functional, but it relies on experimental features, so it requires MetaMask Flask, the developer version of MetaMask.
Hive Wallet SDK
Having a new wallet and the ability to sign transactions from MetaMask sounds fantastic, but if you are a developer you are probably panicking reading this article. Integrating two new wallets into your dApp sounds like a nightmare!
Don't worry, we've got you covered. The Hive Wallet SDK allows you to handle any wallet (Keychain, Peak Vault and MetaMask) without having to write duplicate code. Just ask the user which wallet they'd rather use and let our library handle tedious details.
It's true, you still need to migrate your dApp from using only Keychain to the SDK, but think of it this way: once you're done you'll be supporting every Hive wallet, present or future.
The SDK is already fully functional and you can start migrating today, just run npm install @peakd/hive-wallet-sdk in your project.
Proposal Funding Request
We are requesting 275 HBD per day for the development of new features, UI improvements, and maintenance. This funding will be allocated for:
- Peak Vault
- Hire reliable community members to audit the wallet
- Improve UI and UX based on community feedback
- In wallet staking and delegation
- Integrate the Peak Notification System (Customizable Hive Notifications)
- In-wallet swaps
- Hardware wallet support (Ledger)
- Add a contacts page
- Improve NFT support and add more projects
- Miscellaneous features and improvements
- MetaMask Snap
- Polish the UI
- Release the snap
- Maintenance updates
- Hire reliable community members to audit the wallet
- Hive Wallet SDK
- Create resources to help developers integrate the SDK into their dApps
- Maintenance updates
The other proposal - Peak Open projects mantainance, upgrades and small projects
This year, we have adopted a new strategy by separating our projects into individual proposals. Over the past two years, our team has achieved significant milestones, delivering valuable open-source tools, protocols, and applications for the Hive community. With the completion of over 10 projects, we are now lowering our funding request and taking a different approach with this latest proposal.
Our plan for this year includes keeping our existing projects running, maintaining and upgrading them, and working on a few new small projects for the Hive community, so we have created a separate proposal requesting 250 HBD per day.
For more details about this project, visit this link.
Overall funding
The total funding requested for both proposals is 525 HBD per day, which is 175 HBD per day less than last year's proposal.
Even with both proposals, we believe this approach is fair to the Hive community. Our overall workload is reduced, and we have streamlined our team and processes compared to previous years. This efficiency is why we are requesting less funding overall. We do not support the trend of continuously increasing funding for never-ending projects.
If the Hive community comes up with other projects and we have the capacity to expand our team and dedicate more time, we are open to taking on additional large projects and creating new proposals. However, we are currently content with our reduced funding request and believe it is in the best interest of both our team and the Hive community.
Community Engagement
Our team is known for interacting very well with the Hive Community and getting suggestions and implementing them quickly.
Using Open Polls
We plan to use the Open Polls protocol more extensively to decide on areas for upgrades and new small projects throughout the year.
Feedback and Transparency
- Regular updates: we have posted 17 posts in the last ~11 months updating progress on different projects and will continue to do so.
- Transparent progress: our repository is open to the public ensuring accessibility for all the users. Additionally, we have consistently shared links to our various projects within our posts.
- Encouraged community input and suggestions through polls, Open Genie wishes, and discussions.
Conclusion
With your support, we can continue to maintain and improve tools for the Hive Ecosystem both for the users benefit and for all the various websites and applications that will use these open source decentralized products. Please consider voting for our proposal to help us achieve these goals.
Call to Action
Vote for our proposal here: https://peakd.com/me/proposals/peakd
Or using other Hive dApps:
Ecency: https://ecency.com/proposals/311
HiveBlog Wallet: https://wallet.hive.blog/proposals
Thank you for your continued support and commitment to the Hive community.
The Peak Vault team
Developers: @muwave (main developer), @yozen, @asgarth
Advisors: @jarvie