Amid escalating interest in the Ethereum blockchain platform, a group of software engineers at bitcoin security specialist BitGo have created a multi-signature wallet offering
The news follows the release of the first production version of the Ethereum platform, Homestead, last week. At the time, Ethereum’s developers also released Mist, a more user-friendly wallet that would allow users to deploy smart contracts and store ethers, the digital currency that powers its applications.
Despite this progress, however, wallet development on Ethereum has perhaps lagged behind, an issue creator Vitalik Buterin recently told CoinDesk that he hopes the wider open-source blockchain community will help it address.
Signs are emerging that this is already happening organically.
Ben Chan, Mason Borda and Barath Chandrashekar, software engineers at BitGo, have released Ether.li, a multisig, two-factor authentication wallet for storing and transmitting ethers, the native token on the Ethereum network, in part to apply their expertise to this challenge.
"There has been a lot more interest in ether recently," Chan explained. "I, myself, got into ether pretty early on during the early stages of the project and I was looking to find a model to store ether. At the time, I could only find two kinds of wallets."
The problem, Borda and Chan explained in interview, was that there were technical tradeoffs to running a wallet.
Borda said: "The desktop wallets that are available today look great and aren’t challenging to use, but there is a huge technological limitation, which is the requirement of the running node in the background. If you wanted a wallet accessible from any device or computer, there were single-signature wallets." Borda went on to argue that a user would be making a significant technological compromise by going with the convenient route of using an accessible wallet.While Borda and Chan both work for BitGo, they were quick to comment […]
