Engram Wallet Beta
January 2024
The Dero Foundation is looking after the development of a bespoke GUI wallet for Dero users, this is an article going over some of the features included in the latest wallet update. Engram has been researched and worked on since the release of Stargate (well over 18 months), the only Encrypted layer 1 blockchain with smart contracts.
On December 24, 2023 the official Engram wallet Beta 0.5.0 was released, with major upgrades from the Alpha release, from Gnomon support to UI tweaks. Let’s have a look at this wallet and see if we can explain why it is so unique in how it empowers the autonomy of private individuals using $DERO unlike any other blockchain.
Engram wallet is really designed to promote your own blockchain independence, you can easily connect to your own node and trustlessly use many of the unique features afforded to you by the Dero Network, the only fully encrypted blockchain in existence built from scratch.
As mentioned, the wallet makes it real easy to connect to your own node which is a mindset that is rife throughout the Dero community, running your own blockchain node allows you to maintain maximum privacy, it means all of your dealings with the network are just between you and Dero, no middle men. It is also a great time to shoutout the Dero node for being so lightweight, easy to use and setup. Having a layer 1 HE blockchain with an 18 second blocktime with a node that is light enough to run on a raspberry pie is no small feat.
So, lets get into it. Engram is completely written in Golang, the same programming language Dero itself is written in, a true native wallet. Fyne is used for the graphical interface, Fyne is a set of free and open source Golang libraries to create lovely user interfaces. The Foundation will be looking to release across all platforms, currently all platforms apart from iOS are supoprted. iOS support should come some time in the future.
Primarily, Engram acts as a basic wallet to store, send and receive your precious DERO and assets (which can be tokens, NFA’s, NFT’s etc.). The Engram wallet main menu is broken into “modules” in a dropdown menu, it integrates multiple capabilities offered to it by the Dero network making them real easy for anyone to use.
- First module “Identity”. This is where you use the hard-coded Dero name contract (akin to a DNS) to give your address an easy to read name (if available/minimum 6 characters) to send and receive to. WHat this means is instead of a long string of numbers and letters that nobody can really remember, you can name your address “DeroIsTheBest” and use that instead. A cool little feature of Dero network is you can only send to addresses that are real and registered, so no chance to send to a dead unused address that hasn’t been created yet. But remember this service is case sensitive so make sure you are spelling the name correct.
- Second module “My Account”. This is the basic area in a wallet where you can access your seed phrase and change the password to your wallet. Here it also gives you the option to delete the file called Datashard where some wallet data is held like Gnomon data in case of some issue and you want to resync some wallet data.
- Third module “Messages”. Dero transactions are fully encrypted, and inside this transaction there is a unique payload space that is also, by way of being inside the transaction, fully encrypted. This can be used to put encrypted messages up to 128 bytes and this module makes that easy. This is basically an encrypted messenger, on-chain. But beyond just social messages this can be leveraged to send URL’s, license keys, create private voting services etc.
- Fourth module “Transfers”. This is where your asset transfers get queued up for sending. You can build them with the “Send” button they get put in the transfers module ready to be sent, you can send multiple transfers at once this way. They are called transfers because there can be multiple inside one transaction. Dero network supports sending to multiple addresses in 1 transaction. As an example, inside 1 transaction, you can send DERO to 3 different address at once or the same address multiple times.
- Fifth module “Asset Explorer”. This module is major addition and leverages Gnomon, the local trustless Dero smart contract (SC) search engine/indexer. Dero is a private layer 1 SC platform so the type of surveillance that happens on every other platform is not possible as nobody knows what assets are in which wallet. This completely changes the logic of who is capable of populating your wallets assets, only you can. You cannot rely on trusted remote node providers and neither should you.
On transparent platforms like Ethereum wallet users rely on remote node providers to populate their assets and interact with dApps, anyone can populate your tokens on these platforms because all your wallet data is public. In this Engram module you can locally and automatically populate all assets in your wallet. Gnomon is a local search engine inside your wallet that very quickly scans SC’s for you and identifies what assets belong to you. Gnomon itself is something special and worthy of a write-up.
This module also allows you to call functions of a SC from your wallet! No web interface or trust required when on running your own node, using blockchain in the way it was truly meant to be but with a handy UI so anyone can do it. The power of this wallet really becomes apparent now, you can trustlessly the Dero SC ecosystem and use them from your wallet without relying on hosted web interface front-ends. Recently Dero users were minting a token from their wallet only a couple days after the release of Engram beta, showing the possibilities unlocked instantly.
- Sixth module “Services”. This is another important module that uses a critical feature provided by the Dero network. Here you can set up a Service Address, this is your wallet address integrated with a payment ID so they are not separate, but in one single address. A wallet host can use this to easily identify and sort incoming tx’s while making it easy for others to interact as there is no need for a separate payment ID/destination port to be entered with the address.
What’s even cooler, you can also add a requested DERO amount and comment or description to this Service Address. What that means, when someone pastes this address into their wallet, it will auto populate an amount with the comment/description you want them to see, making point of sale services super easy to setup and use.
So to try and visualize this, if you are selling a pair of jeans for 15 DERO, you could set up a Service Address with your wallet to port 420, where the comment is “Apple bottom jeans” and the amount is 15 DERO, the buyer would simply put that address into their wallet to quickly and easily pay. In future imagine this address put to a QR code system and the buyer could just scan a QR code with their wallet and immediately get the price and description. This is how private crypto currencies can realistically start being used as P2P cash, thanks to Dero and its unique features.
- Seventh module “Cyberdeck”. The Dero wallet has RPC calls that can be opened for connecting to dApps. With Dero network, unlike any other SC platform, wallet data is private so apps need to query the wallet for information sometimes like balances etc. This convenient wallet feature randomly generates a username and strong password to secure your RPC connection.
- Eighth module “Datapad”. This is an locally encrypted notepad, in your wallet. Handy spot to keep some things and a cool feature. It has the ability to export the contents of a note in plaintext too. In future you can imagine having an encrypted notepad like this backed up securely on-chain in a SC and synced anywhere in the world you recover into an Engram wallet would be an insane feature. I suspect this has been on the DEVs thoughts at some point.
To sum up, a powerful wallet client can unlock Dero’s potential as it has a lot of unique features unseen anywhere else in crypto due to its unique private architecture. We know that blockchain was meant to be more than slinging tokens for fiat gains. If it is built correctly and private by default in a strong way, full encryption, paired with turing complete DVM it can truly be tools to assist Mankind.
Please give some love to the lead DEVs Dank and Nelbert442 and everyone else ever involved with the Engram wallet for their hard work, they have built this wallet from the ground up specifically for Dero Network and all of us. It is a truly native Dero wallet in pure Golang.
