Why is EosWebWallet.io different? Interview with Grigory Vasiliev, CTO of the project

Why is EosWebWallet.io different? Interview with Grigory Vasiliev, CTO of the project

EOS
November 20, 2018 by Leo Webb
2781
Compare EosWebWallet with another EOS wallets in our infographic
EOSWebWallet_Interview

Grigory Vasilkov – the СTO of the EosWebWallet wallet – spoke on his project, problems, and prospects for EOS blockchain, as well as about a new plugin for creating identities for EOS Dapps.

What is your technical background and how you ended up in Blockchain sphere?

I’ve made a lifetime study of information security and technology. I graduated from the Belarusian National Technical University with a degree in Information Security Audit and Penetration Testing and worked in this field for 7 years. My friend and I decided to establish a blockchain academy in the Belarusian State University, where we could teach students and develop our skills and also enhance our reputation through participation in international projects. Then we started creating our own projects.

Tell us a little bit about your work, what are you doing now?

I’m running Chaingraph.io project, which specializes in analyzing of smart contracts. This is similar to Google analytics: the user can enter the address of his smart contract and get all the possible metrics. This project is focused on business applications in blockchain networks. As part of the EosWebWallet project, I am also the technical director and product owner.

Why did you choose EOS platform to build your wallet on? What do you think about its structure?

My partners and I believe that the industry will evolve in the future without much hype. Blockchains with the implementation of smart contracts will become popular, for now there are only several dozen of them. EOS has a rather larger community and has already launched a blockchain with the implementation of smart contracts which has improved capabilities compared to Ethereum – the most popular blockchain platform. We created the EosWebWallet to support the EOS community and its development.

In June, block producers froze some users’ accounts. There are just several block producers who make all the decisions on the network as well. That’s why some people claim that EOS is not decentralized. Is it? What’s your opinion?

I believe that if in the future there will be such loud statements or block producers will delete or freeze EOS accounts, then there may be several EOS networks, and community will be divided into several camps,  like Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. There are already several teams that declare independence of the their EOS-blockchains, which they can run on their facilities or with the help of their partners. In this way there will be several EOS networks, and the block producers will not solve anything. Only I think that EOS has just begun its ascent, and small companies do not have the sense to compete with each other.

Is your team ready for this development?

Our wallet is designed for EOS blockchain whatever network is. IP-calls are the same everywhere and will not change, so we can work with any project that supports the EOS blockchain.

Tell about the EosWebWallet’s team. Who is on your team? What do they do? How many developers do you have on board?

EosWebWallet is focused only on the web rather than on application development that’s why we worked only on optimising for web browsers.  EosWebWallet is a social project aimed at the development of the community. My friends and I made a team and allocated funds for the development and accordingly, we have a small and mobile team: a designer, three developers and a QA specialist.

There are many EOS wallets already released. How are you going to compete with them? Why isn’t the EosWebWallet yet another EOS wallet but something special?

Our main difference is that the EosWebWallet supports all actions in EOS. After examining GitHub, we tried to implement them all. Most other wallets can only transfer tokens or EOS. But we decided to enhance the capabilities of our wallet and enabled users to implement smart contracts, something like MyEtherWallet. We also developed our own plugin, which will be launched soon. We have blocked the flow of advertising and pop-ups that annoy users.  Currently, we are planning to add additional functionality.

Please tell us more about this plugin, what possibilities does it offer?

This is an independent EOS-plugin integrating with Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. It enables you to send and receive EOS coins or other blockchain tokens and sign transactions on third-party sites. Also, when you create an account, you won’t be asked to enter personal data.

What tokens does your wallet support? Will you add more digital assets in the future?

EosWebWallet automatically integrates all the user’s tokens that use EOS blockchain.

What challenges do you face with during the development of your wallet?

Yes, we’ve had difficulties. The thing is that EOS and its components such as the EOS GS library are actively changing and adapting. EOS GS had some problems preventing the use of some actions, but the developers fixed them. The newly released beta version of EOS GS may also have some problems, because it has not been fully tested. Therefore it would be necessary to rewrite some functional elements to use this library. There were also problems with the Scatter plugin, which did not support all actions, so we had to work with the code.

Do you have a roadmap of the project development? What do you plan to implement in the near future?

We want to integrate the plugin and get users’ feedback as it has already been tested. We also want to work actively with the community, see the wallet reviews and decide what to improve technically. The market is developing rapidly so it would be wrong to focus on one thing. Now airdrops and airgrabs become relevant, when the user himself calls the method that send him tokens, we may integrate this functionality also.

Safety, security, and privacy are among main concerns for most Blockchain users. Can you tell, how users of EosWebWallet are secured? How do you protect users’ information and keep their funds safe?

We placed top priority on safety and anonymity in developing the wallet. User data such as keys are not sent or recorded, the parameters are analyzed by the browser, there is in a fact no backend and the server does not receive any information. In order to get the necessary information from the user, IP-calls to third-party blockchain nodes are made.

How will an industry change in the near future in your opinion? What do you think about institutionalization and new regulations?

As far as I know, FATF – Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering – said that since 2020, all cryptocurrency operators: exchanges, exchangers, etc. must use AML criteria to be released next year. I think that international organizations are trying to raise the threshold to enter into this industry. But there will be some local possibilities that may be regulated, but if you get into this network, the regulation will be implicitly rather than explicitly, because there are few legal tools for detection of illegal activities in the blockchain industry.

Thanks for the interview. We just remind that  EosWebWallet offers a free open source interface for working with EOS blockchain. Follow the project on Facebook and Telegram to receive the latest news and participate in community discussions.

Compare EosWebWallet with another EOS wallets in our infographic