Support for WalletConnect 2.0, is now integrated into the Obvious app. v2.0 is the latest iteration of the popular decentralized wallet connection protocol. This integration helps in providing a seamless user experience to Obvious users.

WalletConnect is an open-source protocol that helps establish connections between various crypto wallets and dApps. Obvious uses WalletConnect protocol to connect to other wallets as well as dApps.

Why move to Wallet Connect 2.0?

WalletConnect 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the WalletConnect protocol. v2.0 offers the below advantages over v1.0:

1. Chain Agnostic interface which supports chains beyond EVM such as Polkadot and Cosmos. The Wallet Connect team uses CAIPs or Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals to implement this.
2. Through Wallet Connect 2.0 it would be possible to connect to a dApp on multiple chains simultaneously. The dApp and wallet agree on a list of chains and the allowed methods during session connect.
3. Sessions and pairings are decoupled in Wallet Connect 2.0. Whenever a QR Code or Deep Link is generated to connect a Dapp and a Wallet it is used to establish a pairing, therefore when a session is expired or terminated it no longer requires clients to pair again if they still have an active pairing.
4. Previously on v1.0, WalletConnect had an indefinite session lifetime which meant that clients would persist in the session state until one of the clients disconnect. This however introduced a lot of stalled session states. WalletConnect v2.0 has introduced an expiry timestamp for sessions that are currently defaulted to 7 days.
5. WalletConnect v2.0 clients track all JSON-RPC requests sent and received with the client, can ignore duplicates, and acknowledge the messages received.

Migration to Wallet Connect 2.0

Obvious first upgraded its wallet to support WalletConnect 2.0. Till ecosystem migration is completed to 2.0, Obvious will support 1.0 as well.

How will Multi-chain on WalletConnect 2.0 work?

If the dApp and wallet are not on the same network, dApps ask the wallet to switch chains. With Wallet Connect v2.0, dApps can request the wallet to connect on multiple networks at the same time.

For Example — Uniswap while connecting can say that they want to connect with Obvious on Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Ethereum. Obvious can accept all or respond back with their list of supported networks. In this case, since Obvious supports all the above chains, the user can interact with Uniswap without switching chains. The caveat here is that Uniswap should have v2.0 implemented. Currently, the Obvious app is ready to accept multi-chain requests from dApps. WalletConnect has implemented this change by using Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals (CAIPs).

Current implementation on Obvious app with v2.0

The Obvious app presently supports connections with dApps on both WalletConnect 1.0 and 2.0. When a dApp requests a connection, Obvious checks for a 1.0 or 2.0 request and establishes a connection accordingly. Obvious can connect to dApps using any of the wallets, including a connected wallet. The Obvious wallet currently maintains its connection to other wallets, such as Metamask, using WalletConnect 1.0.

For instance, when a user connects to Uniswap on Obvious, it verifies if Uniswap sent a 2.0 or 1.0 request. The request travels using a 2.0 server to Obvious, which then checks the request’s network. If the user is connected to a wallet with a different network, Obvious sends a request to switch networks to the user. After the user approves the network switch, Obvious sends the transaction to MetaMask for signing and acknowledges Uniswap once the transaction is submitted.

In the future, Obvious will support WalletConnect 2.0 in the Obvious-to-MetaMask scenario. This means that Uniswap can request any of the agreed-upon networks during the connection, and Obvious will relay the request to MetaMask without switching chains.

Obvious’s integration with WalletConnect 2.0 significantly enhances the user experience for multi-chain wallets while ensuring trust and security.

Download Obvious today and experience the multi-chain world for yourself.

Obvious now supports Wallet Connect 2.0 in its app was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With this partnership, Obvious now supports 11 bridges and 24 DEXs to allow users to make all kinds of swaps across all the chains supported by LI.FI.

How does Obvious benefit from this partnership?

By partnering with LI.FI and leveraging its SDK, Obvious will be offering users a sleek and smart routing to identify the safest and cheapest routes for transactions and multi-asset swaps.

Now Obvious users can enjoy an anxiety-free bridging and swapping experience on a simple dashboard right within the app, with a range of choices to pick the best bridge as they find convenient.

How will the LI.FI community will benefit from this partnership?

Obvious gives an option to users to track and manage their funds across EVM and non-EVM chains and also provides the ability to track wallets as well as get notifications. Users will also get a sleek and fast experience to move their funds across 9 chains with just a single click and get notified when the transaction is done.

To celebrate this partnership, Obvious has provided LI.FI with 50 whitelist spots for the lizard community to test. These will be distributed through Discord on a first-come, first-served basis.

About LI.FI

LI.FI is an infrastructure protocol that aggregates cross-chain bridges and decentralized exchanges (DEXs) offering users a broad range of asset transfer and swapping options across a range of major chains. LI.FI offers on-chain swaps, cross-chain swaps, and a combination of both.

LI.FI supports multiple chains, including Ethereum, Optimism, Cronos, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon, Celo, and Avalanche. It also integrates multiple bridges, including Hop, cBridge, Avalanche, and Artitrum. LI.FI smoothly connects to major DEX, including Ox, Sushi, 1inch, ParaSwap, SuchiSwap, and PancakeSwap.

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About Obvious

Obvious Technology is a web3 solutions ecosystem that breaks the barriers between blockchain protocols to create an interoperable web3 world.

Starting with the Obvious Wallet that enables seamless management of assets across blockchain, the project envisions a chain-agnostic future where users need not be concerned about different blockchain protocols and tokens native to particular chains while executing transactions.

Telegram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Website | Medium

Obvious partners with LI.FI to bring Advanced Bridge & DEX Aggregation to wallets was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ever wondered where people store their crypto assets like coins and non-fungible tokens(NFTs)? True, cryptocurrencies and other crypto assets exist on the blockchain. Yet, you cannot simply go into the blockchain and pick them up as if the ledger is a room in your house. The blockchain lives in the cloud, far beyond the reach of any physical effort. If you say you own one bitcoin, where is it, then? Where is it stored?

One of the first things you would interact with if you are new to crypto is a cryptocurrency wallet. Whether you want to trade cryptocurrencies, invest, make payments with crypto, or interact with decentralized applications, you need a crypto wallet. Just as you keep cash in your leather purse, a cryptocurrency wallet is a software application that helps you store your coins and other crypto assets.

Cryptocurrencies are not like cash. You cannot simply pick them up from your wallet to make a payment. Instead, you must sign a transaction, send coins to a particular address, pay a transaction fee, and connect your wallet to an application before spending your crypto. Crypto wallets do not exactly store your coins. They hold the private keys that give you access to pay, move, and own those assets.

They work as an interface between you and the blockchain, with your private keys linking both worlds. This is why, although there are numerous crypto wallet providers with different products, you can easily import your wallet using your private keys from one app to another, and your balance will remain intact. Your coins are on the blockchain, while your wallet helps you to use them and claim ownership by putting the private keys tied to those coins in your hands.

Several blockchains exist, some with entirely different infrastructures compared to others. For instance, Bitcoin is different from Ethereum. Thus, some crypto wallets support one chain (like the Bitcoin Wallet), while others offer multichain support. Another point at which wallets differ from wallets is private key control. In this context, there are two types of cryptocurrency wallets: custodial and non-custodial.

In this article, we will explore the concepts of custodial and non-custodial wallets, how they work, compare them for strengths and weaknesses, and help you decide on the best solution for your unique needs.

How do custodial wallets work?

A custodial crypto wallet service holds your crypto assets in its custody and fully owns the private keys to which your assets are linked. You know how a bank keeps your money in its possession, and you have to trust them? The story is the same for custodial wallets. You have to trust the wallet provider to safeguard your assets and private keys, and mainly, you trade off ownership and control for a smooth user experience.

Custodial wallets employ third-party actors to hold users’ funds in custody. In the early days of Bitcoin wallets, users were entirely responsible for controlling their private keys and, by extension, their crypto assets. If private keys were lost, or if the owners passed on without disclosing them to anyone, no one would be able to access the coins in the wallet, and they would be irretrievable. Over 3 million bitcoins have been lost because their owners either misplaced their private keys or died without passing them on.

With a custodial wallet, you can avoid losing access to your coins when you lose your private keys, as you have already entrusted its keeping to a third-party custody provider. If you forget your wallet password (most crypto wallets have some security measure built into them), you can still retrieve your account by reaching out to your wallet provider’s customer support arm.

Most centralized cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken offer custodial wallet services. Also, several custodial wallet services require users to register accounts and pass a KYC verification exercise to use the service. Reliable custodial wallet providers should be regulated and have insurance policies in place in the event of a security breach that touches customers’ funds.

How do non-custodial wallets work?

Non-custodial wallets are the opposite of custodial wallets, with the responsibility of safekeeping private keys and, by extension, assets falling to the user instead of a third-party provider. If you use such wallets, you are your bank. Typical users of self-custodial wallet services store their private keys online or on paper offline, although the latter is safer.

With a non-custodial wallet, when you lose access to your keys, there is no way to recover them. The wallet provider does not have any access to your assets, nor can they help you recover your private keys. Most Bitcoin wallets in the early years employed self-custody. While it eliminates the risk of compromise on the part of the wallet or custody provider, a non-custodial wallet requires more experience to use. Also, users need to be more careful with private keys and seed phrases since wallet recovery is out of the question.

Self-custodial wallets are accessible to everyone and do not require users to register accounts or undergo KYC verification. Also, there is no cost of using the platform, and users pay transaction fees directly on the blockchain. Metamask, Trust Wallet, and Safepal are some examples of popular non-custodial crypto wallets. It would be fair to note that some crypto wallet innovations today support seed phrase recovery even with self-custody, like the Aurox Wallet.

Custodial vs. non-Custodial

Here’s how they compare against one another:

Pros and cons of custodial wallets

Pros

Ease of use

Custodial wallets are generally easy to use. They usually have a friendly user interface, easy for both newbies and experienced crypto users to understand.

Also, most custodial wallets offer a wide range of services like crypto-to-fiat and fiat-to-crypto services, bill payments with crypto, instant crypto trading with high liquidity, and others that make users favor them over non-custodial wallets.

Account recovery is possible

Custodial wallets give users peace of mind, knowing that when they lose their passwords, they can quickly contact support and recover their accounts. Also, there are no worries about losing private keys.

Regulations and insurance

Several custodial wallet providers have regulated bodies, which makes them easier to trust. Since they are regulated, they require users to undergo KYC verification to use their platforms. Perpetrators of frauds and scams can easily be tracked that way. Also, crypto assets stored by most custodial wallets are insured to protect against security breaches and thefts.

Cons

Requires trust

The foundation of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies rests upon trustless systems — eliminating middleman figures in the financial industry. Custodial wallets do not stay true to those fundamentals.

Users must trust wallet providers to play their part and store assets without malicious intent. Recently, discoveries showed how the now-defunct FTX exchange used customer funds stored in its custody wrongly. This is a powerful argument against custodial wallets.

Privacy concerns

Most custodial wallets require customers to go through identity verification exercises. Some users may not feel inclined to submit confidential information to these services, citing privacy concerns.

Pros and cons of non-custodial wallets

Pros

Users are in control of their funds

Non-custodial wallets do not accept deposits. Instead, users have complete control of their assets and need no permission to initiate withdrawals; they have no withdrawal limits and suffer no restrictions whatsoever. Also, users have full custody of their private keys. As the famous saying in crypto goes: Not your keys, not your coins.

Faster transaction speeds and lower costs

Non-custodial wallets suffer no wait times on sending and receiving cryptocurrencies since all activities happen live on-chain. There is no need to wait for anyone on the back end to approve the transaction. Also, custody fees are non-existent. Users only pay gas fees for each transaction.

Privacy-centric

Although they are not entirely private, non-custodial wallets do better at helping users buy and sell crypto without compromising their privacy. Self-custodial wallets do not require you to create an account with them, pass a KYC test, or engage in any other activity that may reveal your identity.

Cons

Lack of account recovery mechanism

Users of self-custodial wallets are their banks, meaning that if they lose access to their private keys or seed phrases, they may not be able to access the coins in the wallet anymore. Some non-custodial wallet providers do not have responsive support personnel, yet those with sufficient support channels will tell you that losing your private keys or seed phrase means losing your coins.

Less-Friendly User Experience

While custodial wallets offer a smooth user experience, non-custodial wallets have, in contrast, a less-friendly customer experience. They are not easy to use, especially for new users or people new to crypto. Although, it is essential to note that new self-custodial wallet solutions offer a user-friendly experience.

Should I choose a custodial or non-custodial wallet?

Choosing either a custodial or non-custodial wallet should depend on your needs. If you are a trader or investment company looking for markets with sufficient liquidity, custodial centralized exchange wallets would be more suitable for your needs.

Crypto users who want to buy and hold coins long-term should use non-custodial wallets and have complete control over their assets. Following the FTX saga, crypto enthusiasts have called for users to abandon custodial wallets and embrace self-custody.

Also, if you interact with dApps or build on the blockchain, you are better off using a non-custodial wallet service. If you want to access a myriad of real-world benefits like booking flights, paying bills, or converting crypto to cash, a custodial wallet would be the safer bet.

Closing thoughts

Custodial and non-custodial wallets have one significant difference: the former stores' users’ assets and private keys with a storage service, while the latter hands over the responsibility of safekeeping assets and private keys to the user.

Although custodial wallets offer incredible ease of use and a wide range of services, users need to trust them, and many have lost assets running into billions this way. Self-custodial wallets are more secure and allow people to control their fates, but they are less user-friendly, and mistakes can lead to loss of funds.

Custodial wallets must reaffirm their commitments to keeping users’ funds safe and intact. In contrast, non-custodial wallets must improve their user experience and find a way to help users recover private keys if lost.

I feel you should be convinced by now, to move your funds to a self-custodial solution. If you are looking out for a wallet, try Obvious Wallet.

Obvious is not just another wallet. It’s imagined & built from the ground up to make your crypto experience 10x better. In essence, it’s one app to rule them all — swap, bridge, NFTs, portfolio management, smart contract wallet, MPC-based wallet recovery, and many more. You can download the app from here.

Custodial Wallets vs. Non-Custodial Wallets was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Team Obvious is thrilled to announce a new way to backup your seed phrase that is more secure and is the future of seed phrase management. Recently, we announced a partnership with Silence Laboratories, to leverage secure multi-party computation that enables MPC-based seed-phrase management wallet backup of your Obvious wallet.

Today, in this blog, we’ll explain in laymen-friendly terms how it works and what cryptographic techniques we’re leveraging to make your wallet backup more secure. Let’s have a look!

How does it work?

Silence Labs have built a product called Silent Shard — an MPC-based cyber-physical proof leveraging threshold signatures for much usable, secure, and truly decentralized support for digital wallets, exchanges, and institutional asset enterprises.

To understand the working, let’s first understand the concept of multi-party computation. Multi-party computation is a simple cryptographic scheme that involves multiple participants. If a single set of seed phrases is split into shares and distributed amongst participants in an MPC protocol, each participant only knows the share in their possession and must do some collective computational work with each, using their share.

Leveraging its threshold multi-party computation scheme, Obvious wallet splits the user’s seed phrase into three shards with a threshold of 2 out of 3 to reconstruct the seed phrase from the shards.

Once the seed phrase is split into shards, the wallet prompts the user to store one shard in an encrypted folder in the user’s GDrive (for Android users) or iCloud (for iOS users), in this instance, while allowing users to manually store the second shard of the key as they want. The third and final shard is automatically stored on a secure and deeply encrypted Obvious’ server.

The Silent sharding ensures that a seed phrase cannot be reconstructed with just one part of it, hence ensuring it’s never compromised.

To help visualize it better, here are the steps involved:

1. The seed phrase is split up into three shards with a threshold of 2/3 shards for reconstructing the seed phrase using Silent Shard technology.
2. One shard is stored locally on the user’s GDrive/iCloud store, another one is stored manually by the user, and the last shard is stored on Obvious’s secure servers. (2nd shard can be shared with friends/family for social recovery)
3. None of the parties involved or in possession of a shard can reconstruct the seed phrase by themselves without having access to other shards as well.
4. Threshold cryptography ensures that even if up to one shard is compromised, users’ funds will be safe since the threshold is set for at least two out of three shards to reconstruct the seed phrase.

FAQs:

1. How to recover your seed phrase in case you lose access to one of the shards?

Since it requires two out of three shards to reconstruct the seed phrase, even if you lose access to one of the shards, you can easily recover your wallet through the Obvious app by reconstructing the seed phrase by utilizing the rest of the two shards.

2. What happens in case of a device change/loss?

Since two of three shards are not stored on your local device, you can easily recover your wallet even if you lose your device.

3. How is it better to split up the seed phrase into shards than simply storing the complete seed phrase?

Splitting up the seed phrase into multiple shards ensures that your wallet remains safe even if you lose a shard to a malicious actor. Whereas losing the complete seed phrase can compromise all your wallets associated with that seed phrase, at one time. More about the Silent Shard product can be found here.

About Silence Laboratories

Silence Laboratories offers SaaS and hybrid solutions for Threshold Signatures and secure authorization schemes. Our developer-friendly libraries help custodians, wallets, and asset management companies alike. We’ve recently raised a seed round of $1.7M from leading deep-tech VC firms and Web3 angels, more of which can be found here.

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About Obvious

Obvious is a self-custody wallet that brings together assets across EVM & non-EVM chains and powers your cross-chain transactions by giving you safe, fast, and affordable bridging & swapping routes within the app.

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Say Goodbye to Seed Phrase Management with Obvious and Silence Labs was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are happy to announce our partnership with Unmarshal.

Unmarshal’s multi-chain indexing protocol will help Obvious in supporting its data needs across L1 and L2 chains by querying the data to show the wallet balances, LP positions, and a lot more.

Unmarshal will also help Obvious users with smart notifications to get timely helpful updates and relevant information like wallet transaction updates and trending crypto pairs, wallet balance updates, price changes, and so on.

How does it work?

Unmarshal comprises a decentralized network of blockchain indexers to curate customized data to suffice the needs of the DeFi economy. Unmarshal accesses data from multiple chains and protocols to show on-chain data such as wallet balances, LP positions, CDP creation, and monitoring. With Unmarshal’s endpoint integration in place, Obvious will be able to query rich decoded information to their front-end application enabling users to be data-driven and have a super-intuitive wallet experience for our users.

Unmarshal Smart Notification is an infrastructure layer on top of blockchains that hooks onto the relevant wallet address/transactions/contract addresses through Webhooks and notifies users instantly of any critical events. The additional decoding layer makes information more comprehensive and meaningful. The notifications are customizable according to the conditions specified. This will help with Obvious push rich and timely notifications to all of its users.

About Unmarshal

Unmarshal is a Multi-chain DeFi data network aiming to deliver granular, reliable & real-time data to dApps. It provides the easiest way to query Blockchain data from Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Zilliqa, XDC, and Solana.

Unmarshal network consists of data indexers and transforming tools to power Web 3.0 applications on any chain while providing a latent view of transformed data.

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About Obvious

Obvious is a web3 solutions ecosystem that breaks the barriers between blockchain protocols to create an interoperable web3 world.

Starting with the Obvious Wallet that enables seamless management of assets across blockchain, the project envisions a chain-agnostic future where users need not be concerned about different blockchain protocols and tokens native to particular chains while executing transactions.

Telegram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Website | Medium

Obvious Partners with Unmarshal to provide data infrastructure for Obvious Wallet was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why Wallet Security is Important

Wallet security is a much-talked-about topic in the crypto space, as crypto wallets are all that give users power over their assets. The importance of a cryptocurrency wallet cannot be overemphasized. Whichever way you look at it, a wallet is the first thing you create when coming into crypto for the first time. Whether custodial or self-custodial, you cannot transact on the blockchain without a crypto wallet.

With the increase in crypto scams and hacks, it has become imperative to improve the security infrastructure on which crypto wallets are built. While a wallet address can receive coins online or offline, its owner cannot interact on-chain with the held assets unless the wallet comes online. Today’s internet is hardly the most secure place, with hackers and scammers at every corner trying to steal information or force their way into secure environments.

What is Obvious Wallet?

Obvious is a secure multiplatform and multichain non-custodial crypto wallet with innovative features aimed at lowering the entry barrier to web3 significantly while providing a seamless cross-chain experience for every cryptocurrency user. Obvious packs several exciting capabilities that allow users to connect their existing wallets to Obvious, with the platform acting as a wallet hub, on-chain, off-chain transfers, etc.

Obvious also supports dApp interactions, meaning you can interact with decentralized blockchain applications from the comfort of any device, as the application is responsive to smartphones, PCs, or tablets. Obvious also goes one step further to give you a wholesome view of all your assets across every source — exchanges, wallets, liquidity pools, blockchain networks, etc.

Yet, one would wonder if Obvious is all bark and no bite regarding wallet security. How does Obvious solve all the problems that could sprout from its versatility and offer excellent wallet security to its users?

Better Wallet Security With Obvious

As wallet security is crucial to the advancement of web3, Obvious has put several features in place to close up possible loopholes and provide an excellent user experience on any platform:

Imported Keys are Never Stored in Plain Text

Private keys are crucial to wallet security. While custodial wallets back up their users’ private keys, their counterparts do not, committing them to users’ hands instead. To add an existing wallet to Obvious, one must import the wallet’s private keys. Some wallet applications store the details of the imported keys in plain text, but Obvious ensures that imported keys are encrypted and stored locally in the phone. The imported keys are never uploaded to a cloud.

Generated Keys are Stored Locally in Keystore/Keychain

When opening a new wallet with Obvious, it generates a private key. Staying true to the decentralization idea and its non-custodial nature, Obvious stores private keys in the local storage (encrypted) of whatever device you use, usually in the Keystore/keychain folder.

Private Keys are Never Shared or Stored on Any Server

Obvious takes private key security to new heights with a security measure that ensures the private keys are never shared with anyone, logged on any servers (even remote servers), and are exclusive to the device on which you installed Obvious. This way, your wallet’s safety is solely in your hands, leveraging your device’s security infrastructure. Any exploit on Obvious’s servers, for instance, will not expose its users’ information to attackers.

Biometric Security

Obvious ties its application to your device’s biometric security, ensuring that you cannot launch your wallet, sign transactions, or carry out any interaction that involves your private keys unless you pass the biometric authentication.

No Threat of Deanonymization

Deanonymization remains a valid threat in the crypto space today, with several malicious actors able to tie people’s on-chain activity to their real-world identities, potentially exposing them to exploits. To protect users as they interact with several different blockchains, Obvious does not store Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII refers to information that can be used to figure out an individual’s identity, like names, social security numbers, biometric records, etc. Obvious preserves anonymization and provides personalized nudges, giving its users a unique and secure experience.

Information From Exchanges is Never Stored

Obvious has a powerful feature that allows you to track and transact your balances and transactions across different blockchains, wallets, exchanges, etc. To use this feature, you would have to import the keys of each exchange account to Obvious. As mentioned, Obvious does not store your imported keys and, by extension, no information from your linked wallets and exchanges. Obvious may locally store information (API Keys) from exchanges with an anonymized ID if the imported keys support Read-Only or Write permissions.

MPC-based Key Social Recovery Feature (Coming Soon)

Soon, Obvious will implement an MPC-based key social recovery feature that will eliminate single points of failure through multi-party computation and ensure key recovery is always possible. With multi-party computation, private keys are split between multiple parties, and the single point of failure ceases to exist.

Closing Thoughts

Wallet security is essential to the continued growth of the web3 phenomenon. While several popular cryptocurrency wallets seem to sacrifice usability for security or make other tradeoffs, Obvious, a novel web3 wallet, delivers an exquisite user experience and improves wallet security admirably.

Obvious offers users a secure multi-chain wallet solution that brings chains, existing wallets, and exchanges together on one platform, allowing users to track all on-chain and off-chain activity from a single dashboard. Furthermore, Obvious empowers users to connect their hardware wallets with the Obvious app and experience a seamless web3 app.

To conclude, Obvious improves wallet security by:

• no transmission of keys
• no storing of unencrypted keys
• no logging or PII
• biometric lock for keys
• connected wallets
• upcoming MPC recovery

Obvious improve wallet security as a non-custodial solution that never shares user secrets, encrypts and stores private keys in local storage, and also planning to implement MPC-based key social recovery real soon. Obvious invites the public to gain early access to its platform. Visit Obvious to learn more.

How Obvious Improves Wallet Security was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are happy to announce the inclusion of Hypersign to our list of partners. With this latest partnership, Hypersign’s decentralized identity infrastructure solutions will find a place in Obvious’s multi-chain wallet aggregation application to deliver a secure and superior user experience in a seamless fashion.

Hypersign is an omni-chain decentralized identity infrastructure protocol designed to work with any existing blockchain protocol in the web3 space. While Hypersign delivers reliable, user-friendly Decentralized Identifiers (DiDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), Obvious has set out to make it easier for everyone to manage all their crypto assets across different protocols from a single window.

The blockchain agnostic wallet solution being created by Obvious Technology will be able to support crypto portfolio management, cross-chain transactions, yield discovery, and other DeFi products and services across protocols. By collaborating with Hypersign, Obvious will explore the possibility of implementing decentralized identifiers to enable access and transfer of crypto assets between users. Hypersign and Obvious will join forces to spearhead the research and marketing efforts for mutual benefit.

Hypersign Solutions for Obvious Wallet Ecosystem

A positive outcome of the collaboration between Hypersign and Obvious will have the latter implementing Hypersign Protocol’s DiD Registry to its infrastructure. By doing so, Obvious will allow its users to create their on chain names, aiding easy discovery and transactions in the ecosystem. In addition to the possibility of incorporating decentralized identity for wallet aggregation, Hypersign will also allow Obvious users to generate privacy-preserving proofs from their wallets to share across web3 dApps without disclosing wallet information, an ideal use case for NFT Gating.

Meanwhile, the Obvious unified wallet infrastructure solution will be extending support to the Hypersign ecosystem by including $HiD and other related crypto assets along with their wallets to its portfolio. With Hypersign integrated into Obvious, $HiD holders and Hypersign community members will be able to have an aggregated view of the wallets which will prove handy while making investment decisions.

About HyperSign

Hypersign is a Decentralized Network purpose-built for Self-Sovereign Identity use cases and related applications. Its objective is to facilitate SSI adoption in the real world and help people take back control of their personal data.

Website | Twitter | Medium | Telegram

About Obvious Technology

Obvious Technology is a web3 solutions ecosystem that breaks the barriers between blockchain protocols to create an interoperable web3 world. Starting with the Obvious Wallet that enables seamless management of assets across blockchain, the project envisions a chain agnostic future where users need not be concerned about different blockchain protocols and tokens native to particular chains while executing transactions.

🌎 Website: https://www.obvious.technology/
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/itsobvioustech
📢 Telegram: https://t.me/obvioustechnology
🔔 Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/itsobvioustech
👉LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/company/itsobvioustech/

Obvious and Hypersign Join Forces to Implement Decentralized Identity for Crypto Wallets was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What comes to mind when you hear a random person talk about gas fees? Gasoline prices or a fee charged for sending 0.01 ETH to your friend’s crypto wallet? While car owners and regular people in the real world talk about gasoline prices, gas fees have a somewhat relevant role in the crypto space.

As terms that originated in the Ethereum network space, gas and gas fees have been around for a while. As essential as gas is to the Ethereum blockchain, it has been a pain point for most users, especially when there are high transaction volumes on the network.

This article will explore the concept of gas fees and compare their values across different blockchain networks. High gas fees are a problem for Ethereum users, and we will find out how they become astronomical and the viable solutions to high gas fees.

What are gas fees?

Sometimes, transactions on the blockchain are so swiftly completed that one might think they happen by magic. The nature of most blockchains either requires miners (for Proof of Work blockchains) or validators (for Proof of Stake protocols) to secure and validate the networks. One way or the other, these actors require incentives, apart from mining rewards (for PoW blockchains), to keep the network going, update blocks, and confirm transactions.

Ethereum heralded the smart contract era, and its consensus mechanism as a Proof of Work blockchain required miners who needed incentives to keep working. For any transaction to be completed on-chain, a miner had to do the computing work, validate the transaction, and update the blockchain. At this point, gas fees come into play.

Gas fees are the amount of ETH (Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency) required to complete interactions with the network. Whether you’re sending the JPEG of a rock to another user in faraway Puerto Rico or approving a connection to a dApp to your wallet, you will need to pay gas fees for any of those transactions. You pay gas fees to send crypto, miners receive the fees as compensation for their services, and everyone is happy.

How are gas fees calculated on Ethereum?

The Ethereum network uses a metric system of denominated units known as wei, such that one ether (ETH) is equal to one quintillion wei. Gas fees are represented by one of the wei denominations, gigawei or gwei, which means one billion wei. When your gas tracker says you need an average gas fee of 1000 gwei to complete a transaction, your transaction will cost a base fee of 0.000001 ETH.

1000 gwei is worth around $0.0018 at press time, which seems like a steal in the crypto space today. As you will come to discover, base fees do not represent the gas fee structure in its entirety, thanks to the Ethereum London upgrade. The London hard fork went live in August 2021, and it readjusted the gas fee structure significantly, allowing users to pay tips to miners to complete transactions. These tips, called priority fees, serve as an incentive to miners to confirm transactions faster.

Already, a gas unit (limit) is in place for each transaction. Different interactions on Ethereum require varying gas fees. Hence, users can adjust how much gas they are willing to spend on a trade, which puts some power back into their hands. However, if you set your gas limit below the suggested amount, your transaction will be reverted, but you will not receive a refund of your gas fees.

The base fee, like the 1000 gwei mentioned above, represents the minimum fees needed for a transaction to be recorded on the blockchain. Base fees depend on network congestion levels, so they are not constant. Based on the current arrangement, here’s how to calculate the total gas fees per transaction:

Total gas fee = (Base fee + Tip) × Gas unit (limits)

Say you wanted to send 1 ETH to your favorite person, and the gas limit on Ethereum is 25,000 gwei, the base fee is 200 gwei, and you choose to pay a tip of 40 gwei. Using the above formula:

Total gas fee = (200 + 40) × 25000 = 6 million gwei

6000000 gwei, or 0.006 ETH, is the gas fee you must spend to send 1 ETH. At press time, 0.006 ETH equals $10.8, at $1800 per ether.

Comparing gas fees across Blockchains

Although gas fees are native to Ethereum, the term is generally used to describe transaction fees on most blockchains, especially those with an underlying technology similar to Ethereum. Gas fees may sometimes be notoriously pricey on Ethereum, but Bitcoin has also recorded high transaction fees. Here’s how gas fees compare across popular blockchains:

Binance Smart Chain

The Ethereum Virtual Machine powers Binance Smart Chain; hence, the gas fee structure is similar to Ethereum. On BSC, 1 BNB is equal to one billion gwei — where one gwei is 0.000000001 BNB.

The average gas price on BSC is around 6.9 gwei, so sending 10 BNB should cost less than ten cents. Compared to Ethereum, BSC gas fees are much cheaper, and they also increase during times of network congestion.

Bitcoin

Gas fees on Ethereum are the equivalent of Bitcoin transaction fees. Transaction fees on Bitcoin depend on how much block space the interaction consumes and not on the value of bitcoins sent.

Bitcoin has an average transaction fee of $2.088 at press time. Bitcoin transaction fees are also affected by network congestion, and during the crypto boom periods of 2017 and 2021, the average fee prices shot up to as high as $45 and $60, respectively.

Avalanche

Avalanche is another EVM-powered blockchain built to solve the trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization. Transaction fee calculations on Avalanche are similar to Ethereum gas fee calculations, adopting the base fee, gas limit, and tip to determine the total gas fee.

Instead of gwei, Avalanche uses nAVAX (one billionth of 1 AVAX). The base gas fee on Avalanche at press time ranges between 25–27 nAVAX.

Polygon

Polygon is a Layer2 blockchain solution built to scale Ethereum. As expected, gas fees are much lesser on Polygon, with a base fee of 34.2–32 gwei at press time.

Total gas fees on Polygon can cost between $0.0005 to $0.2, depending on the type of transaction.

Solana

Solana was dubbed the Ethereum killer at launch, and one of the reasons for the name is its low transaction fees.

The average transaction fee on the Solana network stands at around $0.00025 per transaction.

Why are Ethereum gas prices usually expensive?

Considering the networks mentioned above, the average gas fees on Ethereum are higher. Several reasons explain the high gas fees on Ethereum, one of them being that ether is expensive.

The price of ETH

Gas fees are paid in ether, and ETH is not a cheap cryptocurrency. The average price of 1 ETH at press time is $1,800, down approximately 63% from an all-time high of $4,891.70 in November 2021. One gwei is equivalent to $0.0000018, significantly higher than in the early days. In 2015, 1 ETH sold for as low as $0.42, which means one gwei then was equivalent to 4.2E-10 or $0.00000000042, much lower than it is today.

Six million gwei, the total gas fee in the example mentioned above, is worth around $10.8 today but would have been worth $0.00252 in 2016. When the price of 1 ETH was $100, six million gwei would have been worth $0.6. Many crypto analysts and enthusiasts expect ether’s value to reach $10,000 or $20,000 someday.

With the current gas fee structure, transactions will be almost impossible to complete. Ethereum is moving over to a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, which we will explain subsequently, and the new structure is expected to reduce gas fees significantly.

Network congestion

Proof of Work blockchains need miners to validate transactions and secure the network, and gas fees compensate Ethereum miners. During peak periods like the 2017 and 2021 crypto surges, hundreds of thousands of transactions are carried out on Ethereum.

The Ethereum network has a slower transaction per second (TPS) rate than some of its competitors. Ethereum’s scalability problem means that users may have to pay higher gas fees to complete their transactions in time. Also, transactions are not spread evenly across 24 hours. Congestions during certain times of the day result in higher gas fees as miners prioritize users who pay more to fast-track their transactions.

Widespread adoption and DApp concentration

One of the reasons behind high congestion on Ethereum is the network’s value. Over seventy percent of decentralized applications in crypto are built on Ethereum, which results in over 250,000 daily transactions on some days.

For a network that can currently support only 30 transactions per second, congestion will naturally occur because of the sheer number of daily on-chain interactions.

Solutions for high gas fees

Exorbitant gas fees on Ethereum are a worry for many, with several dApps electing to build on alternative networks with much cheaper transaction fees. Although Ethereum users can reduce the amounts they pay in gas fees if they transact when the blockchain is less congested, usually during weekends, there are better solutions that can put the gas fee challenge to bed once and for all.

Layer-2 scaling solutions

Layer-2 blockchains are one of the most promising solutions for increasing Ethereum’s performance and reducing gas fees. Known as rollups, these tools work as extensions of the Ethereum network and are built on it, which is why they are called Layer-2 solutions. Popular examples include Arbitrum, Optimism, and Immutable X.

There are two main groups of rollups: optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups. While their approach differs, they handle interactions off-chain and interact with the Ethereum network to validate these transactions. This way, they can process thousands of transactions in a batch but only pay gas fees to update them on-chain. Hence, they spread the gas fees across all transactions, requiring users to pay far less than they would if they interacted directly with Ethereum.

The Ethereum Merge

Ethereum’s long-planned transition from the Proof of Work consensus mechanism to Proof of Stake is in the works. Many believe that the approach will not only make Ethereum more scalable but reduce gas fees significantly, enough to compete with prices on alternative networks.

The arrangement will do away with the miners, and it is hoped that the change will solve the high gas fee problem.

Closing thoughts

Gas fees are necessary to keep the Ethereum network secure and up-to-date, but they can sometimes be a bottleneck due to certain factors that make them rise astronomically.

Layer-2 scaling solutions have helped reduce the cost of gas fees, and transaction fees are lesser on alternatives like Solana, Avalanche, and BSC. The Ethereum Merge is on its way, and we expect it to put the final nail in the coffin of high gas fees.

Understanding Gas Fees in Crypto was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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1. Sign up on your local crypto exchange
2. Head to your wallet/portfolio section in your exchange account
3. Select deposit and choose the crypto asset you want to transfer from your non-custodial wallet (MetaMask, TrustWallet, Kepler).
4. Select the chain on which you have USDT in your wallet (Ethereum, Polygon, Tron, Tezos) and copy the wallet address (Destination)
5. Now, head to your non-custodial (Source) and click on send button, and fill in the destination address you copied in step 4.
6. Make sure you have the required tokens to pay for the transaction fees
7. Hit the ‘Confirm’ button and voila!
8. You just transferred your crypto assets from your non-custodial wallet to your exchange account
9. Once the funds are successfully transferred to your exchange account, you can convert them to your choice of local currency and withdraw them to your bank account.

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How to convert USDT to your local currency was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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We are on a mission was originally published in Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.