Albedo Stellar wallet

This review was done for a donation from @ignatyashin (bought 1.4 EURMTL of my ANCAPCHAN tokens)

All of Montellibero’s tokenomics operate on the Stellar blockchain. A number of third-party tools plus proprietary developments are used for operations with it. There are several different blockchain explorers, online transaction builders, and a couple of services for a purely Montelliberian feature—BSN (Blockchain Social Network), but users of the tokenomics primarily interact with wallets.

Historically, the first wallet we started using was Lobstr. Its advantages are: a) the ability to link a so-called federation address to the public key, which is convenient due to its human-readability; b) a contact list; c) convenient order book display for trading on the decentralized exchange integrated into the blockchain; d) the ability to top up via fiat. Disadvantages are: a) it supports only one account; b) it charges a fee for swaps.

Next, the community turned its attention to the open-source Solar wallet. It could handle multiple accounts and didn’t mess with the user’s money, but trading from it was not very convenient, and soon the developers stopped supporting it. Now, our people have forked it, and a wallet called Sunce has been created on its basis. It can already work with multi-signature and is equipped with a contact list, but trading from it remains just as inconvenient.

The main wallet for Montellibero remains a custom-developed Telegram bot, @MyMTLWalletBot. Pros: it supports multiple accounts, multi-signature, swaps, an address book, and some other specific Montelliberian features. Cons: you never know at what moment Durov will decide to completely ban the use of any blockchains in Telegram other than TON.

And now, another wallet, Albedo, has been presented to me for review. Let’s see what interesting things it can offer.

This is an open-source wallet which, judging by its GitHub account, has been slowly developed by five developers for five years. Moreover, the team clearly has some connection to the stellar.expert blockchain explorer. The wallet is written in JavaScript, which implies its use via a web interface. Furthermore, it is theoretically possible to embed it into your own website, for example, as a large golden “donate” button that would immediately generate a payment transaction and prompt to sign it. However, I didn’t have enough brains to build such a button for myself—well, to each their own. Usually, there was always some kind of kind subscriber who helped implement one useful tool or another in WordPress.

If we set aside the idea of integrating the wallet functionality for now and open the wallet’s own website, the first thing offered, of course, is to create a new account.

Scrolling past the routine blah-blah

Next, we are prompted to protect the account with a password (which will be used to locally encrypt our keys), after which we can either create a new account, log into a previously created one, or import one created elsewhere.

If you create an account, a pair of public and private keys is generated, but the wallet is completely empty, so for the blockchain, this account does not yet exist.

You can click on the phrase “public network” and select “test network.” A sandbox will open for playing around. There, you will have 10,000 test Lumens (XLM, the native token of the Stellar blockchain), the ability to open trustlines to some test tokens from a given list, exchange them for each other, and so on. The alternative—while staying in the public network—is to find a few Lumens somewhere and send them to your new account, for which the “Receive” button is used.

I simply imported my main account into the new wallet right away and gained access to all my tokens. It’s convenient that the wallet also imports custom token icons. For example, Lobstr doesn’t see the icon for my ANCAPCHAN token, which is somewhat disappointing, but here everything is fine.

In the account properties, you can set your name, fill out the address book, and connect additional accounts to the wallet if needed.

By playing with the buttons at the bottom, you can discover that the wallet also allows for fairly advanced operations that are not needed very often. When swapping, an allowable slippage percentage is set. When sending, you can perform an immediate send with conversion or send tokens for which the recipient does not have a trustline, so they will receive a notification and either accept the tokens or refuse them. An interesting option: you can immediately generate a link to receive a specific amount of specific tokens; this is convenient if, for example, you are pouring a beer for a customer and then present the bill this way. Our Montelliberian wallets cannot do this—a useful feature. If you already have a Stellar account, you can scan the code and see that you will be prompted to send me 10 EURMTL.

Most likely, some functionality was not considered by me; for instance, I didn’t find out about the multi-signature. However, the mere ability to issue fixed invoices already makes the wallet worthy of attention.

The wallet can also be installed on a phone as a web app. Open the site albedo.link in Chrome, click the three dots in the right corner, and in the menu that opens, select “Add to Home screen.” That’s it—you have a shortcut through which this web wallet will open immediately.

The author of the review request also asks to provide a channel for user support if anything remains unclear while working with the wallet. Perhaps I will use this channel to figure out how to organize the “stellarization” of my website.

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