On Tuesday (March 12th), Binance announced that its official wallet app, Trust Wallet, had added support for sending, receiving, and storing XRP as well as support for in-app cryptocurrency purchases (XRP, BTC, BCH, LTC, and ETH) using debit and credit cards.
Trust Wallet, which was first released (for Android) on 25 October 2017, was acquired by Binance in July 2018. Originally it only supported Ether (ETH) and Ethereum tokens, but after it got acquired by Binance, support for other coins started to happen, such that it currently supports 17 blockchains, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, TRON, Wanchain, VeChain, Dash, ICON, and EOS, as well as any 20,000+ ERC20-compatible, ERC223-compatible, or ERC721-compatible Ethereum tokens (such as Basic Atttention Token or Augur).
Trust Wallet also has a “fully functioning Web3 browser that can be used to interact with any decentralized application (DApp).” This provides “a seamless, simple and secure connection between you, Ethereum network, and any decentralized application (DApp).” There is also an integrated “DApp store”, which is called “Trust DApps Marketplace”. Only those DApps “that have been vetted and optimized for Trust become a part of the Marketplace.”
As for in-app crypto purchases of XRP, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ether using debit cards and credit cards, this feature has been enabled through an integration with EU-licensed payment services provider Simplex, which is the same company that Binance.com said it was using when it announced on January 31st that it had added support for using Visa or Mastercard debit/credit cards to buy BTC, ETH, LTC and XRP (the base currencies Binance supports excluding the stablecoins). Simlex also helps several other crypto companies with debit/credit card processing, including BitMART Exchange, Xaro, BTCC, and Changelly.
To get these two features, you need to download from the iOS “App Store” or the Android “Google Play” store a version of the Trust Wallet app that was updated on or after 12 March 2019, i.e. version 1.2004.0 or later on iOS and version 1.6.288 or later on Android.
Today’s announcement about XRP support comes just one day after Trust Wallet Co-Founder and lead developer Viktor Radchenko hosted his first livestreamed Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, highlights of which were reported by CryptoGlobe. Here are a couple of topics that were covered in this AMA session:
1. The “Trust Wallet Core” library: once this recently-launched open-source cross-platform wallet library gets released, any blockchain will be able to add support for its coin to Trust Wallet. A few examples of projects working with this library are Zilliqa (ZIL), Tezos (TEZ), Ontology (ONT), and Decred (DCR).
2. Trust Wallet does not show private keys because the goal of the team was to simplify things for users by requiring them only to secure their backup phrase. Here is a tweet from Trust Wallet’s support team, and one from Andreas M. Antonopoulos, explaining why Trust Wallet does not need to show to users their private keys:
Hello samo, your recovery phrase is your private key. More correctly it holds all your private keys for each asset you own in one 12 word phrase. Otherwise you would have a separate key for each coin which would be a disaster to backup/recover.
— Trust Wallet – Help (@TrustWalletHelp) March 4, 2019
Samo,
The recovery mnemonic (12-24 words) is the private keys. Meaning, all keys are derived from that, so if you have that, you have the keys. You can use it to generate all private keys for all cryptos on any compatible wallet
Mnemonic is equivalent to “your keys, your coins”
— Andreas M. Antonopoulos (@aantonop) March 4, 2019
According to Monday’s AMA session, other features coming in the near future (few weeks to few months) to Trust Wallet are support for more blockchains (e.g. Tezos support should be available in 1-2 weeks), in-app coin swap (in the next 2-3 weeks), Binance DEX (by early Q2 2019), and Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (before the end of the summer).
Finally, with regards to the addition of support for XRP (“the most requested coin from the community”) in this latest release of Trust Wallet, which was done with the help of the “Trust Wallet Core” library, here is what Viktor says about what the experience was like of was like:
I was impressed with a quality of the documentation and tooling around Ripple. Sadly most blockchain companies do poor job on building documentation and tooling to let anyone to use/integrate their products.
— Viktor Radchenko (@vikmeup) March 12, 2019
Victor also had a few words to say about end user onboarding:
So far onboarding is the most complicated step for the end user, XRP chain required to lock 20 XRP on the chain, it activates automatically when sender send some funds.
— Viktor Radchenko (@vikmeup) March 12, 2019
Featured Image Courtesy of Binance
