IOTA Announces New Wallet. Here's Everything We Know So Far

The IOTA Foundation announced its new wallet, called Firefly, via a cryptic tweet dated Nov. 24.

Charlie Varley, developer at the IOTA Foundation, expanded on the out-of-the-blue announcement, claiming that Firefly will arrive as a replacement for the troubled Trinity wallet that was released back in July 2019:

We are aiming for a first alpha this year. Taking everything we learned from Trinity we redesigned it from the ground up.

Varley adds that the alpha release of the wallet is slated to take place in 2020. Next year, IOTA's developers will bolster it with a slew of additional features.

A new era for the ecosystem

As explained by IOTA's David Sonstebo, the name of the wallet reflects the stigmergic behavior of fireflies.

IOTA cofounder Dominik Schiener claims that Firefly—whose testnet version will become available in the coming weeks—opens "an exciting new chapter" for the IOTA network.

With Chrysalis we are fundamentally upgrading the entire IOTA stack. Over the coming weeks everyone will be able to participate in this new IOTA future and try our new Firefly wallet and Testnet. This will be an exciting new chapter for IOTA and the entire ecosystem!

In September, IOTA made a major step toward the rollout of Coordicide (IOTA 2.0), the pivotal upgrade that is expected to make the mechanism for securing the network completely decentralized, with the deployment of the first phase of Chrysalis (IOTA 1.5).

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Looking past Trinity's woes

Upon its release, IOTA touted its Trinity wallet as "secure" and "industry leading," but that was not the case.

As reported by U.Today, the wallet ended up getting hacked this February, forcing IOTA to shut down the entire mainnet for two weeks by pausing the centralized Coordinator node that confirms transactions on the network.

The $1.6 million stolen from users of the Trinity wallet were later reimbursed by Sonstebo.

Coordicide will replace Coordinator in IOTA 2.0, which is expected to be shipped in Q1, 2021.