GreenAddress, one of the best bitcoin wallets available today, recently deprecated its Chrome application, telling users it should now only be accessed by mobile and from the new port made available in the form of a more secure desktop app. Along with this move, the team has implemented a few other substantial improvements and features to the wallet.
The development team mentioned it’s now focused towards building on more native frameworks. The new desktop application is based on libwally, the GreenAddress libsecp256k1-based wallet library. The new desktop app also now fully supports hardware wallets like the Trezor One and Ledger Nano S, with support planned for more hardware wallets in the future.
Although officially deprecating the Chrome browser-based wallet, it will still be accessible for a limited time. However, the Chrome application and web wallet will NOT be updated in the future and will eventually be totally removed in the coming months.
See below, some other new updates from the GreenAddress team.
Two-factor Recovery, sending to bech32 & updates
Two Factor Authentication Recovery
The new long-term two-factor recovery procedure which has been planned to be implemented is now complete. It allows users who have lost the ability to access their bitcoins to now recover them. This recovery procedure is available on the new, updated desktop and Android versions of the wallet software. The GreenAddress terms of service have been updated as well for the CSV changes coming soon, as well as to clarify the details of the recovery procedure.
CSV will allow the following:
- Make recovery processing completely trustless and atomic
- Remove the need for nLockTime files
- Remove the need for an email address for nLockTime notifications
- Have all newly generated addresses in wallets automatically be able to be recovered
- Minimize trust requirements in GreenAddress
- The biggest improvement CSV enables is reducing the amount of trust users must place in GreenAddress. With CSV, users will no longer have to worry about GreenAddress shutting down nor will they have to trust GreenAddress to provide out of band nLockTime transactions.
The GreenAddress team said:
“We will be taking advantage of CSV (CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY), a feature in Bitcoin that allows us to greatly improve recoverability for GreenAddress users. Support for this feature will be included in future GreenAddress releases. We will continue to provide more information as the deployment time approaches. We are very excited about the improvements to our user experience that CSV will bring!”
Updates & Bug Fixes
Updates and bug fixes include the following:
- Added support for sending to native SegWit addresses (bech32)
- Added support for the new two-factor reset and dispute procedure
- Fixes and improvements related to BIP 70
- System messages are now shown to the user on startup
- Various improvements to hardware wallet support
Android-specific updates and fixes include:
- Moving to the latest Android SDK
- UI and notification updates for Oreo
- Removing support for pre-KitKat devices
- Updated SPV checkpoints
- Removing support for dead Android platforms (e.g. MIPS)
- Improving Recovery & Trustlessness
New Native iOS App and GreenAddress Development Kit
The team also has announced a new native iOS app which will include an updated and rebranded UI and will be based on the new GreenAddress Development Kit (GDK). The GDK is based on libwally and provides a high-level coding interface for anyone that wants to access GreenAddress programmatically.
The team concluded:
“We would like to remind users again to enable a second two-factor method as a backup if they currently only have a single method enabled. As always, we are busy working on other new features and enhancements to the platform and will update the community about them in the future.”