The re-birth of NanoVault: Nault

Json (Joohansson)
3 min readJun 29, 2020

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Initiated by the dev from My Nano Ninja, welcome to Nault! This project aims to be a new fresh community-driven wallet for Nano with active development and maintenance. It’s a fork of the popular NanoVault but with a twist!

Nault is an entirely client-side signing wallet for sending and receiving Nano in your browser either from publicly hosted nault.cc or by cloning the site and run it locally. There is also a fully working desktop build available.

The main difference compared to the original NanoVault is the “server-less” hosting via vercel, seamless integration with any Nano compatible RPC backend/WebSocket, and the aim to be more frequently maintained. Those features together will significantly increase stability, performance, and uptime.

The native NanoVault relies on a private server to be hosted on and dedicated backend software. In contrast, Nault is hosted completely free of charge yet remaining highly available. The public site, nault.cc, is built automatically on every commit on the master branch, which should give it a more reputable status compared to running on a private server.

Also, Nault is hooking up directly to node RPC interfaces or compatible public APIs without the need for any specific server software.

Meaning it is possible to connect to your own node quickly, the beta network or any privately or publicly hosted Nano derivative.

Nault Wallet
A Familiar Interface

The Goal

The original goal of NanoVault was to be an open-sourced and community-driven wallet. Unfortunately, as much as we love and appreciate it, the progress on the main repository has stalled past year, with a list of unsolved issues growing and features broken. There has been no official standpoint announced by the original developer. So we now aim to do a clear reset and relaunch as a fork, updated with the latest security patches and bug fixes. Hopefully, this will attract more interested developers and collaborators on the git repo as originally intended. This should NOT be a one-person job. The strength will now rely on collaboration, and we need YOU.

Representatives
Instead of new accounts being set to a single pre-defined representative, it will now be randomized among a trusted list of reps. That will considerably help with weight distribution. It will also detect if you run a bad rep and suggest switching.

Backend support for optimal uptime
The wallet has a list of pre-configured backend APIs. These are just examples and can grow further with little effort and help from the community. For example, by running a version of NanoRPCProxy, which is fully compatible and with upgrades in the pipeline.

Current API list:
* My Nano Ninja
* Nanos.cc
* Nanex.cc
* Nanocrawler
* NanoVault

Planned Features

  • Automatic fail-over if a backend goes down. Currently, a list of public APIs can manually be selected or fully customized via the app settings.
  • Overhaul of the Ledger hardware wallet third-party library. Please reach out if you are a developer who wants to dive into this. The libraries have been updated to the latest version, but there are more JS libraries to choose from apparently. The current Nault version has been verified to work with the latest Ledger Nano S firmware in both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20 using either web or desktop app.
  • Even better functionality for semi-automatic switching of a bad rep. For example, giving a message like “Your account’s representative is not optimal for the network, press OK if you allow Nault to change it for you to XYZ. Or press MANUAL if you want to select the rep yourself.”
  • Anything that the community comes up with! Join the Github.

How can I contribute?

  • If you are a user of the wallet, you can find issues and report them on GitHub
  • If you are a developer, you can clone the repo, create a new branch with an improved feature and create a pull request
  • A trusted developer may also become a direct contributor to the repository
Say hello to the new logo designed by Shane

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