From the team behind PoolChia comes a new lightweight Chia wallet called Nucle.io run on the web, but not a custodial wallet as you retain control of your keys. This wallet a bit of a game changer, with no more multiday sync process needed to get up and going. Honestly, between the release of first Flexfarmer and now Nucle the barrier to entry for farming is getting very low. I’m told Nucle is looking for a full release in two weeks, so it should be available for everyone very soon.
I was invited in to the Nucle beta a few weeks back, and have been playing with the wallet since. And I have to say I am quite impressed. Getting started was very easy, and as soon as I was signed up I was able to transfer XCH in and start using it. Transfers were fast, but more importantly there was no wait for sync. It just worked. I am not too familiar with the Ethereum ecosphere but I am told it works very similarly to Metamask, run from cloud servers but protected by a user key so the custodians do not have access to the keys and wallet contents, even while you are actively using it.
Let’s start with the name. The Nucle team told me they did indeed derive the name from Nucleus, and their website Nucle.io can be pronounced “Nucleo”, but because everyone started calling it “Knuckle”, they have gone ahead and embraced that pronunciation. They have embraced it so much that they called the first token they were issuing to wallets “Tails”. As in the Sonic the Hedgehog characters, which I am here for. Pure coincidence too that Idris Elba is currently advertising Knuckles all over the world right now.
Nucle supports both 12 and 24 word keys. I want to take a second to talk about the security offered by word keys and how they work, because I think coming from Chia Network’s 24 word client it might look like Nucle is less secure. I mean, academically there is a higher entropy with 24 words but as long as there are enough words in the dictionary set 12 of them will provide a huge amount of entropy, more than enough to protect a web wallet. Far more than a 12 character password. And a 12 word key can be memorable enough to know which can be strong protection in and of itself.
Nucle also supports multiple wallets tied together with a password, where they are different wallets but can be easily managed – easier even than switching between keys in the official Chia client. They have early support for tokens and everything else to do with the current Chia ecosystem.
This is actually so good its a little boring to write about. The interface was good and easy to use, there were no technical issues I had with the product during the beta. I transferred coins in and out with no hassle, and had no issues using any of the features. Token support in the wallet is still early, but still ahead of the official client and ahead of the Chia Network itself. If they launch with their Tails token and can do something with it that will likely be another “first” for their launch.
Switching between computers is easy, just needed my words and set a new password for that system. I was able to load up both wallets with balances and start using them very quickly on the new system, and securely. There are a lot of use cases this opens up, as well as just making it possible to sporadically use a Chia wallet without giving yourself a days notice to resync.
The Nucle / PoolChia team seems very competent to me and very open about their product. They are planning on open sourcing the Nucle wallet and making it widely available in order to kick start the Chia software ecosystem and make it not cost-prohibitive to send and receive XCH. They plan on moving on to bigger and better projects using their wallet, including layer 2 tokens and decentralized applications (dapps). I suspect they will be stiff competition for anyone else looking to get into the space.
During the beta I did not take enough screenshots because I wanted to make sure this article was updated with the latest screens in case things changed during the beta period. Well, when I went this morning to get the screenshots I could no longer access the beta service – a risk I knowingly took. So I will update this article with screenshots as I get access. In the meantime if you would like to check out Nucle they have a YouTube channel with two videos and you can join their discord channel here to get more info on how to sign up when it becomes open to the public.
