The newest L1 rockstar in the crypto world is the Aptos blockchain. Launching its mainnet in late October, the chain hasn’t been live long but has been turning heads and gaining attention for some time. Given its fundraising of over $350 million, it’s clear that those with the means to back their horse have done so.
With key stats like 160,000 TPS (transactions per second), along with using the Move programming language to stay flexible and lean, utilizing parallel transaction processing via Block-STM Technology, and selecting a BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus protocol, the Layer 1 has all the right stuff.
What is left to make Aptos truly amazing is to populate the ecosystem with a set of Dapps as impressive as the chain itself. Running an incentivized testnet, many Dapps got a head start and were ready to go live along with Aptos.
While a number of DeFi Dapps were launched, let’s talk today about the Rise Wallet, one of the most unique. On the surface, reviewing a crypto wallet can only be so unique. After all, there are a list of expected functions of a good crypto wallet (speed, flexibility, low cost, good UI), but there aren’t many ways a wallet can differentiate itself.
That said, Rise has decided that instead of providing a few gimmicks to make it stand out, it has instead invested deeply into discovering how users interact with their wallet, what pain points they face with a typical wallet, and what it will take to make the experience truly seamless for users at all levels.
Let’s dive in to see what makes the Rise Wallet a top pick for the Aptos blockchain. We will start with the core features to show what the wallet can offer, and then will peel back the UX layer to see how the team has made the Dapp something special for its community.
Core Features
In terms of the important features needed in a wallet, Rise has all the basics. It is non-custodial, highly secure, and incredibly efficient as a browser extension. Using Hippo Space (https://hippo.space/swap), a top swap aggregator for Aptos built by Hippo Labs, users can easily swap tokens within the wallet finding the best rates on many of the biggest markets.
The swap process will find the best route for the trade and the lowest price, without Rise adding fees on top. Of course, the wallet allows for all things both token and NFT: send, receive, buy, and sell. It will also allow staking for rewards. Overall, the wallet is full-featured, secure, and extremely low-cost.
However, there are certainly some other wallet contenders on Aptos that offer similar features. And that’s why Rise’s secret weapon isn’t its core features; the secret weapon is its incredible user experience.
Key Differentiator: EXTREMELY Smooth User Experience
A trend with crypto wallets, or Dapps that include a wallet, is that they tend to fall on one or two extremes: either they focus on being bare bones but lightweight, or they try to cram as many features as possible into their platform (with varying degrees of success). This is fine, but one thing tends to be consistent: the actual user experience for the wallet ranges from adequate to cumbersome in most cases.
For Rise, the user experience was the first priority, and it shows. The team clearly did some deep research on what was important to users, and it’s evident that they have their own set of horror stories about bad wallets. It seems they wanted to fix the issues and make sure none of their community has to deal with poor UX again.
The various features might be seen as small or subtle, but taken together they truly offer a unique and smooth experience for users. Here are some of the key elements embedded into the Rise experience:
- NFTs are automatically grouped by collection, making them easy to find and sort.
- Profile picture protocol allows users to select one of their NFTs from their gallery as their on-chain NFT profile picture, which is visible to others when they send a transaction.
- Instead of having to memorize long strings of random characters, the wallet allows for users to type in someone’s Aptos name domain, and the receiving address is automatically connected. This, in combination with the user’s unique profile picture ensure that the correct contact has been selected.
- The wallet has been translated to 15 languages, which covers a large portion of the global population.
- Users can create an infinite number of wallets (they might not need this, but the flexibility is representative of the Dapp’s overall attitude to flexibility).
- Believe it or not, the Dapp offers 24/7 chat support, which is almost unheard of with Web3 Dapps.
- Rise has developed a dynamic header, which users can click on to get more information on an event, be it a transaction, error message, or more. This means that more intel is available to users with fewer clicks.
- Push notifications are available for a variety of transactional and NFT events.
- The address book is synchronized so that users can simply type in their contact names and the recipient and their address are automatically derived.
- Users can adjust the auto lock timer, changing the amount of time that must elapse before the Dapp requests a password again.
- Users can click a universal “Send” button, which will then offer a dropdown of which token they would like to send.
- Users can edit a variety of filters for transactions, including the gas price, max gas limit, or transaction timeout limit.
This long list of features taken together equates to an extremely smooth experience for users, taking them far away from the “DIY” feel of many Web3 Dapps today and much closer to a seamless experience that is to be expected with more mature technologies.
Summing Up
The Rise wallet is an exciting addition to the Aptos ecosystem, supplying users with the critical features necessary to interact with the growing number of Dapps setting up shop daily. Its focus on an extremely smooth user experience is important, and should provide a lasting benefit to those who use it, making this part of their experience with Aptos easy to manage, and allowing them full access to the features you would expect from a Web3 wallet.
We will see how the Rise Wallet continues to evolve, but it will likely continue to focus first on its user experience, pampering its community with intuitive but powerful features.