Continued Feather Wallet development (Q1 2021)

What

This CCS proposal is for 3 months of full time Feather Wallet development.

The goal of this proposal is to:

• Reach feature-parity with the GUI (this mostly concerns hardware wallet support)
• Further advance the Monero desktop wallet space by implementing new (and experimental) features.

Background

• Feather was announced on Aug 21 2020.
• A CCS proposal funding the initial stages of development was accepted on September 1.
• The first alpha builds became available on Oct 10.
• During the alpha time was spent on:
  • Troubleshooting teething problems
  • Bugfixes and performance improvements
  • Getting the websites and build infrastructure up and running
• The first beta builds were announced on Dec 15.
  • The beta introduced signed release binaries.
  • The focus for the beta was to fix the remaining UI/UX issues before adding new features. This is now mostly complete.
  • A total of 211 pull requests (171 made by me) were submitted to the repository since the alpha release.
• Some features that were added between the previous CCS proposal and now are: Windows support, view-only wallets, offline transaction signing, advanced transaction overview (image), transaction rebroadcasting, XMRig integration and reproducible Linux builds. Reproducible builds are mostly thanks to work done by Xiphon on the GUI.

What I want to work on

• Hardware wallet support (most requested feature, so this is definitely happening now)
• More exchange integrations (among which LocalMonero)
• More advanced coin control features: manual input selection and individual output labeling
• An in-wallet troubleshooting wizard that detects and suggests fixes for common issues (example)
• Easy to use 2/2, 2/3 multisig (work on the message transportation layer and UI/UX design can commence before it is clear what changes Triptych/Arcturus will bring to multisig)
• Qr scanner (scan addresses with laptop camera/webcam)
• Multi destination transactions
• Debian package
• Sync over clearnet, construct & broadcast transactions over Tor
• Approach the Tails team to discuss potential inclusion of Feather Wallet by default
• Further UI/UX improvements (including more actionable error messages, better UI feedback)
• Upstreaming of changes to libwalletqt / wallet_api
• (Separate from Feather): Monero Daemon as a system service (more info)

This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the things I want to work on during the proposal. I expect the majority of the items on this list to be completed at the end of the 3-month period (with the exception of multisig, which will likely take longer). As always I will rely heavily on user feedback to determine where to put my focus.

Why contribute to Feather development?

• It is an excellent testing grounds for features that may later be implemented in the official GUI (14 word seeds, coin control, multisig, etc)
• There is more room to experiment with UI/UX and features and see what works before committing to it in a reference wallet.
• Some users cite its simplicity, focus on user experience, quick setup, addition of power user features and similarity to Electrum as reasons they prefer it over the GUI
• Feather will remain open source and licensed under BSD-3.

Who

Hi, I'm tobtoht. Creator of xmrguide and maintainer of Feather Wallet. I have been an active contributor to the Monero ecosystem since April 2018.

Some of the things I have worked on are:

• Created and maintained guides to set up Monero on Tails and Whonix (xmrguide, reddit)
• Made miscellaneous contributors to the GUI (most notably Tails support)
• Maintained a list of .onion remote nodes with their status
• Created various Python scripts to convert from/to Monero using third party exchangers
• Co-created Feather Wallet with dsc

Proposal

40 hours per week at 45 USD/hour for a total of 150 XMR. The XMR/USD rate is based on current exchange rate of $144 XMR/USD.

This will cover January/February/March. Any hours left over will bleed into April.

Progress will be reported in #feather on OFTC. Bi-monthly updates will be posted to /r/FeatherWallet in the form on release changelogs.

Feedback and comments are welcome.