SmeshWallet vs Spacemesh Wallets
The Spacemesh team have developed two products which offer SMH wallets—Smapp and Smapp-Lite. This document offers some reasons why you might choose SmeshWallet over these products.
- Smapp — Smapp is a full-node, requiring 100GB of disk space and to be run 24/7, if you want immediate access to your funds. More than half the SmeshWallet users migrated from Smapp, and so the rest of this document will focus on SmeshWallet vs Smapp-Lite.
- Smapp-Lite — Like SmeshWallet, Smapp-Lite is web-based wallet. According to the team, however, Smapp-Lite is not a “product” which the team intends to market, but is more of a developer’s tool useful for testing, and implements special features allowing staff and VCs to claim their vested tokens.
- Superior UX design — SmeshWallet was created by a team that specializes in UI/UX design. In our subjective opinion, echoed by Discord comments from many others, SmeshWallet is notably more user-friendly.
- Message signing — SmeshWallet offers a feature to sign messages with your wallet’s private key, allowing, among other things, to login to popular services like Team24. Currently, Smapp-Lite does not offer message signing capabilities.
- Mobile friendly — SmeshWallet is a “Progressive Web App”, meaning it works great on mobile. You can even turn it into a “mobile app” by doing “Share → Add to Home Screen” in iOS, and similar in Android. While Smapp-Lite can be used on mobile, Smapp is a desktop-only app.
- Customer support — With SmeshWallet, I generally respond to support emails within 24-hours. With Smapp-Lite, you’ll need to post your issues in Discord, and wait for a team member or community volunteer to respond (and the creator of Smapp-Lite, within the Spacemesh team, is rarely online in Discord.)
- Are they equally safe? — This question is sufficiently complex that I have created a dedicated security document on the topic. In short:
- Theft — As discussed in the security document, the main risk you face with SmeshWallet, is that I would become a criminal and steal your funds. I am a public figure, who has been working in the crypto field for many years, am financially secure, and would have no desire to spend my life looking over my shoulder, with a target on my back. But even this risk, however, is mostly mitigated by the following...
- Open-source — Smapp-Lite is open-source, whereas SmeshWallet is not. I invested considerable personal funds to have SmeshWallet developed by a wallet-specialized professional product design team, and don’t want that it can simply be copied by someone else. But since the question of open-source is important to many, I have given access to the code in GitHub to two of the community’s most trusted and technically competent members, Flare (@schinzelh) and Earl (@xearl4). Any malicious changes made to the SmeshWallet code would immediately be visible to them.
- Ledger support — The risk of theft will be completely mitigated, once the Spacemesh team finishes their Ledger app, and we integrate that into SmeshWallet. At that point, your private keys will exist only within the hardware device, inaccessible to even the SmeshWallet application.
- Redundant nodes — SmeshWallet operates redundant nodes in two geographically separate data centers, ensuring continuous operations during updates or network outages. Security on these servers has been hardened, and a five-minute monitor confirms that the SHA checksum on the go-spacemesh node software matches that of the official project release.
- Operational status — SmeshWallet operates a status page showing the real-time operational status of the wallet and all nodes.
Have questions?
If you have any questions, I’m more than happy to answer them on Discord or Telegram @dafacto, or on Twitter @SmeshWallet!