Hello, and welcome back to another Greymass progress update. This time around, we’ve got great news if you’ve always wanted to use the Anchor mobile app in Chinese, or to log in to Unicove with any wallet of your choice, or if you’re waiting with bated breath for the WAX upgrade to Antelope 3.1…
And if none of that floats your boat, then be sure to scroll through the rest, because there’s plenty more to discover! So let’s get right into it.
Anchor Updates
For Android
We’ve released a few new versions of Anchor Android since our last progress update, and are currently on version 0.49. Among the changes, the most exciting one for users is that the Chinese version of the app is now fully functional. If you would like to switch your Anchor app to Chinese, you can follow the instructions here.
Our other recent improvements to Anchor Android include:
- Simpler handling for multiple transactions — if you’ve ever triggered multiple transactions in a row and then been confused by which to sign, then this will be a welcome change. We’ve now turned off the transaction queue, so that you only need to handle one transaction at a time.
- Faster transaction completion — When you perform a transaction in Anchor, it needs to be sent (or “broadcasted”) to the blockchain for it to be completed. In the past, Anchor always showed a “success” message once the transaction was broadcasted, even if this broadcasting was actually handled by an external client, such as bloks.io or Unicove. Now, we only show this “success” message when your transaction was broadcasted directly by the Anchor app, in order to complete the transaction process faster.
- Quality of life improvements — Users will benefit from various bug fixes.
For iOS
In our last progress update, we mentioned that a new version of Anchor iOS would be released shortly. Version 1.3.2 is now live, and as promised, this includes support for language localization, and a Chinese version of the app as well. The app will default to your device’s main language automatically, if you have English or Chinese selected.
Other improvements include:
- Support for Jungle 4 — If you’re an explorer of the testnets, then rejoice! Anchor iOS can now follow you into any testing situations you need in Jungle 4.
- Quality of life improvements — Given that we were just talking about the jungle, there’s definitely a jungle-and-bug metaphor here somewhere… but we won’t subject you to it. Suffice to say that we fixed some bugs, so hopefully you won’t run into them anymore.
Unicove Updates
We’ve been spending some time leveling up Unicove recently, with the most exciting development being our partnership with Banxa! You can read all about it here, but the TL;DR is that you can now buy EOS and WAX tokens directly in Unicove. This new feature was the result of 6 months of talks with potential integration partners and development work from members on our team, and we’re excited that’s now out in the wild and helping users to more easily perform transactions on the EOS and WAX networks.
Our hope is that this will make it easier for new users in particular to join the Antelope ecosystem, since they can now use Unicove as a one-stop-shop to create an account, manage their account resources, get tokens, and perform transactions.
In other Unicove news, we’ve also recently updated the balance system to use a new balance provider. This resolves issues that users with Telos accounts were facing, and also removes Unicove’s dependency on bloks.io for balance information from multiple chains. We hope that this will improve Unicove’s resiliency as the Antelope ecosystem continues to evolve.
Wharf Updates
Work on the Wharf Software Development Kit is progressing nicely, and for those who are curious, we encourage them to check out the recordings of our Wharf Project Status Meetings at wharfkit.com.
But for those who would prefer a brief overview of Wharf’s progress (or for those who don’t want to watch multiple hours of meetings… because honestly… same), here’s what we’ve been working on recently:
- Turning Unicove into a more flexible wallet — We’re currently working to integrate an early version of Wharf’s code with Unicove, which will eventually allow other wallets in the Antelope ecosystem to log into Unicove and use it as a web wallet. This will allow all users to benefit from Unicove’s resource management, free transactions from Fuel, etc. regardless of whether they have Anchor or another wallet. While this is currently not public, we’ll notify users when this project is complete.
- Creating a universal user interface — When developers work on projects on Antelope blockchains right now, they need to code many things from scratch, including many aspects of their user interface. Our designer is currently hard at work creating a user interface that will easily integrate with any app that implements the Wharf’s user-facing features, in order to save development work and create an easily recognizable flow for users. Current design mockups are below, but please note that this is a work in progress, and the final user interface may look different.
In Other News…
Support Greymass on Pomelo
If you would like to see Anchor, Unicove, and other materials such as the Greymass website and Support Portal in other languages beyond English and Chinese, then you may be interested in our latest grant for Pomelo Season 5! We intend to streamline our internal translation process, so that we can quickly create new versions of our public goods in Korean, Spanish, and other languages. If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, then please consider supporting our grant. And don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know what languages you’d like to see next!
Status of WAX Upgrade to Antelope 3.1
Greymass is currently preparing for the 3.1 upgrade, and all our servers will be upgraded by March 10th. A number of our internal servers have been upgraded already, and the remaining servers will be upgraded over the coming days. We do not anticipate any disruptions to our services for users on the WAX blockchain.
New Content
Users can now find new and improved articles in our Support Portal, in order to help them get the most out of Anchor (including its new features). The new guides include:
- How to switch Anchor Android’s language — while users can only choose between English and Chinese for now, we certainly hope to add more options in the future.
- Simplified guides for account creation — In the past, our account creation guide covered not only creation of an account, but also how to generate an Owner Key Certificate, and testing their new account. These actions are now broken up into shorter, more digestible guides, so that users can more easily find exactly what they’re looking for.
Note: We’re currently working on translating all the articles in our Support Portal into Chinese, in order to better serve Anchor’s Chinese-speaking users.
We also have new content on our Medium blog and podcast, for readers who want to dive deeper into Greymass’ offerings:
- The Top 3 Ways Your Private Keys Could Be Stolen — Did you know that even if you’re using a secure wallet like Anchor, your keys still might not be safe? True key safety is multi-step, and relies just as much on the user as on the wallet. This is a good read for any user who wants to make sure their keys are truly safe, and for any developers who handles keys.
- A Deep Dive on Unicove + An Exciting New Feature — As mentioned above, we added token purchases to Unicove. This podcast episode dives deeper into how we did it, why we did it, and broadens the conversation to look at our overall goals for Unicove. If you’re curious about tokens, then check it out! Or you can read the related blog post if you’d prefer.
And that’s all for now, folks. Stay safe out there, and we’ll see you in the next progress update.
