The “why” behind Linen Wallet.
As most of you already know, the most successful startups are the ones that solve a significant problem in a big and growing market. Well, we firmly believe we are solving way more than a simple problem in the crypto industry.
Linen is on a mission to securely bring the next 100 million users to the internet of value, or Web3, in which people use their digital assets issued on decentralized blockchains like Ethereum to interact with online services and applications. For example, in-game items or community tokens issued by one party can be used in multiple applications and are freely transferable to anyone.
We envision a future where the internet is owned by its users and digital assets move with their owners across the internet. A future where a secure wallet is not only a place to store digital assets, but also a login for Web3 applications. And this login is owned by the user — not by Google, Facebook, or Apple.
We strongly believe in that future, but there is a major obstacle to it becoming a reality, related to the adoption of wallets: secure backup and recovery of user private keys. But don’t take our word for it. Ethereum’s co-creator, Vitalik Buterin, probably one of the most brilliant minds on earth, recently discussed this in his piece,“Why we need wide adoption of social recovery wallets,” where he explains that wallet security and usability remain obstacles to earning high yield in DeFi, investing in new asset classes such as NFTs, and earning governance and community tokens for average users.
Indeed, even advanced crypto community members like Farokh lose close to $1 million worth of digital assets using a wallet like Ledger or MetaMask because their seed phrase was compromised or lost.
Don’t get us wrong — wallets like Metamask or Ledger have brought us where we are today, and we are extremely grateful for what they’ve done for this industry. Nevertheless, they are not an optimal solution.
So what do we need?
Vitalik Buterin calls for wallet designs that satisfy three key criteria:
“No single point of failure: there is no single thing (and ideally, no collection of things that travel together) which, if stolen, can give an attacker access to your funds, or if lost, can deny you access to your funds.
Low mental overhead: as much as possible, it should not require users to learn strange new habits or exert mental effort to always remember to follow certain patterns of behavior.
Maximum ease of transacting: most normal activities should not require much more effort than they do in regular wallets.”
Vitalik Buterin, Etherum co-creator
We are proud to say that we are building exactly that. Linen would allow its users to access Web3 platforms like DeFi, NFT marketplaces, etc. without making any compromises between security, asset ownership, and ease of use. We are laser-focused on executing our vision for the multichain Web3 world where Linen Wallet is your secure home for digital assets!
As some of you have already noticed, to deploy a smart contract wallet and start using Linen, users need to pay a wallet deployment fee, which is required for miners to process transactions on the Ethereum network. Unfortunately, fees on the Ethereum blockchain have been very high lately, causing retail crypto users to hold off from using DeFi and other Web3 applications.
That’s why the upcoming Polygon Network integration is the first step to bringing low transaction fees to users of Linen Wallet. Polygon Network is home to many DeFi and NFT applications because of its very cheap transaction fees. We expect to release it next month and, once implemented, we expect that most of our users will be using the multisig wallet on Polygon. Transactions will be cheap, and there will be no need to pay fees to miners for wallet deployment as they are negligible and Linen aims to subsidize them.
At the same time, users of Linen can use the Ethereum network, which is already supported today. That’s because some users may choose to hold high balances or use certain applications on Ethereum. This is basically the way it works today.
Remember we mentioned that we are building our wallet for the multichain world? Support for additional blockchains and scalability solutions will be implemented afterward In a couple of months, users will be able to connect Linen Wallet to just about any Web3 application in the Ethereum ecosystem.
We couldn’t be more excited about the journey and hope you are too!
Vitaly, Alex, and the rest of the team!