Presenting Nucle: The First SPV Wallet for Chia

Presenting Nucle: The First SPV Wallet for Chia

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to catch up with the Nucle.io team and get a first look at their closed Beta for the first SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) wallet for Chia. SPV allows a lightweight client or a wallet to determine if transactions are valid by verifying the related UTXOs are included in the blockchain without downloading the entire blockchain.

These wallets allow users to interact with the blockchain instantly without having to sync a full node. A lightweight, SPV wallet is a critical component that will allow Chia Tokens, DeFi applications and asset trading to happen on top of Chia. Because of the UTXO model in Chia, an SPV wallet is different under the hood than other non-custodial wallets like MetaMask or Trust Wallet but part of its functionality will give the user the same type of experience.

Nucle brings a great first impression. A sleek, easy to use interface is a welcomed experience for anyone that has fumbled their way through the various crypto user interfaces in the past.

Nucle seed recovery phrase

After you create your 12 word pass phrase, you are brought to the wallet home screen where you can add or remove wallets, send and receive Chia, and see your balances of XCH and smart coins.

Nucle Wallet Main Page

Token Support

I made a few test transactions from a faucet and back to a synced wallet with almost instantaneous results.

The Nucle team will officially launch the SPV wallet later this week and in anticipation of the launch I asked them a few questions about the wallet, their team and their vision for the future.

Chia Decentral: We were very excited to see the official Closed Beta launch of Nucle.io. The community has been anxiously awaiting the first thin-client or SPV wallet for Chia. The wallet appears to only scratch the surface on what you’re looking to achieve with Nucle, tell us about Nucle and the initial wallet launch?

Nucle: Nucle is the world’s first Chia SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) decentralized wallet. Basically, it’s a lightweight always-in sync wallet similar to MetaMask, Jaxx, or Trust wallet. That means it doesn’t require a fully synchronized chia blockchain node while the user completely controls and owns their private key.

The Nucle features:

-Ultrafast transactions: an immediate sync to the blockchain with the address attached to your key.

-On top of the originally 24-word mnemonic key, Nucle also supports 12-word mnemonic keys for better user experiences and flows while maintaining reasonable security.

-Allow for multiple wallets smoothly and instantly switching within a single app.

-Support multiple platforms, including but not limited to webapp, iOS and Android

We also prepared some surprises on the initial launch, stay tuned! 

Chia Decentral: Can you tell us exactly what an SPV wallet is and the benefits over the existing Chia wallet?

Nucle: Simple Payment Verification (SPV) is a technique originally described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper. SPV allows a lightweight client or a wallet to verify that a transaction is included in the blockchain without downloading the entire blockchain. 

The most obvious benefit of SPV wallet is the speed and the ease of use: open, checking balance, send, and receive. The use case of SPV wallet is considering a hot wallet that is suitable for day to day use. The chia full node wallet is more ideally used as cold storage for the highest security that is fully verified by the blockchain. What you need on a daily basis is checking around, something that you can quickly move money in and out of that freely. That’s where Nucle enters the picture, whether you’re moving your money to a cold storage, savings, or an exchange, you first stop in the checking account.

Chia Decentral: Metamask is synonymous with Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens. Is your goal to build a similar ecosystem with Nucle, Chia and Chia Tokens?

Nucle: Right out of the gate. We are planning to support Chia Tokens and we hope that we can bring a MetaMask level of DeFI experience to the Chia ecosystem. Having Nucle’s extensibility, anyone can onboard and transfer their own Chia Token on Nucle.

Chia Decentral: We all read Bram’s DeFi on Chia blog post a few weeks ago, how will Nucle fit into the DeFi ecosystem?

Nucle: A decentralized lightweight wallet is almost the first step to experience the excitement of the decentralized financial ecosystem, such as decentralized exchange (Uniswap), NFT trading platform (Opensea), and many more. We are working on a full take on the DeFi post specifically designed for Chia blockchain. You will see more of that coming soon. 

Chia Decentral: What’s next for the Nucle team?

Nucle: Launching Nucle publicly in August is our primary focus. We want Nucle out to the community as a solution to some of the users who suffer from the time consuming wallet syncing progress.

Thank you again to the Nucle team for their contributions to the community.

Happy (yield) Farming!