Introducing the O3 Wallet

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Today we’re proud to unveil something that we’ve been working on for quite some time; O3 (pronounced Ozone). O3 is a native iOS cryptocurrency wallet built specifically for the NEO smart economy.

So why build O3? The obvious first answer is that there is no mobile wallet that is specifically tailored to NEO. We had very specific design goals in mind when building O3.

O3 is a wallet and standalone client that you should be able to interact with the NEO blockchain everyday, securely and easily from your mobile device. The biggest challenge for any wallet creator is balancing security with convenience. If a wallet is incredibly secure, then it is also likely difficult to use. If it is very convenient, then the smallest error could lead to a complete loss of funds. So how do we tackle these issues?

The first thing to realize is that if you are holding crypto assets, then it is unlikely that you will need to have write access to these these on a daily basis. If you store 1000 USD in one wallet, what is the chance that you will need to send all 1000 at any given time? So the typical solution for a user in this scenario is to lock all of their funds up in a cold address and never touch them again. However if your funds are never used then are they actually valuable?

In this case many bitcoin holders have separated their funds into a hot wallet and a cold storage wallet. This can be analogous to a checking account and a savings account in a bank. A hot wallet is private key that you would use that frequently interacts with web based services, only holds a small portion of your holdings, and if the key is compromised you will survive (albeit) have a very bad day. O3 follows this embraces this paradigm of hot wallet and cold storage separation, by allowing you to store your hot private key on device, but at the same time specifying watch only addresses to monitor without exposure to security risks.

So let’s go through the basic features

First off you will see that O3 is very similar in design to a stock app such as Robin Hood. In the future we envision many types of assets and tokens issued on the Neo blockchain. As the Neo economy grows so should your portfolio, so monitoring the price changes should be essential.

However digital assets are at their best when they are easy to move, without ridiculous transaction fees, and without middleman, so O3 maintains full wallet capabilities such as adding contacts, and sending/receiving assets.

Scanning Capabilities (to be expanded in the future)

Security wise, O3 is meant to be used as a hot wallet. Your private key will be stored in the iOS keychain, which although is considered to be very secure still does have attack vectors. However, relative to a windows PC, I consider someone breaking into your keychain much less likely than getting a key logger on to your machine.

Any sensitive data is protected via touchID or pin code. Sending transactions and viewing your private key will both require you to be authenticated, but all of this information is stored on your device, we will NEVER send private key data remotely.

O3 shines when you separate your watch only and hot wallet address. This concept is also described by Erik Zhang in

NEP: Wallet Standard by erikzhang · Pull Request #13 · neo-project/proposals · GitHub

You can add unlimited read only addresses to help you keep tabs on your portfolio, but even if your device is compromised, an attacker has no way of accessing these funds.

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With these features, and many more to come we hope O3 will be what we set out to make. Your gateway to the NEO smart economy.

Our code is open source, and we hope developers will take this time to audit our code, as we prepare the finishing touches for our beta release.

GitHub - CityOfZion/neo-swift: Swift Wrapper for Neo Blockchain API
O3 Github

We’re now looking for beta testers, so please signup here if you’re interested o3 - A NEO wallet app for iOS

Final Notes

O3 also works in read only mode, so you can have full monitoring capabilities without ever entering a private key, and if you want to see exactly when your transaction is added on to the blockchain, or when you receive funds from someone else BOOM