AdaLite fully interoperable with Yoroi

TLDR: AdaLite now offers backward compatibility with Icarus-based wallets (such as Yoroi) for both mnemonic and Trezor.

Almost one year passed from the inception of AdaLite. In the meantime, we developed the Cardano Trezor integration and currently, we are (together with Cardano Foundation and Emurgo) working on Ledger integration that will be released soon.

Back then it was only AdaLite or Daedalus but now the Cardano community has access to many more wallets, the best of them based on Icarus Cardano light wallet reference implementation. But AdaLite is still the only web-based light wallet in the Cardano ecosystem and we would like to express gratitude to all our users and supporters.

Back when we started with the development of AdaLite, there were no suitable libraries and services for the development of Cardano wallets such as Icarus, therefore we had to build a custom back-end. We focused on security, the speed of development and quality of code trading it off for some performance. Therefore in the final implementation, we decided to allow users only to have a maximum of 10 addresses per wallet and completely abstain from the use of change addresses to avoid server overload. Therefore, we have been only checking for balance on the first 10 addresses of the derivation path.

This design decision, unfortunately, caused incompatibility with Icarus-based wallets such as Yoroi. We have been receiving many requests (mostly from Trezor users) that tried the Yoroi wallet, did a transaction there and after returning to AdaLite they were unable to see their complete balance because of the above limitation.

This is history now as we transitioned to the new Icarus based back-end and changed the behavior of how the addresses discovery on AdaLite work. From now on, we will be checking the addresses in line with Icarus standard and we will show our users the right balance also when the mnemonic or Trezor hardware wallet was used on Yoroi. Adalite will discover and display all addresses up to the last used address, following the same standards as Yoroi, so no balance would be left out.

This will effectively allow our users to seamlessly switch between AdaLite and Yoroi according to their needs (use Yoroi on the personal computer and AdaLite on a public computer for example — this works mostly for Trezor users, but please refrain from using the mnemonic on non-secured computers). For existing AdaLite users we will still keep showing just first 10 addresses because we don’t currently feel like there is the need to use more on light wallets like ours (but if you feel otherwise, let us know on our Telegram channel)

Please note, we still don’t support Daedalus backward compatibility and in regard to upcoming Cardano changes, we don’t plan to implement this feature.

This is not the only improvement to come to AdaLite. Expect Ledger Nano S support and a new design very very soon.