6 Things You Should Know About Trust Wallet — in Conversation with Founder Viktor Radchenko
Learn six things you probably didn’t know about Trust Wallet directly from the founder and CEO, Viktor Radchenko, in this interview conducted by Adrian Sandiford.
1/ Not only is Trust Wallet the simplest crypto wallet to use, but it also supports 250,000 different assets.
If you’re new to the space then let’s take a step back. “The simplest way to explain it is it’s a crypto wallet that allows you to store and send Bitcoin,” explains its founder Viktor Radchenko. You can also use it for other cryptocurrencies.
“We currently support over 33 blockchains, which contain, in total, around 250,000 different assets.”
It’s non-custodial and decentralized, which means no one other than you has any control whatsoever over your funds. And then, on top of all that, it has DApp browser support, which — jargon aside — means you can utilize your wallet to explore different ways of using crypto, from earning and insurance to games and art.
Read more from Viktor’s introduction to Trust Wallet here.
2/ Trust Wallet has its own token (TWT), and there are one billion of them. But they aren’t reserved for investors or team members, they’re for you — the community.
So far around 25–30 percent of the tokens have been distributed. With the rest to be given out over the next five-ten years. “Something to mention is that we haven’t distributed tokens to our team members,” says Viktor.
“There is no big delegation or anything like that. We continue distributing all the tokens that we have to our community.”
But while they do have a market value don’t think of TWT as the next Bitcoin. It’s not about speculation. It’s about education. “We don’t try to build any monetization model. We’re trying to bring a different kind of value in terms of bringing new people to crypto. That’s the idea behind it. We use it where it’s useful, and where we find it helps incentivize people to get on board with crypto.” One clear example is governance where holding TWT allows you to vote on decisions related to the project.
Read more about why TWT is about education, not speculation here.
3/ If you own TWT then you can vote on if a project should be added to Trust Wallet or not — decision making is in the hands of the community.
“It’s a better way for us to eliminate different shitcoins, and at the same time it gives more power to users to decide what they want to do with integrations,” says Viktor.
This system also means projects are incentivized to give tokens to TWT holders to encourage them to vote. As part of the agreement, these projects also have to create an open-source contribution to Wallet Core, which is Trust Wallet’s core library.
Not sure what that means? Then listen to Viktor: “If you want to support Bitcoin, Litecoin, whatever, this is what that library’s doing. It’s abstracting the complexity for integrating a blockchain, and creating this universal and intuitive interface to utilize and interact with these blockchains.”
And Trust’s Wallet Core is so good that it’s used by plenty of other companies and products out there, too — from the Bitcoin.com Wallet to the Crypto.com DeFi Wallet.
“We allow other developers to create wallets in a way where they use this Wallet Core library as a foundation, and then they build their user interface on top of it.”
Read more about community governance and the power of Wallet Core here. Or check out Trust Wallet’s governance system at governance.trustwallet.com
4/ The Trust Wallet team is working on a new product called Earn, which will help users make money more easily.
There’s a lot you can do with crypto when it comes to finance. You can provide liquidity. There are lending protocols. Decentralized exchanges. There are tools like Yearn Finance Protocol (YFP). You can stake your tokens and earn interest that way. The list goes on and on. But where to start? It’s a lot to take on, and a lot to figure out. “This is where we want to be more involved in providing greater functionality for users to make money on those things,” says Viktor.
“We’re going to provide a simplified interface that will explain how much you can earn.”
Because that’s what Trust Wallet is all about — making things accessible and easy for people. “The way I look at it we need to make a button that makes Earn and crypto work for you. So it’s literally, like, you’re pressing a button, and then you start earning funds. That’s the main idea,” says Viktor.
Trust Wallet’s pre-existing ‘Finance’ section can be viewed as the beginnings of this project, but it will be extended to support so much more. “I want Trust Wallet to be that aggregator for all the different ‘earning’ products out there.”
Read more about the vision for Trust Wallet’s new Earn product here.
5/ Trust Wallet’s mission is to make crypto accessible to everyone — that means no KYC, no restrictions, and no barriers to entry.
“I was born in Ukraine so I know what money is,” says Viktor. “If you’ve always lived in the US, or somewhere like that, you’ve always known one dollar to equal one dollar, so you don’t understand as much about money. In Ukraine we had lots of inflation, so that gave me more of an idea of what money is, and how to perceive it.”
And so Viktor’s driving force is simply to make crypto accessible to everyone — regardless of where they live or what they do. “That’s the baseline,” he says.
“Simplifying it, making it accessible, and giving people the ability to create wallets without limits. You’re free to set up a wallet anywhere you want. No restrictions.”
That commitment to openness and freedom extends to how Viktor views open-source development and the sharing of ideas, too. “Building this permissionless world is very important to me,” adds Viktor. “My parents were always telling me to be honest, have integrity, and share knowledge. So I think that’s the same concept where we talk about blockchain, technology, development — where you don’t want to build technology that’s only used by you, and create different patents, all of that bullshit, but you create something useful, not just for your product, but you make it open-source so others can use it.”
Read more about Viktor’s motivation, philosophy, and views on community here.
6/ In the future the seed recovery phrase will be replaced by a better system.
If you’re an absolute beginner you won’t know what that means. But trust us when we say the idea of replacing it is A Big Deal.
For context: the whole point of Trust Wallet, and other services like it, is that only the user has access to the wallet and its funds. Without getting bogged down in technical detail this is done by giving each user a secret 12-word phrase that only they have access to. These words are like a magic key to your wallet. And for now, is the industry standard in terms of securing your funds.
Viktor and Trust Wallet want to improve all that. “We’re still lacking a good key management system in crypto,” he says. “ The seed recovery phrase is cool, but I think it needs to be abstracted away. It’s not something that people want to worry about if possible. We need to make crypto more accessible in terms of being a self-sovereign system, where you control your keys, and no one else, but we need to find a balance, where it’s encrypted, safe to use, and no one can easily steal it from you.”
So key management is something the Trust Wallet team is now exploring. Because your wallet is not just the money you store — it’s more than a digital asset; it’s going to become your identity. “If we manage it then it will give us more exposure to building other products on top,” says Viktor, “because this is the biggest barrier I see in crypto.”