We were surprised and saddened to hear that Lunie plans on sunsetting their hosted services at the end of November. For those of you new to the ecosystem, you may not know about Lunie and Tendermint’s shared history. The Lunie wallet project used to be a product of Tendermint and is, in fact, the oldest wallet in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Development on the wallet codebase started four years ago, around the time of the Cosmos fundraiser. Early supporters of Cosmos may recall there used to be a wallet called the Cosmos Voyager — this later became Lunie. Jordan Bibla and Fabian Weber, core members of the Voyager team, wanted to build a company focused on wallet development. They spun out of Tendermint in early 2019 to form Lunie International Software Systems Inc.
The Lunie wallet is still the most popular web wallet for the Cosmos ecosystem. Aside from their well-known web wallet, they also have a mobile wallet, a Chrome extension, and a powerful notifications system. They also currently support seven different blockchain networks, including the Cosmos Hub, Kava, Terra, E-Money, Akash, Kusama, and Polkadot.
Lunie’s focus on providing a great user experience to proof-of-stake networks has made them stand out in the nascent crypto ecosystem. What they’ve done is no easy feat — they made it easy for users to stake tokens and vote on governance proposals with their intuitive UI.
A large number of ATOM holders use Lunie to manage their funds, receive staking rewards, and vote on governance proposals. While there exist good alternatives to migrate to, like Keplr and Cosmostation, what about the users who would prefer to continue using Lunie?
With the sunset of hosted Lunie products imminent, we’ve taken steps to ensure that ATOM holders who prefer using Lunie can continue doing so. Tendermint and the Interchain Foundation have been working with the Lunie team to develop Lunie Light, a wallet specifically aimed at supporting the Cosmos Hub and blockchains built on recent versions of the Cosmos SDK.
While the wallet is called Lunie Light, it does not mean it will be light on features. Lunie Light will continue to have its core features within a web UI. This includes token transfers, staking, governance, and support for a wide variety of login options, including Keplr, the Ledger hardware wallets, and the new WebAuthn standard.
Feel free to check out the specs and progress here.
Tendermint is now hosting this wallet at https://lunie.cosmos.network, with initial support for the cosmoshub-3 blockchain. Once the Cosmos Hub upgrades to Stargate, we will update our hosted version of Lunie to support cosmoshub-4, which will feature interchain token transfers.
In the long term, we are looking at ways to build pathways to more sustainable wallet development. We believe the future must be decentralized, and Tendermint will always encourage a diverse ecosystem of wallet providers for Cosmos.
Are you an ATOM holder? Be sure to check out lunie.cosmos.network!
