First Look at the Epic Cash GUI Wallet

I had a moment to try out the new Epic Cash GUI wallet. Here are my impressions.

This morning, I had to hastily amend my What I'm Mining post. I had stated that Epic Cash only had a command-line wallet, but as it turned out, the devs had released a graphical wallet while I was writing the post!

The new wallet is available for both Windows and Mac. I tried out the Windows version, and installing it was easy enough; it's packaged in a normal Windows-style install wizard.

Once I had the wallet installed, I ran it, and was prompted to create a new, password protected wallet.

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After I entered a password to protect my new wallet and hit the Create new wallet button, I was given a recovery phrase to write down--pretty typical for modern crypto wallets--and then I was presented with the main wallet screen.

It's worth mentioning that I also had the option to import or recover an existing wallet with a recovery phrase. I decided not to import my main wallet, since I had it open and running on another machine.

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This is the main screen of the wallet. It's pretty simple, and I actually like that. I think that a lot of crypto newbies are scared off by wallets with 6 tabs at the top and statistics all over the screen. I think the wallet will become a little more complex once additional features are added, but hopefully the devs will keep this clean look.

As you can see, the wallet shows you your balance, broken down by the different coin statuses, as well as a list of transactions and an "Unspent output commit" list. That last element is a little bit confusing, and the language is taken directly from the Mimblewimble spec, but it's basically some transaction detail that's hidden from the user in most wallets. The devs and the community have been chatting on Telegram today about how to make it more understandable, so I expect it'll change in the next wallet release.

On the left, you also have the option to send and receive Epic Cash by file or via HTTP. Since Mimblewimble doesn't have addresses, transactions either have to be sent as files, or broadcast directly from one wallet to another over the Internet. How this works is a bit complicated, and takes some getting used to, so I'll leave the explanation to the wallet announcement post by one of the devs.

As you can see, I sent an Epic coin to this wallet from my main wallet, and the transaction was pending when I took that screenshot. Here's what it looked like once the transaction cleared:

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Hooray! Now I have one spendable EPIC!

My conclusion is that, while it's got a way to go, this is a great start on a GUI for Epic Cash, and a sign of the devs' commitment to making Epic accessible to users who aren't comfortable with the command line. If you're new to Epic and want to pool mine, this wallet and some mining software are all you need. (If you want to solo mine, though, you'll still need to set up an Epic server from the command line.)

The only downside? This wallet seems to be closed source at the moment. The source code is not in the Epic gitlab project. I hope the devs will remedy that soon.

You can download the wallet on the official Epic Cash site.