The Norwegian-developed Web browser Opera has been competing with Internet Explorer since the 1990s, and then it was followed by the new-gen browser like Mozilla, Chrome, Safari, and other. Nevertheless, today Opera has more users than Internet Explorer.
This week at the Hard Fork Decentralized event in London, UK, Opera announced, how it has a built-in cryptocurrency wallet for Ether and ERC20 standard-based tokens. As of now, the new browser version is available for Android devices, and the desktop version is in beta.
“We’ve decided to support Ethereum, as it has the largest community of developers building Dapps and has gathered a lot of momentum behind it,” said Project lead Charles Hamel.
“We see this as an important moment in improving dApp accessibility, opening Web 3.0 to mainstream audiences, and encouraging developers to build on Ethereum,” said Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin.
Though Opera’s crypto wallet are Ethereum-specifically, support for other coins is planned for the future.
Generally, crypto wallets and access to dApps is made possible by browser add-ons, like MetaMask, which still does not have a mobile wallet. In November 2018, Metamask unveiled its own dedicated mobile client at Devcon4 in Prague, but it has yet to be released.
Hamel illustrated the issue to Hard Fork:
“One major hurdle in all this is that you need a special browser or special browser extensions to even start exploring the decentralized web and even then, users are faced with lots of new terminologies that is sometimes confusing.”
Users will be able to access their dApps on the Opera’s Android browser, and through the wallet, they will be able to manage their digital identities and make cryptocurrency transactions.
The Opera protects wallet keys with Android’s secure key storage, via a mobile user’s device lock screen.
Hamel Said “Developing a mobile cryptocurrency iteration was not simple for Opera. They had to “build competence” in different blockchains, cryptography, and distributed networks. He added “how dealing with variations in the code for Web3 features. One of the biggest challenges was to define what a browser wallet should look like and how it should behave.”
In the end, Opera only wishes to see its wallet is seamlessly integrated, rather than working like an application-within-a-application.