Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, the company behind Cardano, had announced that he would make a ‘big’ announcement on August 15.
However, a day earlier i.e. on August 14, Hoskinson revealed partial details of a new project, which involves creation of a Google Chrome extension named Icarus.
Hoskinson said
So we never intended to launch a product but rather build something that we’re going to give to our partners to launch and try to encourage the development of a third-party application ecosystem and that is called Icarus.
Hoskison further revealed that in the future, Icarus can be added to other platforms such as Mozilla Firefox and even mobile applications. So, it is basically a Google Chrome wallet which does not maintain a copy of the blockchain but can facilitate users to perform actions similar to what is done on Daedalus.
Charles Hoskinson
Hoskinson further stated that a Daedalus wallet can be downloaded into Icarus and recovered within few minutes. As the entire blockchain is not downloaded, the Icarus acts as a light wallet.
Hoskinson explained that the facility would be immensely helpful to those who have been facing network connectivity issues. The application, created using a combination of Rust and Java, has already been security audited. The Cardano founder said the team wanted to create a reference design as a result of identifying security issues while auditing third-party applications.
…now we created this because what we wanted to have was a reference design for people who wanted to do mobile wallets and browser-based wallets because we were a little worried about the security. Some people had come to us and they said ‘hey we’ve constructed a light wallet and look how cool it is’… And we did a little audit in the design and we realized that that’s not so good and that the reality is that it’s probably going to be insecure.
Hoskinson also believes that Icarus is an equivalent of Vanilla Android, a reference design for Android created by Google.
Hoskinson also spoke about the hard-fork of Icarus, planned to be executed by Cardano’s partner Emurgo. An announcement regarding the hard fork is expected to be made by Emurgo today. By this month end, the testnet is expected to be completed, while the mainnet is expected to be launched in September. Regarding the purpose of this project.
Our hope is that people can start building an ecosystem around this so that as ADA gets more capabilities like ledger support and multi-sig and these types of things that the mobile client will be able to keep lockstep with that.
