Bloom: Past, present and a glimpse of the future
From humble beginnings
Six years ago, Charlie Varley, our CEO, met Navin Ramachandran (IOTA Foundation Board of Directors) during his Computer Science MSc at University College London. In long discussions in the bustling Victorian pubs of Fitzrovia, they began planning a new wallet for IOTA. The only IOTA wallet at the time, now fond in memory, left a lot to be desired, from its striking green colour scheme to the button mashing required to view one’s balance.
The plan was that the new wallet, named Trinity, would elevate IOTA’s usability to be on par with the very best ecosystems in the space. Soon after graduating, Charlie joined IOTA in an official capacity. With Navin’s guidance and Charlie’s leadership, Trinity soon became IOTA’s official wallet. The team was expanded and mobile and desktop apps were launched. Following IOTA’s meteoric rise to the Top 10 on CoinMarketCap in 2017, Trinity amassed 160k users worldwide and a 4.8 rating on app stores.
In 2021, IOTA launched Chrysalis: a complete protocol rewrite, bringing improved throughput and network stability, and replacing audacious protocol features — like trinary logic and quantum-resistant signature schemes — with more conventional industry standards. An opportunity presented itself to revisit the wallet architecture from the ground up. Trinity was deprecated and a new wallet project emitted its first light, Firefly. The mission was simple: build an incredibly robust wallet that would form the base for future expansion. With a highly-performant Rust-based core, Firefly Desktop and, later, Firefly Mobile launched. Firefly demonstrated the resilience of the core IOTA community, accumulating 50,000 users during a multi-year bear.
Firefly implemented new utility in the ecosystem, from liquid staking on IOTA to a comprehensive governance interface, and much more. It was during this phase that members of the Bloom development team joined the wallet-building mission. Firefly was then rearchitected to support the Stardust protocol upgrade for Shimmer and IOTA, led by our CTO, Nicole O’Brien. This brought a range of additional functionality to the wallet including microtransactions, transaction expiration times, native tokens, and NFTs.
Over the past year, the IOTA Foundation refocused its efforts on core research and development, and several projects were spun out to a commercial setting. We are immensely grateful to the IOTA Foundation for creating the environment for our team to flourish and grow. We were given room to experiment and innovate. We had a roadmap we had to stick to but the creative direction was our own. We’re grateful for the trust that was placed in our team by the IOTA Foundation’s Board of Directors and by the wider community. It was truly an honour for us to support the ecosystem by building IOTA’s official wallet for the past 6 years.
A new era blossoms
In July 2023, the majority of the Firefly team departed the IOTA Foundation to begin working on a new project. Bloom. UK-based co-founders Charlie Varley and Nicole O’Brien are joined by an extremely talented development team: David De Troch, Matthew Maxwell, Mark Nardi and Jean Ribeiro, with UX consultation supplied by Digital Zen, led by Andrew Brough.
We’re on a mission to create the most user-centric wallet on the market and give Web3 usability a serious upgrade. We believe we can make the largest usability upgrade within the desktop wallet ecosystem, and so we begin with Bloom Desktop. With more room for features, we can build a curated, feature-rich wallet experience. Rest assured, we have plans to build a mobile app once we’ve expanded our development team.
If you enjoyed the user-friendliness of Firefly, you’re going to love what we’ve done with Bloom. Expect beautiful UI and intuitive UX. As a fork of Firefly, Bloom inherits a secure and battle-tested architectural foundation. We can’t wait to unveil our brand-new design to the community. We’ve carefully reimagined the wallet dashboard to streamline core asset management, laying the groundwork for a multichain world.
The first goal for Bloom is to provide one single app for everything within the IOTA ecosystem: unifying Shimmer, IOTA and Shimmer EVM within a single wallet experience. Early Access will launch with Shimmer and Shimmer EVM. You’ll be able to manage your full portfolio of Shimmer assets and send Shimmer and native tokens between Layer 1 and Layer 2. This will be followed by a number of improvements and releases, including dark mode; an address book; IOTA network and token support; IOTA and Shimmer governance frameworks; and expanded EVM support (ERC-721, ERC-1155, ERC-4361).
Looking ahead
We then turn attention to interoperability with dApps. A wallet cannot exist as a walled garden without the ability to connect to the wider Web3 landscape. Accordingly, we will introduce support for WalletConnect so Bloom can interact with web-based dApps to sign transactions and send assets on IOTA, Shimmer and Shimmer EVM. Over time we will add a variety of security and UX improvements to enhance dApp interactions further. If you are a Shimmer dApp development team, reach out to us for assistance with supporting Bloom.
From there, we plan to introduce third-party integrations directly within the wallet. The first of these will include a fiat on/off ramp and token swaps. You will be able to buy and sell both IOTA and Shimmer directly from within Bloom, and swap between the various popular tokens within the IOTA ecosystem. As we enter a commercial environment, priorities must adjust accordingly. But equally, our mandate is broadened: we can build a much more extensive feature set than we ever could in a non-profit setting.
We have many more exciting features on our roadmap, but we’ll save those for another time. If you are interested in getting involved with the Bloom community, please join our Discord. We are looking forward to unveiling the Bloom app and website to the ecosystem. Next stop Early Access!
Bloom: Past, present and a glimpse of the future was originally published in Bloom wallet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
