Stellar wallets overview

bkolobara

UPDATE: This post is outdated. On the forum you can find much better reviews of wallets now, like @NogueiraLuisa's posts about Stellar Desktop Client & Stargazer, Stellarterm & Ecliptic or Centaurus. To see all available wallets visits this page.

Introduction

A Stellar wallet is an application that allows you to send and receive different currencies/assets on the Stellar network. If you come from Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency you may already be familiar with wallets. Usually cryptocurrencies differentiate between wallets that are full nodes or thin clients (SPV). There is no need to have a full node as your wallet. Reason for bundling everything together are mostly historic. The first Bitcoin implementation was a full node, wallet and miner in one.

Stellar started from scratch and used a much better separation of concerns. All Stellar wallets are lightweight applications and don't need to download the full ledger history.

Here is an overview of the most popular Stellar wallets.

Stellar.org account viewer

The minimal data that represents an account is a public/secret keypair. You can generate a new keypair on this site:
https://www.stellar.org/laboratory/#account-creator?network=public

It is important to safely store and never let anyone get access to your secret key. Or she/he will have complete control over your assets in this account. If you lose access to your private key you will also lose access to all assets that this account is holding.

Now you can use Stellar.org's account viewer to see your account balance and send Lumens:
https://www.stellar.org/account-viewer/

Account viewer screenshot

The account viewer is a simple application that gives you only a minimalistic interface without much functionality. You are left on your own to secure your account's secret key. Another drawback of the account viewer is that you can only send Lumens (XLM) and no other assets.

Centaurus Android wallet

Centaurus Android wallet is more feature rich. You can get it here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.xcoins.centaurus

Centaurus wallet

It will automatically create an account for you and keep the secret key stored in your phone. You should export the secret key and store it in a secure location in case you lose access to your phone.

While using the wallet I noticed some small bugs, like the camera view for scanning QR codes is stretched vertically on my Galaxy S6 and it's hard to get the QR code to be recognised.

The description of the application also says:

Don't hold more Lumens in this app than you need for every day purpose and you can afford to lose in worst case! Use at own Risk.

During my usage I never noticed major issues in the Centaurus wallet.

Scotty's Wallet

Another web based wallet is Scotty's wallet:
https://sacarlson.github.io/my_wallet/

It is the most feature rich wallet exposing almost all options of the Stellar platform. It allows you to hold multiple assets, place orders on Stellar's distributed exchange and perform many other actions. This makes it also the hardest to use.

Scotty's wallet

Notice that the wallet points to the test network when you first navigate to the website. If you want to use the live network you need to go to Advanced => Change Settings and set it to live network.

I noticed some small issues while using it. Like the export QR code for Centaurus not being accepted by Centaurus, but most of the core functions work as expected.

Lobstr iOS and Android wallet

The Lobstr wallet has a really nice design. You can get it here:
https://lobstr.co/

Lobstr wallet

I had it previously installed on my phone, but didn't use it. After I sent some Lumens to the wallet the transaction didn't show up in the view, but the account balance showed that the Lumens arrived. Then I tried to send some Lumens but it asked for a password that I couldn't remember. I went to their website and reset the password. And I lost access to all the Lumens I had inside. It looks like it removed the secret key from the wallet when I reset the password. This was not clear during the whole process and looks like a really dangerous behaviour from the wallet. It still lets me receive Lumens, even the wallet doesn't have the secret key and I will not be able to get the Lumens out. Something like this should not be allowed. The interface should clearly state that the wallet is not holding anymore the secret key and not only prompt you to enter one when you decide to send Lumens away. I would not recommend anyone to use it for serious amounts of Lumens.

UPDATE:
See pitsevich response below.

SeanLee

pitsevich bkolobara

Hey! I'm in a situation where I did not save the secret key because Lobstr never indicated it was critical, but saved the 10 recovery phrase. How do I go about getting my secret key to my wallet? I used the recovery phrase and it seems to only reset my password of the account, has nothing to do with the wallet. Per Gleb, he indicated there's a way to recover your secret key using the recovery phrases, but as of now Lobstr.co doesn't have that functionality.

Thank you for any insights you have.

bartek

Cold is my weekend project. Helpful for generating cold wallet transactions offline.

chainhead

bartek

How do you mean offline? Can you please describe?

cedced

Very nice. I wasnt't aware of Scotty's wallet.

tyh

Very nice Scotty wallet.

pitsevich

Hi, Bernard.

I am Gleb, one of the founders of the lobstr.co

First of all, I'm terribly sorry to hear about your troubles while using our wallet.

Our team is looking into the issue which you've described in your review of the stellar wallets, and we will definitely take some actions to notify users more clearly about the consequences of resetting password and actions needed to ensure safety more clearly.

Let me clarify:

We don't have access to your secret key - it is securely stored inside our platform encrypted.
Your password is taking part in the process of encryption/decryption of your secret key.
(Obviously, we don't store passwords in raw format as well.)

We've implemented the logic that allow users to restore their secret keys in case of password loss, using a special passphrase, which is called "Recovery Code".
During the registration process, the system shows a message, asking to securely store the recovery code on your side, as it can be used to restore access to your secret key in case of lost password.

Here is the screenshot of this prompt:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qbt7sy67kimj7js/Screenshot%202016-07-06%2016.26.48.png?dl=0

Lobstr allows you to easily email it to your inbox.
Our records show, that you haven't requested Lobstr to email the secret key, and you probably haven't wrote it down manually.

During "Reset Password" you can see the option to enter recovery code - it will allow you to get access to your secret key and completely restore your existing account.
Please, see the screenshot:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n4bdl0guxjljdpm/2016-07-05%2021-40-35.png?dl=0

We see recovery code as a helper tool, for the rare cases when user forgets his password. Of course, since we are talking about money and their safety, users have to be careful with storing passwords and credentials.
It never hurts to manually securely save the secret code and account address if you plan to store funds in cryptocurrency wallet.

We will review the flow and will try to emphasize importance of security measures.
We will be happy if you'll give https://lobstr.co/ another try at some point later.

Thank you for the feedback,
Lobstr team.

GOzD

pitsevich Hello. Recently I started an account with Lobstr.co and joins him. But now the problem is when to send their lumens to another account. How to send lumens of Lobstr wallet to another account ??

Binchentso

pitsevich
Hey there, I am a new user of Lobstr.co but can not create an account. It has been for days that i tried. I always get the error that there are technical problems when i want to create a new wallet. I can login but not create a wallet. Any ideas? Really just server problems and i should wait or did i do something wrong? Thanks in advance.

bkolobara

Hi Gleb,

I updated the text to point to your response.

Maybe just make the message more explicit that without the Recovery Code you will loose access to the account after the password reset. I just created a new account and the prompt to save the recovery code is well written and clear. The problem is when you can't log in to your account, you may do the password reset in a hurry and not pay attention or remember that you actually saved a recovery code when opening the account few months ago.

I think I printed the recovery code out now that you mention it. I will check my papers when I get home.

Lobstr looks really nice, I like the design. I also noticed that the last 2-3 transactions don't show up in my history. Is this related to not having a secret key anymore attached to the account?

stellaruser

I can't recover my Stellar wallet's username and password by my email and recovery code. What should I do?

bkolobara

stellaruser What wallet are you using? Do you get any error message? Where does the recovery process fail?

bartek

chainhead sure. You can create and sign a transaction on the offline machine (it also works on Raspberry Pi with no hardware network interface) and then transfer the transaction blob to online machine to submit it to the network.

chainhead

bartek ah ok, got it! Thanks!

bkolobara

GOzD Sending Lumens with lobstr should be straightforward. There should be a menu entry with send. What issues exactly do you have?

kevin

bkolobara same here at stargazer wallet unable to send lumens out to bittrex but can receive i have install and tried both in windows and android adding memo and leaving 20 coins behind

kevin

bkolobara can you help me with a solution to get my coins out to bittrex below provided by bittrex

Memo 80f649fbde78425c973

Address
GB6YPGW5JFMMP2QB2USQ33EUWTXVL4ZT5ITUNCY3YKVWOJPP57CANOF3

i can click the send button but nothing happen all address , memo and 20 coins balanced done

GOzD

I put an address to send and the amount, as required by the instructions, but is not sending. And the total amount in the purse remains the same. There you can enter any address to send? I introduced to send the address to Poloniex is a few numbers, but there is no result, it does not send any where.

bkolobara

GOzD I think you are entering the memo.id as the address. You need to click a little show address link to see the Poloniex deposit address. The address starts with a G And is a super long text. Something like:

In this case GCG... is the address. But all deposits have the same address and you need to enter the memo.id to differentiate yourself from other people depositing (it is written where I put the blue rectangle).

My android lobstr wallet only offers me a message field and I don't think this is the memo.id (maybe memo.text?). I would first create an account at:
https://www.stellar.org/account-viewer/
Send everything there and then send everything from there with the right memo type (memo.id) to Poloniex.

GOzD

Thank you. You're right, I have not looked at the address and enter only memo.id, I did not study it carefully. Soon I will have more time, what would understand.

bkolobara

Binchentso Maybe try to use another wallet for now. Lobstr can sometimes be tricky. Here is a list of wallets https://galactictalk.org/d/14-projects-built-on-stellar

Stargazer is pretty cool.

Binchentso

bkolobara thanks. Will definitely try it out. Just wanted to give lobstr a shot and sadly it has this problem that i can login but not setup a wallet. Will report on my steps. Thanks.