Introducing Brave Crypto Wallets

As some folks have already noticed, we’ve been working on a new Crypto Wallets feature in Brave.

This new feature is a client-side Ethereum wallet with support for ETH and most standard Ethereum tokens & collectibles, including BAT. For now, Crypto Wallets is a standalone component which doesn’t interact with Brave Rewards at all. It allows you to use a local wallet and interact with Ðapps, making Brave a fully-featured web3 browser. Think of Crypto Wallets like Metamask, but built into Brave. In fact, Crypto Wallets is a lot like Metamask — it’s based on the same open-source codebase as Metamask in the same way that Brave is based on the same open-source codebase as Chrome.

That means that you can’t transfer BAT directly between Brave Rewards and Crypto Wallets. You don’t need to do any sort of verification to use Crypto Wallets. It’s a client-side wallet which you use exclusively with your own assets, and you control all the keys. Brave (the company) isn’t involved in your transactions. We don’t know what you’re doing, and we have no control over it. With Crypto Wallets, you can either manage your keys in a software wallet in Brave, or connect a physical hardware wallet (Ledger or Trezor) for more secure key-management.

Our progress so far is available in Dev and Nightly builds of Brave. With a little more work, it’ll ride the trains through Beta, and eventually make its way into released versions of Brave. We’re proud of our work so far, but Crypto Wallets hasn’t yet been through the extensive testing we want before putting features into production. Until this is in a release version of Brave, you should probably stick to small amounts and keep regular backups.

At present, Crypto Wallets is for people who already have a working understanding of cryptocurrency generally, and Ethereum specifically, and know how to use hardware and software wallets together safely. This isn’t a universal, built-for-everyone feature like Brave Rewards: it’s only for you if you are already familiar with crypto.

But that’s just where we are so far. We built Crypto Wallets to lay the technical groundwork for a richer browsing experience that incorporates many kinds of crypto in many ways. The next big piece of work will add Uphold support to Crypto Wallets. That’ll let you manage assets in your Uphold account inside of Crypto Wallets, and directly transfer crypto assets between your verified Uphold account, Brave Rewards, and Crypto Wallets.

The next step is a bigger piece of work, and one we’ve been working towards for a while. We want to integrate the client-side Crypto Wallets feature with Brave Rewards, letting you fully control the keys to your Brave Rewards wallet, as an alternative to Uphold’s custodial wallet. Of course, we’ll still need to meet US and international regulatory requirements when you earn BAT through Brave Rewards. That’ll probably mean some sort of identity verification process. But we’re committed to ensuring that Brave (the company) knows the absolute minimum about you, whether you’re using a hosted Uphold wallet or a private client-side wallet. Designing that system to ensure that we follow the law while ensuring that you remain anonymous is a big deal for us, and one of the most substantial components of this work ahead.

We’re excited to continue pushing the envelope when it comes to support for cryptocurrency and other blockchain applications on the web platform. This is only the beginning for tools and services which incorporate the exciting new suite of capabilities offered by decentralized computation platforms like Ethereum. At Brave, we endeavor to integrate technologies which put people in control of their online lives rather than having to rely on intermediaries and gatekeepers. That’s why the Brave browser already includes other features built to support the distributed, borderless web: like IPFS and WebTorrent. We want Brave to be a tool for everyone and to support people’s individual autonomy — without forcing everyone to get to grips with the ins and outs of these cutting-edge tools. But we know full well that without experimentation and creativity, we’ll never see the full potential of these new technical opportunities.

Right now, Crypto Wallets is built for the trailblazers who want to roll up their sleeves and dig in. As we learn more about what’s important and effective in this space, we want to make those powerful capabilities available to everyone, with no technical barrier to entry.

18 Likes
  • Unable to login with Metamask wallet / recovery phrase. (12 words instead of 24)

  • Everytime after configurating my Crypto Wallet, it needs my password again. And it always fails. Need to recover my wallet everytime with the recovery phrase. I’ll set it up with the same password again, but still after a few times I need to fill in my password and it fails again.

  • Works correctly on dApps like cryptokitties and the new Request protocol v2. But the title is still MetaMask and not Brave Wallet:

1 Like

How do I interact with the wallets as a developer, for interacting with DApps and such?

For example, sending a transaction and reading the selected address (and network, such as testnet/mainnet).

Is there a way to disable this completely?

Every website I go, I get notification to install wallet and I disabled the extension too and still no luck.

2 Likes

Did you try u removing/installing the extension?

There is no way you can remove or installed it back again, as it comes with the browser and you can only disable it in the settings.

This problem still applies after 2 weeks of mentioning it here. No reply.

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I can’t even login, brave crashed after I made my password and recorded the recover phrase but now it won’t login or let me import using seed phrase. Any ideas?

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For me, everything is working perfectly. No problem at all.

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I’m also having the issue, when going to the crypto wallets section, it asks for a password. I’ve input every password imaginable with no success. When attempting to input the seed, it still asks for a password which does not work. Any tricks or tips to this? I see a couple of people are having the same issue as I am, but no solved issues.

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I haven’t had any help on this issue either. Maybe they know about the issue, but haven’t found the solution?

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Cool. Keep building :slight_smile:

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I have problems getting in my Brave Crypto Wallet. I forgot my Password and there’s no way of me getting in import code because I didn’t save it. Is there any way of recovering the password or anything else?

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Everytime I log out and try logging in it shows incorrect password, I don’t understand why

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Can you guys please not default things like this to enabled? I’ve gone through my settings and disabled basically everything and it’s really unhelpful to have new things enabling themselves without my consent.

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Crypto Wallets in Brave is not enabled by default. You have to affirmatively turn it on to use it.

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The setting was turned on and I had never turned it on. I was prompted by a website to install Crypto Wallets, which seemed sketchy, I didn’t know what it was so I looked it up and found out it was a Brave thing, I found it in settings and it was enabled. It is now disabled.

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Hi can someone from Brave please tell us how to completely disable crypto wallets. It’s broken, I can;t log in, I can’t even recover the seed. When I click recover nothing happens.

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Head to brave://settings/extensions and flip the switch off.

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But it seems, when i visit a web3 website brave always redirects me to the disabled wallet instead of MM (which i want).

1 Like