Avalanche has made the announcement about the launch of its own wallet, Core, as well as the addition of Bitcoin bridging capability, all of which are aimed at improving the user experience and including more assets into the Avalanche ecosystem.
To the delight of conference attendees, Ava Labs Head of Product Nick Mussallem made the announcement on Tuesday at the Avalanche Summit in Barcelona, Spain.
Ava Labs is a group dedicated to work on the Avalanche blockchain.
“Core is not just a wallet. It’s a curated Web3 operating system that combines secure wallet architecture with technology not found in any other wallet,” stated Mussallem. The development comes after ConsenSys – the parent firm of wallet incumbent MetaMask – raised Series D at a £5.32 billion valuation in its recent funding round.
Users of the Core wallet will be able to communicate directly with decentralised applications (dapps) on the Avalanche blockchain thanks to native Avalanche bridging features. To get their virtual assets onto the Avalanche blockchain, MetaMask users had to employ an Ethereum-Avalanche bridge previously.
Bridges are programmes that allow users to move assets from one blockchain to another, which is a time-consuming and vulnerable operation.
The Avalanche Bridge has become the hottest Ethereum-linked bridge with over £4.56 billion in total value locked (TVL) due to a surge in decentralised finance (DeFi) usage on Avalanche. Since its inception in July last year, the bridge has made possible the movement of over £32.7 billion in assets between Avalanche and Ethereum, according to Avalanche.
An increasing number of Avalanche power users who want an Avalanche-native user experience are likely to benefit from the new wallet.
In late March, the Core browser extension will be released as the first phase of the launch. The Core mobile application will be released early in the second quarter in the second phase.
Avalanche also announced that starting in early Q2, the existing Avalanche Bridge would handle Bitcoin, bringing the world’s top cryptocurrency by market cap into the Avalanche DeFi ecosystem.
Users who wanted to migrate their bitcoin to Avalanche previously had to wrap it using third-party wrapping solutions such as WBTC or renBTC.
AVAX, the Avalanche blockchain’s native asset, has remained at £65.3 in the last 24 hours.