A fully p2p desktop Cardano wallet with intrinsic support for a DEX, lending/borrowing, and options trading. It includes a transaction builder that can be used to build arbitrarily complex DeFi compositions.
Warning
This is a prototype! Expect breaking changes until at least an official v1.0.0 release.
The P2P-DeFi wallet is the first of its kind wallet that enables users to build up arbitrarily complex transactions. It functions like an online marketplace's shopping cart where uses add actions to their cart until they are ready to "checkout". By enabling users to compose actions together into a single transaction, users have access to significantly better economic opportunities (e.g., composing a DEX with an options contract execution) while saving 10x more money in the long run. It has builtin support for a full DeFi stack: DEX, lending/borrowing, options trading, and aftermarket. Furthermore, since it uses the p2p-DeFi protocols, it is the first fully-decentralized and censorship-resistant DeFi experience. There is no multisig or central point of failure that can be used to stop any part of it.
You can find the demo video on youtube.
Tutorial videos:
- Installation
- The Basics
- DEX - TODO
- Options - TODO
- Lending/Borrowing - TODO
- Aftermarket - TODO
An overwhelming majority of Cardano's potential is wasted due to users being extremely limited in what they can put in a transaction. If you split your delegation across two staking credentials, why does it require two transactions to update your delegation preferences (e.g., one transaction per credential)? If you have a DEX position you intend to close, why can't you close the position and send the money to a friend in the same transaction? Finally, if you want to buy an options contract but don't have the required asset to buy it, why can't you exchange for the required asset on a DEX and use it to buy the options contract in the same transaction?
The reason why the answers to the above questions are universally "No" is a product of how DApps and frontends (aka wallets) are designed. The eUTxO model natively supports arbitrary action compositions within transactions. Unfortunately, developers are simply not taking advantage of it, and by extension, they are preventing Cardano users from being able to take advantage of it.
There are three main reasons why developers need to start prioritizing support for composing actions within Cardano transactions:
The (simplified) transaction fee calculation for Cardano is:
fee = a * size_of_tx_in_bytes + b
where the current parameters are a = 0.000044 ADA
and b = 0.155381 ADA
(source).
Substituting the parameters in to the equation results in:
fee = 0.000044 * size_of_tx_in_bytes + 0.155381
Every transaction you submit has a minimum fee of 0.15 ADA! Meanwhile, the cost per byte is dirt cheap! Let's put it in real terms. Imagine you have the two staking credentials and want to update both of their delegation preferences. A transaction with a single delegation certificate is approximately 420 bytes in size which means the fee is approximately 0.173861 ADA. You need to pay this twice (once per delegation transaction) so the total cost to you comes out to 0.347722 ADA.
But what if you combined the delegation updates into a single transaction? A single transaction with two delegation certificates is approximately 550 bytes in size which means the fee is approximately 0.179581 ADA. You pay literally half the transaction fees by combining the delegation updates into one transaction!
For every action that you are forced to use separate transactions for, you are forced to pay an additional 0.155381 ADA in transaction fees. Take the delegation example to an extreme where you want to update the delegation for 10 stake credentials. Using separate transactions would result in 1.7 ADA in fees.
What about if they were all submitted in one transaction? Each delegation certificate is about 130 bytes so you would have a total transaction size of approximately 1590 bytes. This equates to a transaction fee of 0.225341 ADA. That's almost 10x cheaper!
Perhaps you won't find yourself ever needing to update the delegation preferences for 10 staking credentials, but what about updating the prices for 10 DEX positions? What about making loan payments on 10 separate loans? What about updating 5 DEX positions and making 5 loan payments? When you consider DeFi, there are a lot of actions that should go together in a single transaction.
In order to maximize savings, every transaction should be as full as possible. If developers are not allowing you to combine actions together into a single transaction, they are making you waste money...
All opportunities carry some form of risk. Whether you choose to go after the opportunity depends on how comfortable you are with that risk. The less risky an opportunity, the more people will be willing to go after the opportunity. For example, imagine if I offered you $1 million dollars, but in order to claim it, you had to tightrope walk across two skyscrapers. Would you do it?
Most people would probably not. But what if I changed the terms to you had to drive from New York to California within 1 week. The drive only takes 44 hours in total so even if you broke up the drive, you would still make it on time! Would you take this deal? Pretty much anyone would take this deal.
The only difference between the two deals is the level of risk. While this example is extreme, it highlights the fact that, in order to get more people involved in pursuing opportunities, minimizing risk can do a lot.
When it comes to Cardano, is it better to have more people participating in DeFi or less? This is not a zero-sum game because of the network effect. If more people participate in Cardano DeFi, businesses will be incentivized to also join in. This then feeds on itself since businesses provide services that attract more users. On net, the following happens:
- The value of everyone's ada increases relative to all other assets.
- Stake pool rewards start to rise again as more transactions result in more transaction fees to distribute among pool operators and delegators (see the FAQ for a continued discussion of this).
The more people that participate in DeFi, the better off all ADA investors become. So, in addition to creating cool new DeFi applications, we should strive to decrease the risk associated with DeFi. One of the best ways to do this is to support composing actions in a single transaction.
Imagine if there was an options contract for sale in AGIX, but you have DJED to avoid the market volatility of AGIX. You could convert DJED to AGIX in one transaction and then try to buy the options contract in another transaction. But what if you don't get the options contract in the end (e.g., if someone beat you to it)? You exposed yourself to the volatility of AGIX and now need to convert it back to DJED in another transaction. Simply trying to go after this opportunity could have cost you money.
But what if you could compose the conversion with the options purchase? If either the conversion fails or the options purchase fails, the entire transaction would be invalidated. In other words, the only scenario where you convert DJED to AGIX is the scenario where you immediately use it to buy the options contract. You have zero market volatility risk, zero collateral risk, and you saved money since you only paid the 0.155381 ADA once. Because this method is effectively risk-free, significantly more people will try taking advantage of these DEX+Options opportunities. As a bonus, the DEX and the options market even end up with greater liquidity!
Perhaps you find this example too contrived. If you do, you should read how not being able to compose DeFi actions in a single transaction can actually lead to DeFi recessions and market instabilities.
Imagine you have a DEX position open that has already completed with 10 ADA waiting to be claimed by you. What if you would like to send this ada to your friend, Alice? Without being able to compose, you would first need to close the DEX position in one transaction, and then send the 10 ADA to Alice in a separate transaction. This extra transaction is an inconvenience that users would rather avoid.
To satisfy users, DApp developers can try adding a feature to the DApp that enables the swap to go to an address of the users choice when their swap is being fulfilled. This feature makes the DApp significantly more complicated code-wise and it can also distort the DApp's incentives! If you are interested, consider checking out this comment that explains how adding this feature to cardano-swaps could have severe negative consequences for its incentives.
There is no reason DApps should need to add this feature to the smart contracts! Instead, this feature can easily be enabled by frontends. By enabling arbitrary compositions within transactions, DApps can use a separation of concerns approach to design. This approach makes the overall DApps significantly simpler, and most likely as a consequence, more secure.
It is always better to design things using simple building blocks that can then be arbitrarily combined to build more complicated things. The fact that developers are not enabling support for composing actions within transactions is fundamentally undermining efforts to build a vibrant and secure Cardano DeFi ecosystem.
The p2p-wallet is the first wallet frontend that actually enables users to take full advantage of what Cardano has to offer:
- Cross-Platform - the desktop app works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- Fully Permissionless DeFi - no one can stop you from participating in DeFi. The p2p-wallet uses the p2p-DeFi protocols which means you retain full custody, delegation control, and voting control of your assets at all times. There is also no multisig that can be used to freeze or make changes to any part of the DeFi stack.
- Arbitrarily Complex Transactions - you can close a swap and use the proceeds to pay a friend in the same transaction. You can create a swap, ask for a loan, execute an options contract, and change your delegation preferences in the same transaction. If you can think of the composition, the transaction builder can probably build it.
- Notifications - if any of your UTxOs change (personal or DeFi), the wallet will notify you the next time you sync the wallets. Did someone execute your swap? Did the borrower accept your offer? Was your options contract executed? The wallet will tell you.
If composing actions in a single transaction decreases costs, how can it also increase the total transaction fees collected in an epoch?
While it is true that being able to avoid paying multiples of the 0.155381 ADA will reduce fees paid by an individual Cardano users, its impact stops there. The better economic opportunities, on the other hand, has a network effect - more users/businesses attract more users/businesses. So while the transaction fees collected by any individual user decreases, the exponential increase in total number of users means the total transaction fees collected actually grows.
To put some numbers on it, if Alice decreases her total fees paid from 0.5 ADA to 0.17 ADA, while at the same time 9 more users join and they each also pay 0.17 ADA, the total fees collected increased from 0.5 ADA to 1.7 ADA. It tripled despite Alice personally cutting costs by 66%!
The P2P-DeFi Wallet is a cross-platform GUI wrapper around cardano-cli and cardano-hw-cli. It should work on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The wallet is a light-wallet that connects to koios.rest so there is no need to have a local node installed.
Caution
If you are on Windows, it is recommended that you use WSL2.
The wallet depends on:
cardano-cli
version 10.0.0 or latercardano-hw-cli
version 1.15.0-rc1 or later- SDL2
- GLEW
- libsodium (aka "sodium")
- secp256k1
- blst
The p2p-wallet
executable will work on any computer with the above packages/executables installed.
For the sake of simplicity, this guide will be dedicated to Ubuntu/Debian (Linux), but reference
material will be provided for installing the wallet on other operating systems.
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt-get install autoconf automake build-essential curl g++ git jq libffi-dev libgmp-dev libncursesw5 libssl-dev libsystemd-dev libtinfo-dev libtool make pkg-config wget zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev libpq-dev
These packages are necessary for installing everything else.
Tip
If you get an error about libncursesw5
, you can replace it with libncurses-dev
. Some versions
of Linux have deprecated the former in favor of the latter.
For other operating systems, refer to the System dependencies installation
section of
the cardano-node
install instructions. The p2p-wallet
executable depends on the same system
dependencies as cardano-node
.
# Create a directory for storing cardano-cli and cardano-hw-cli.
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/bin
# Add a newline to your .bashrc file.
echo '' >> $HOME/.bashrc
# Add the new directory to your lookup PATH so the executables can be executed from any directory.
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin' >> $HOME/.bashrc
# Reload the .bashrc file.
source $HOME/.bashrc
This step is required so that the p2p-wallet
executable can actually use the cardano-cli
and
cardano-hw-cli
executables.
You can find the latest version of cardano-cli
attached to the latest
release of cardano-node
. It can be found
inside the tar/zip files under the release's Assets section. You only need cardano-cli
, but you
need to move it to the local install location:
# Execute this from within the extracted directory.
cp cardano-cli $HOME/.local/bin
If you did it right, you should be able to execute cardano-cli --version
in the terminal from any
directory.
The latest version can be found here. Just
like with cardano-cli
, you can find the executable inside the tar/zip files under the release's
Assets section. You must move all of the executables found inside to the local install
location! You can easily do that with:
# Execute this from within the extracted directory.
cp * $HOME/.local/bin
If you did it right, you should be able to execute cardano-hw-cli version
in the terminal from any
directory.
Warning
There is currently a bug in cardano-hw-cli
that prevents hardware wallets from being able to sign
certain DeFi transactions (bug).
Cardano-Swaps (DEX) and normal wallet actions are not impacted by this bug! However, the other
p2p-DeFi protocols are impacted. If you ever come across a ScriptIntegrity
error when trying to
use your hardware wallet to sign, you have encountered this bug. Unfortunately, there is no
timeline for a fix. Perhaps this wallet will create enough pressure to get it fixed ASAP. Luckily,
when a fix is implemented, you can simply swap out the version of cardano-hw-cli
on your system and
the p2p-wallet
should be able to sign these DeFi transactions without having to re-build the
wallet from source.
If you are on Linux, you will also need to set up the required udev rules for your hardware wallet
in order for cardano-hw-cli
to be able to connect to your hardware wallet.
For Ledger, you can execute (source):
wget -q -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LedgerHQ/udev-rules/master/add_udev_rules.sh | sudo bash
For Trezor, you can execute (source):
sudo curl https://data.trezor.io/udev/51-trezor.rules -o /etc/udev/rules.d/51-trezor.rules
Important
If you are using Trezor, you will need to have trezor-suite
installed and open in the background whenever you wish to use your trezor hardware wallet. In
order to run trezor-suite on Linux, you will need to install libfuse2 with sudo apt install libfuse2
. Alternatively, you can set up trezor-bridge by following these
instructions.
If things are set up correctly, you should be able to test your hardware wallet's connection with:
cardano-hw-cli device version
These are easily installed with:
sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev libglew-dev
The documentation for installing these dependencies on other operating systems can be found here.
These instructions are the same as when installing
cardano-node
.
# Create a subdirectory for the git repos.
mkdir -p $HOME/git-clones
cd $HOME/git-clones
git clone https://github.com/intersectmbo/libsodium
cd libsodium
git checkout dbb48cc
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd $HOME/git-clones # Return to the git-clones directory.
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1
cd secp256k1
git checkout ac83be33
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-module-schnorrsig --enable-experimental
make
make check
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd $HOME/git-clones # Return to the git-clones directory.
git clone https://github.com/supranational/blst
cd blst
git checkout v0.3.10
./build.sh
cat > libblst.pc << EOF # This command extends through the next EOF
prefix=/usr/local
exec_prefix=\${prefix}
libdir=\${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir=\${prefix}/include
Name: libblst
Description: Multilingual BLS12-381 signature library
URL: https://github.com/supranational/blst
Version: 0.3.10
Cflags: -I\${includedir}
Libs: -L\${libdir} -lblst
EOF
sudo cp libblst.pc /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/
sudo cp bindings/blst_aux.h bindings/blst.h bindings/blst.hpp /usr/local/include/
sudo cp libblst.a /usr/local/lib
sudo chmod u=rw,go=r /usr/local/{lib/{libblst.a,pkgconfig/libblst.pc},include/{blst.{h,hpp},blst_aux.h}}
cd # Return to your home directory.
echo '' >> $HOME/.bashrc # Add a newline to your .bashrc file.
echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"' >> $HOME/.bashrc
echo 'export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"' >> $HOME/.bashrc
source $HOME/.bashrc
Important
At this point, a pre-built version of p2p-wallet
should be able to run on your computer. If you
wish to build the executable from source, continue with these instructions.
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://get-ghcup.haskell.org | sh
- Prepend or append the required PATH variable.
- You do not need to install the haskell-langauge-server.
- You do not need to install stack.
- Install the required packages. You can keep this terminal window open and install from another window.
- Press ENTER to proceed.
source $HOME/.bashrc
ghcup install ghc 9.2.8 # The wallet relies on 9.2.8
cd $HOME/git-clones # Go to the git-clones directory.
git clone https://github.com/fallen-icarus/p2p-wallet
cd p2p-wallet
# Specify the desired version
git checkout 0.2.1 # Latest stable
# git checkout main # Bleeding-edge
cabal clean
cabal update
cabal build
You can move it to your home directory with:
cp "$(cabal list-bin exe:p2p-wallet)" $HOME #This command may take a few seconds.
It can be opened by double-clicking on it. Enjoy!