Talisman Wallet and Portal Retroactive Funding

Talisman Wallet - Retroactive Proposal #3

Dates: Oct 2023 - Sep 2024

Requested Funds: $690,600 USD, denominated in USDT on Polkadot Asset Hub

Short description: Talisman Wallet is a user-friendly, GPL3-licensed open-source wallet designed for the Polkadot ecosystem. It offers advanced portfolio management, account organization features, and supports transaction signing on Substrate and EVM blockchains. Complementing the wallet, Talisman Portal is a "one-stop-shop" web application that enables users to discover and access Polkadot ecosystem activities with simplicity and ease of use. Integrated with Talisman Wallet and accessible to other ecosystem wallets like Polkadot.js, Enkrypt, Subwallet, and Nova Wallet, these products work synergistically to enhance user experience. This proposal seeks $690,600 USD in USDT for retroactive funding for maintenance and new feature development (from Oct 2023 to Sep 2024). Since launch, Talisman has achieved approximately 130,000 active installs and garnered contributions of over 8 million DOT to its nomination pools.

Links to full proposal:

🖥️ Summary deck
📄 Full proposal

Context of the proposal

Talisman (talisman.xyz) is a multi-chain wallet and web application that enables users to “Traverse the Paraverse” with ease. We believe in a future where everyone has freedom via true agency over their financial activities, and we believe that the Polkadot ecosystem will bring this to fruition.

For more on Talisman’s mission and approach, please see the following recent talks

Warp Lizard and Natti on Polkadot Spaces, Sep 2024: Talisman's Cross-Chain Swaps
Nipsey at Polkadot Decoded 2024: Conquering Browser Based Substrate Development With Talisman
Polkadot insider interview @ Thailand blockchain week: Unveil What Next For Talisman In 2024 w/ Jonathan Dunne
Nipsey at Sub0 Asia 2024: The Application Layer: Conquering Browser Based Substrate Development with Talisman

Polkadot’s multi-chain implementation, though powerful, can lead to a confusing user experience for end-users. It’s our goal to solve these challenges with design, storytelling, and engineering. We abstract away the complexity of the underlying implementation and provide a friendly user experience when using Polkadot and a way to discover new applications and services available to end users, while keeping them safe and educated about the actions they are taking. Talisman has two products: a browser extension wallet and a user-friendly web application. Since launching in early 2022, Talisman has been able to achieve the following:

Talisman’s DOT Nomination pools driven by one click staking in the Portal web application, and more recently inline staking in the Talisman Wallet, have garnered over 8 million DOT since launch, and are among the largest and most trusted pools in the ecosystem.
Our wallet has recently reached 130,000 active installs, as measured by the Chrome and Firefox app stores
We have over 17,000 users in our Discord community, as well as a highly engaged “Spirit Key” community with over 600 active contributors Thousands of weekly users of Talisman’s web app (app.talisman.xyz), a dapp that works with any Polkadot wallet
Our users frequently mention that they would recommend Talisman to users new to the Polkadot ecosystem because alternatives, particularly Polkadot.js, are too complicated

Talisman was founded in 2021 and now consists of a team of 12 people with deep experience in crypto, finance, development, UI design, and product management. The team was previously founded by Agyle, Nipsey, Swami, and Hood, and is now led by Nobyte and Warp Lizard, who have been with Talisman since near Talisman’s founding. There are no conflicts of interest between the team and governing bodies for Polkadot or Kusama.

Simple for Beginners, Powerful for Pros

User experience is central to all of our design and development. Not only do we focus on providing the easiest Polkadot experience for beginner users, we also have emphasised developing features for advanced Polkadot ecosystem users. Our aim is to be the first entry point for users into Polkadot, and also the primary option for all those developing in Polkadot.

We build in an open, community-driven way and we are committed to building for the community, including users, teams, institutions, infrastructure providers, and other ecosystem stakeholders.

Prior Proposals

Talisman has a stellar track record of executing on treasury proposals:

Proposal	Details
Business-Friendly MultiSig UI Approved: March 2023 Links: Proposal, Final Report	This proposal was for a business-friendly multisig frontend to lower the difficulty for teams and businesses when running their financial operations on Polkadot. Teams currently face many difficulties when trying to perform these operations, risking mistakes along the way, and leading them to choose convenience over security. We applied Talisman’s UX and design philosophy to create improvements for standard workflows for Polkadot multisig usage (based on the current multisig pallet), and eventually integrated upgrades when improvements to the multisig pallet itself are available.
Talisman Portal Milestone 1 Approved: April 2023 Links: Proposal, Final Report	In this proposal, we were seeking to fund improvements to Talisman Portal, Talisman’s “one stop shop” web application that enables users to discover and access Polkadot ecosystem activities with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. This is an open source dapp that supports multiple Polkadot Ecosystem wallets, including: Polkadot.js, Talisman, SubWallet, and Enkrypt. Talisman Portal (https://app.talisman.xyz) is a great entry point for new users who are coming to Polkadot from other ecosystems, as well as advanced users who would like an intuitive experience for their day to day needs across portfolio management, staking, NFTs, dapp discovery, crowdloans and more.
Talisman Wallet - Retroactive Proposal #1 Approved: December 2023 Links: Proposal	This proposal sought retroactive funding for feature development, UX improvement, QA testing and Audit fixes for Talisman Wallet over fourteen weeks (Feb-May 2023).
Talisman Wallet - Retroactive Proposal #2 Approved: March 2024 Links: Proposal	This proposal sought retroactive funding for feature development, UX improvement, QA testing and Audit fixes over 31 weeks, for Talisman Wallet from May to Sept 2023, and Talisman Portal from Mar to Sept 2023.

Overview of Talisman Products

Talisman Wallet

Talisman Wallet is directly aimed at supporting retail usage of Polkadot by providing an outstanding experience in a multi-chain context, without sacrificing security. The tools that users choose to access Polkadot have a direct impact on their experience of the ecosystem as a whole, and Talisman endeavors to create a first class user experience for ecosystem participants.

Talisman Portal

The Talisman Portal is a “one stop shop” for Polkadot ecosystem activities. As an open source dapp hosted at https://app.talisman.xyz, it supports wallet connections from all Polkadot ecosystem extension wallets. The Talisman Portal is a quick way for users to quickly orient themselves and manage their activities in the Polkadot ecosystem, including :

View token portfolio
View NFT portfolio
Manage staking
Perform cross-chain swaps
Explore Polkadot ecosystem dapps

Actively Advancing the Polkadot Ecosystem

While working hard to improve our product experience, Talisman has also continued to contribute to the Polkadot ecosystem at large. We highlight some of our contributions below.

Day 1 support for Polkadot Generic Ledger app

Besides having played a pivotal role in the wallet-side implementation of the Zondax generic Ledger app, Talisman committed significant development resources to delivering Generic Ledger support from day 1, enabling our users to migrate with ease. During the planning and development phase of the Generic Ledger application, Talisman engineers gave up their Friday evenings every week for several months in order to be present at planning meetings regarding the API design. During this time, our engineering team found several critical issues with proposed designs and provided crucial feedback to ensure a better outcome for the ecosystem.

Native cross-chain swaps

One of the key pain points of the Polkadot ecosystem has always been moving assets to/from Polkadot and other ecosystems, particularly between Ethereum and Polkadot, which has limited liquidity in the ecosystem. We have built a super convenient way for users to swap natively across chains, by integrating two swaps providers into our aggregator, and will continue to support additional paths.

Easy Polkadot staking

We support and continue to support easy staking of assets across the entire Polkadot ecosystem, enabling our users to generate yield with just a few clicks of a button, both in the Portal and in the Wallet. We’ve recently integrated nomination pool staking functionality focusing on convenience in the wallet, and will continue to expand those features. Polkadot ecosystem Portal The Talisman Portal makes it super convenient for users to get started quickly in Polkadot: including tokens, NFTs, crowdloans, staking, and ecosystem explore. Bring any Polkadot wallet to the Portal, we don’t discriminate.

Going above and beyond with Talisman Support

Talisman users don’t just use the wallet, they need to interact with dapps throughout the Polkadot ecosystem. Manned by both Sentinels and our core devs, our Discord help desk has always been there to guide them with the intricacies of the Polkadot ecosystem. Many of the common support issues raised in our Discord don’t relate directly to Talisman, but to Polkadot in general - for example, issues with the existential deposit, address formats, and (until recently) Ledger application incompatibility. The Talisman support team provides a crucial service to the ecosystem by educating users on Polkadot in general.

About this Proposal

This proposal consists of retroactively funded Wallet and Portal work completed between Oct 2023 and Sep 2024, during which time there were 34 software releases.

This proposal covers features across the following main feature areas:

👛Wallet

In-wallet Polkadot staking
Generic Ledger app support
Advanced Polkadot Ledger support
Support of chain-specific Ledger apps
Talisman Substrate developer mode
Signet / Polkadot Multisig account import
Foreign assets support
Manifest V3
Polkadot ecosystem support
Ongoing UX/UI and performance improvements

🌀Portal

Native cross-chain swaps
XCM improvements and fixes
Polkadot ecosystem NFT improvements and fixes
New Polkadot ecosystem staking assets

⛓️Chaindata

Talisman Chaindata is an open source repository of all Substrate and EVM chains supported by Talisman. Chaindata requires constant maintenance as new chains are supported and existing chains undergo changes.

Open Source Repositories

The end product has been be released and integrated into Talisman’s GPL3 open source repositories:

Relevant Team

Warp Lizard - Co-CEO / Head of Engineering
Nobyte - Co-CEO / Head of Product
Nipsey - CTO
Glide - Product Manager
Diogo - UX/UI Designer
Kheops - Software Engineer
Chris - Software Engineer
Alec - Software Engineer
Will - Software Engineer

Timeline

The timeline of the wallet section of this proposal covers 1 work milestone spanning approximately 48 weeks of calendar time from Oct 2023 - Sep 2024.

Payment Details

We are requesting $690,600 USD to be paid upfront for this proposal, as this work has already been completed. Please see the full report for the cost breakdown.

This will be requested in the form of USDT on Polkadot Asset Hub, in order to underline our commitment to development rather than speculation on DOT prices.

Beneficiary Information

Fund recipient address: 16q8a9V8qSVscHMi6HoobBjMpBe23HzhYW9DDNgFLyBgAQT (Talisman Proposals, Polkadot Asset Hub). Please note, this is a proxied multisig address, not a single signatory account as Polkassembly indicates.

Fund manager contact: Nobyte and Warp Lizard ([email protected])

Comments, Q&A: Please comment below! We will also appear on AAG Thursday 17 October.

Suggestions and Improvements:

We are dedicated to continuing to improve our features and user experience for our users. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have suggestions for future improvements. You can do this directly on our Discord.

We appreciate your interest and support.