#197·Nova Wallet 7th Proposal: Retroactive Reimbursement: 1-Click Cross-Chain Swaps, Multisigs, Extended Ledger Support, Polkadot Vault v7.0 Support, Unified Address Format, Off-Ramps, Price Charts, DApp Browser Improvements, and more!

Nova Wallet 7th Proposal: Retroactive Reimbursement: 1-Click Cross-Chain Swaps, Multisigs, Extended Ledger Support, Polkadot Vault v7.0 Support, Unified Address Format, Off-Ramps, Price Charts, DApp Browser Improvements, and more!

Full proposal: Nova Wallet 7th Proposal

Feature set of the proposal (see proposal):

• 1-Click Cross-Chain Swaps
• Multisig Wallets
• Extended Ledger Support (Flex, Stax, Nano S Plus)
• Polkadot Vault v7.0 Metadataless Signing
• Unified Address Format
• Off-Ramp Support
• Token Price Charts
• DApp Browser Improvements
• XCM Improvements
• Runtime Improvements
• Community Requested Features
• Self-funded features: Debit Cards, MYTH Staking
• …and more (See Deliverables Table in the full proposal)

1. Context of the proposal

Nova Wallet is secure, open source, and is the leading app for the Polkadot ecosystem:

• 🌌 100+ Polkadot eco & EVM networks 
• 👑 1-Click Onboarding with Google and Apple accounts
  ☁️ Secure Cloud backups to sync across multiple devices
• 💳 On-ramp & off-ramp support, including Mercuryo x Nova Wallet Polkadot debit card
• 🥞 Staking: 14+ options including DOT, KSM, AZERO, GLMR, and more!
• 🙌 Super simple staking supporting both Nomination pools and Direct staking with our 2-in-1 flow & analytics and alerts
• 🔀 1-Click in-app Swaps with 430+ Cross-chain channels
• 🙋🏼‍♀️ 1-Click Voting with SwipeGov, OpenGov, Agile Delegations, & Gov v1 support
• 🗣️ Support for 14 Languages
• 🌐 Seamless Multi-tab DApp browser supporting the Polkadot JS & MetaMask protocols 
• 🔗 WalletConnect v2 support
• 🖼 Access to RMRK, AssetHub, KodaDot NFTs
• 📱 Hardware wallet support for Polkadot Vault, Parity Signer; Ledger Stax, Flex & Nano X
• 🙆 100 000+ monthly active users on both iOS & Android
• 🔔 Push Notifications for staking, balances, governance, and announcements
• 💲 Support for Price Charts, multiple Fiat currency displays
• 🤝 Support for Multisig Wallets and Proxy accounts (Delegated Authorities) 
• 📶 Network Management: add any Substrate/EVM chain, manage nodes

2.1 Adoption

Nova Wallet is the most popular Polkadot ecosystem wallet in terms of on-chain metrics on multiple fronts. If we look at staking, currently over 13.4 MILLION DOT has been staked with Nova Wallet by over 12.3 THOUSAND users – this is a 39.6% increase in total stake through Nova Wallet since our last referendum. For nomination pools, Nova Wallet’s nomination pool has 10,281 nominators, which represents ~26.9% of all nomination pool stakers. Nova Wallet's validators have 2053 nominators – which represent around ~6.9% of all direct staking nominators.**** Overall, ~18% of all DOT stakers are staking via Nova Wallet. It is important to note that currently, 49% of all DOT is staked, meaning it remains the most popular use case for DOT holders, and each wallet’s total stake through their platform remains a solid non-gameable metric to measure adoption. 

It is also possible to determine the popularity/market share of different wallets within the Polkadot ecosystem when it comes to in-app swaps, thanks to Hydration’s referral code mechanism. In terms of total users that have used one of the ecosystem wallets to carry out swaps within the wallet’s UI, Nova Wallet referral codes account for a ~71.5% share of total referral codes used. In terms of volume generated through the use of referral codes, Nova Wallet’s total volume is 132.8% higher than the next ecosystem wallet. 

2.2 Sustainability & Revenue

A frequent question from voters is “What is Nova Wallet’s path to self-sustainability?”. This is a question that affects all wallet providers, not just in the Polkadot ecosystem, but in web3 as a whole. The most common ways for wallet providers to achieve self-sustainability are by charging their users additional fees once they have gained a sufficiently large user base. The most common example of this is how MetaMask charges an additional 0.875% fee to its users when they utilize its built-in swap feature, instead of going to any DEX dApp. This is not the path that we want to follow at all, and instead, we have been busy with other paths to some level of self-sustainability whilst not taxing users:

• Novasama Technologies hosts 5 active Polkadot validators (one of which is part of the web3foundation’s Decentralized Nodes initiative).
• Novasama Technologies hosts 6 active Kusama validators.
• Novasama Technologies hosts a Mythos validator – this has allowed us to implement Mythos-specific features without charging the Polkadot treasury.
• Nova Wallet participates in Hydration’s referral code system, generating fees without adding an additional tax to users.

It is also important to note that there are community validators, which are not affiliated with Novasama Technologies, that have remained in the active set thanks to receiving nominations from Nova Wallet users, thanks to our validator algorithm. 

These sources of revenue have allowed us to begin developing features for Nova Wallet without any burden to the Polkadot treasury. The first such feature is our debit card implementation, which was released in June 2025. 

We will continue to explore additional revenue streams that can help subsidize the development of Nova Wallet whilst trying to reduce the expenditure from the Polkadot treasury, whilst not taxing our users. 

2.3 Why Retroactive?

This is a retroactive proposal for the past 7 months’ worth of development carried out for Nova Wallet. Due to the evolving nature of Polkadot, with frequent runtime updates, it was decided to request funds retroactively again. The roadmap for Nova Wallet is always publicly visible at novawallet.io. The necessity to move to retroactive payments starting from our last treasury proposal was due to it not being possible to determine ahead of time the amount of work that we have to carry out to ensure that breaking changes do not impact our user base. As the most popular wallet in the Polkadot ecosystem, ensuring that our users have the best possible user experience is paramount. As such, we will work towards a general roadmap, introducing cutting-edge features just like those we have become known for over the past 3 years, whilst also ensuring that our products face no issues due to unforeseen circumstances such as breaking changes caused by runtime upgrades. This also allows the community to validate our work by testing these new features before deciding on their vote on our treasury requests.

2.4 Our Goal & Additional Contributions to Polkadot

Our goal for Nova Wallet is to build and maintain a high-quality, open-source, community-focused, and feature-rich mobile application that has no network biases and can function with no limitations/restrictions. Nova Wallet is the leading app in the ecosystem by the following criteria:

• Feature set & high quality (reliability, security, performance, usability)
• Total number of active users
• Amount of Staked tokens to Nomination Pools and Validators
• Amount of users & total volume using an application's built-in swap feature

Apart from developing the open-source Nova Wallet iOS & Android mobile applications, our team is consistently contributing to the Polkadot ecosystem by providing open-source SDKs, design assets, knowledge-sharing sessions, and infrastructure. Examples include:

• Substrate SDKs for iOS and Android development
• Nova Utils GitHub — metadata & configs for networks, DApps, cross-chain transfers
• SubQuery API projects developed and hosted by the Nova Wallet team, including a Governance-focused project
• Nova Assets Figma — design assets: Polkadot eco tokens, networks, DApps, etc.
• Hosted metadata portal for Polkadot & Kusama ecosystem networks — metadata portal for Polkadot Vault and Parity Signer hardware wallets
• Polkadot in Action — a series of videos & articles focused on onboarding people to help utilize the power of Polkadot & Kusama ecosystem through the Nova Wallet
• Delegate Registry — an open-source repository for Delegates to fill out their information to attract more delegations through the Agile Delegation feature

More Polkadot user-facing products by Novasama & partners:

• Designing and Developing Telenova
• Designing and Developing Nova Spektr — an all-in-one desktop app for the Polkadot ecosystem
• Developing the Polkadot App
• Developing the Web3 Citizenship App
• Developing and Maintaining Polkadot Vault (starting from 2025)

Find out more about the products Novasama develops in our 2024 end-of-year blog post.

     This proposal covers the retroactive reimbursement of deliverables for 7 months as detailed in the Deliverables Table in the full proposal.

Please feel free to review the full proposal: Nova Wallet 7th Proposal