Much the same way that DOGE and SHIB have a meme following, and now BONK as well, Banano Coin (BAN) does too. With a very dedicated and vibrant community, BAN is fairly easy to collect, earn and trade, and the fact that it is based on the NANO network as a fork, it's feeless transfer feature makes BAN very attractive as both a starter crypto as well as a value exchange format too, much the same way people use Litecoin and Matic to move funds without the big gas fees. Of course, collecting all that BAN token has to go somewhere, and Banano isn't the most popular-listed token out there. So, folks have a choice between a few cloud wallets, the tipcc wallet on Discord, or using a mobile tool like Kalium Wallet.
A Very Similar Setup to Natrium
If you caught my earlier article on the Natrium (NANO) Wallet, this one will be very similar. That's because the two wallets operate almost the same. Where Natrium is dedicated to NANO, Kalium is the same for BAN. While it would be ideal to have both on one wallet (Kanatrium or Nakalium?) that reality simply doesn't exist at the moment. That said, Kalium uses a very similar Bootstrap style interface design with a clean look, intuitive controls and functions, and clearly readable details across good color contrast (I knew those photography classes were good for something...).
In terms of settings and controls, everything starts with the little gear wheel in the top left (see above), as well as with transit controls in big buttons on the bottom. Activity is seen in the middle with the display of the latest transactions, and clicking them goes to the the web and the Banano blockchain explorer/Creeper site.
Themes provide a variety of color choices. Most are a bright color on a dark background, but there is one light screen choice for those folks who don't mind being blinded at night before going to bed.
Flexible Currency Display
A nice feature of Kalium, especially given that the population of Banano users tends to be very international, is the setting for currency type. Aside from the big ones like USD and EURO, a few other currencies are included providing additional reading convenience for users from those countries too.
And there is also the ability to interact with paper cold wallets as well for the hyper-security types. That's probably a handful of folks, but there are few sizable whales in the Banano world, which can be seen on Creeper statistics.
Finally, Kalium also includes a nifty contact management page which allows a user to contain addresses of frequent contacts, and they are nice enough to include a default project donation address.
After all, good things don't come free. Someone has to keep the Banano devs going.
Overall Perspective and Wallet Review
Again, like Natrium, Kalium is designed extremely well for a mobile app. That said, it is only available for mobile; there is no browser version of Kalium wallet per se. Instead, if someone wants a desktop version, the alternative wallet, Bananostand is the most viable choice, but it is a completely different system and does not sync with Kalium per se.
Kalium works on both Apple iOS and Android. I personally use iOS and have been very happy with the wallet app for at least three years now.
The limitations of Kalium, however, are in its simplicity. Like Natrium, Kalium is single-token oriented. So, in practice, I have to use both to store my NANO and BAN. It would be nice to see a NANO blockchain family wallet that combined all the NANO network coins in one place, but that's for the future. I've only seen Kalium have a glitch once which was in a very rare occasion of a double-transaction where the Banano system then sends the erroneous transaction to a dead wallet address to clear it. Overall, the wallet is dependable, solidly-built, functional and easy to learn. It scores pretty well if I were to give it a rating, but doing that would miss all the discussion above. Try it out if you haven't already. Links are below.
