It's that time again. Publish0x is having another writing competition and this time it is for a wallet. Just not any wallet but a web wallet that is directly trying to take on MetaMask. And you know what I say? "It's about time someone does!". So without further ado lets dive into the Tally-Ho wallet and give my honest review and opinion on it. (I think I have proven by now even if it's a writing contest and the product/app sucks I will say it sucks, so fear not. This will be a truly honest review).
What is Tally-Ho?
Tally-Ho is a Web Browser wallet. Think of Meta-Mask and that is basically what Tally-Ho is as well. It works with Chrome, Firefox and Brave.
I for one love to see Brave being called out here because to build an app for Chrome means it will work on Brave but to acknowledge it will work on Brave means they tested it and there is a big chance they are not some lazy BS scammers.
Tally-Ho wanted to build a Web3 wallet that was a browser extension and would work just as people would expect it to work based on MetaMask usage. So if you are familiar with how MetaMask works then you are already familiar with Tally-Ho!
What does it mean to be Community Owned?
It means a few things that are very important and need to be stated.
#1 - The software that runs Tally-Ho is open source. This means anybody (even you) can download the entire code of the application. That means you can get involved in development of the software as well. Anyone can suggest features and suggest code and work with the other developers to implement improvements to the app. It is also very important because it shows transparency, we can see if anything nefarious is going on and it builds trust in the application and the team.
#2 - It is all new code built from scratch. The development team thought long and hard about just forking MetaMask and then making improvements. Think of what Brave browser did, it is built on Chromium but they added all those sweet ad blocking extras. However the Tally-Ho team didn't want to copy code that was crated 6 years ago and has been constantly updated for 6 years to fix issues or shortcomings. They wanted to create a brand new clean fresh application and that is what they did.
#3 - They added multiple ways to get your wallets combined into 1 interface from the get go. They added native Ledger support which is something I am grateful for. They are going to add 'Wallet Connect' which is a nice feature to have. You can also add addresses into Tally-Ho that will be Read-only.
#4 - All Wallet fees are given back to the community. What this exactly means, I do not know. I read through their 'dog-umentation' pages and couldn't find a specific statement as to what it means. What I would expect is that the fees will go to individuals who have a Tally-Ho token staked in their wallet but that is my personal guess. What I am a little confused on is how the swapping is going to work because normally there are liquidity pools that you can stake into and earn a portion of the fees from swapping those tokens. However I have not found any solid information regarding this area.
How does it work?
Step 1) Go here and download the browser addon that works with your browser.
Step 2) After it downloads/installs you will given a cute tutorial after you open it.
Step 3) At the end of the tutorial you will be given a few options as to what Wallet you want to create/add. For this walkthrough I decided to create a new wallet.
Step 4) For various reasons I am not showing my seed phrases but there will be 24 phrases that it will give you and you need to write it down and keep them safe as they are the ONLY way to retrieve your wallet from another computer or at a later date. Once you write down your seed phrases it will ask you to verify 6 of them to make sure you wrote them all down in order.
Step 5) Now you wallet is setup and you can poke around the various screens. In the top right corner you can rename the wallet to whatever you want, for this example I named it 'TrocProcLock' because YOLO.
Step 6) Swap tokens is the next step and I attempted to do just that. I sent over roughly $10 worth of ETH to my TallyHo wallet. Now I also need to clarify that my $10 of ETH did make it to TallyHo eventually but it took 12 hours to make it's way over there. I can't say for certain whose fault that was but Ledger showed it was confirmed after about 5 minutes with more then 100 confirmations and it took another 12 hours for TallyHo to show that I had that balance. So I want to chalk this up to the wallet being in Alpha and I would assume it is why but I feel like it needs to be stated either way.
Step 7) Now we need to swap. So I picked my ETH to swap to Polygon (MATIC). I choose roughly 0.001 ETH to swap which is about $1.40. I even tried 0.002 ETH which is around $2.80 and both gave me the same problems. After I navigate through the screens and seeing that the gas fee would be around $3.11 it told me that I didn't have enough ETH to cover the cost of the gas fees. That seemed odd to me because I had more than enough ETH to cover the fees.
So again I think this issue is because the wallet is still in Alpha and not everything is ironed out yet. I say that because if this app/wallet was published and live and out of beta and having these issues then no one would use the app. To TallyHo's credit they have stated multiple places that the app is still in Alpha and there are bugs and there are features missing. However swapping is the only thing you can really do within the app so I would have liked to have it live already but I guess we just need patience.
Step 8) For what it is worth I was able to go to Uniswap and swap 0.002 ETH for SHIB INU no problem. It was super quick to sign in with TallyHo and the swap took about 1 minute and the SHIBA showed up in my TallyHo wallet within that minute. So this leads me to believe the swapping in app is purely bug related and should be fixed.
What if any are it's differentiating features?
1) The color scheme stands out to me as the first difference. I for one love the dark green and goldish/yellow accent color. It's basically the best of both worlds between light and dark themes.
2) There are not nearly as many settings and options as there are in MetaMask. Normally I wouldn't directly compare 1 wallet versus another but Tally-Ho has stated their goal was to be a better wallet then MetaMask.
So to that end I will compare them directly with MetaMask. However I have to state that Tally-Ho is still in alpha so some lenience needs to be given. HOWEVER they specifically state "It's got everything you need from MetaMask, plus lots more to love" which is a lie at this current point in time.
3) When looking through the Roadmap I notice a 1-work feature that will be added and it was called "Earn".
Now to me, as someone who has used Coinbase before this immediately brings back thoughts of earning Crypto from various projects for learning about them. I am very excited about this.
4) One thing to note that I greatly appreciate is the native ability to swap tokens and only having a 0.5% fee. That fee goes back to the DAO community. This may seem weird but Tally-Ho has an entire tab at the bottom of the screen to swap tokens with. I appreciate the swap function easy to see and easy to use as well.
5) It is supported by a few companies already. To be honest I have never heard of some of these but some of them like Uniswap are big names that give it credibility.
Do I like it and would I recommend it?
This is a hard thing to answer right out of the gate because even though I have tested this app/wallet some, I have not done extensive testing. Do I like the look and feel of the app sure but when we are talking about the safety and security of our money/crypto you need to have more trust into the Wallet.
I am going to list out the things that scare me and the things that are encouraging to see with this Web3 Wallet.
What scares me?
1) There is no whitepaper. I have tried searching and searching and can't find a real technical document that goes into details of the TallyHo Wallet. They do have a Documentation (Dog-umentation) section on their website that appears to have been last updated 3 months ago and it is very light on details.
2) This Wallet is still in alpha release so there are bugs and there are things that are missing that you would expect. This is concerning as the wallet is very 'lite' however the dev team has addressed this and acknowledge it won't be like that forever.
3) The DAO is not really defined in concrete terms anywhere. Again, I have looked and looked and can't find a guide to explain how the DAO will work with TallyHo. On their website when you click on 'DAO' it just brings you to a section where it points you to their Discord Server.
4) It would be nice to have a Android and Apple mobile app for the wallet. Again I understand they are still in Alpha and creating a whole other 2 apps is a lot to ask. But none the less I wish it was at least talked about or on the Roadmap.
5) I do not like up and coming companies that blatantly lie in their marketing. For example as stated earlier TallyHo lists on their website: "It's got everything you need from MetaMask, plus lots more to love". Which is not true in the least. They do not have Polygon support yet, They do not have BNB, FTM, etc support. They do not have a mobile app like MetaMask. Those things could be forgiven since they are still in alpha but don't lie and say you have everything that MetaMask has and then not have even close to the same features.
What encourages me?
1) I love the look of the Wallet. It's clean looking and I like the color scheme. I know this is minor but it still needs to be stated.
2) They appear to have a vibrant community on Discord. You can get lost in all the subchannels. It is nice to see however I wish there was some concrete information listed there as it was stated as the repository for the DAO.
3) The fact that they put on this writing contest with Publish0x means they are actively trying to gain public interest. Which is nice to see.
4) From what I have read they truly want to take on MetaMask and I applaud that effort. MetaMask has been unchallenged for a long time. I have never really been a big fan of MetaMask in the past. I use it because I have to for certain applications. I want TallyHo to be a contender in the Hot Wallet space because one is needed.
5) They are adding other Blockchains. Polygon is going to be added shortly. This is a good sign that more and more blockchains will be supported and if they truly want to overtake MetaMask then they will need a lot more blockchains that are supported.
Final Thoughts:
Look guys, this Hot Wallet is still in Alpha stage. Which means it is not ready for mass adoption or mass use. We need to keep that in mind with this app. It would be too easy to run into a problem and just say "well this wallet sucks and is trash". It is also too easy to just sing the praises of the wallet because there is a writing contest and I want the 'judges' to look kindly on my article. I am in neither of those positions.
The Wallet still needs a lot of work to be done to it to be ready for me to truly recommend the wallet as a MetaMask replacement. HOWEVER I do think this wallet has a lot of potential. I can see where they are going and what the dev team is working on and I think they can do it. I have faith that the TallyHo wallet will one day be the MetaMask competitor that they want it to be. But they need time. So with that in mind I would tell you the reader that this is a project that you should keep an eye on. You should not write them off and you shouldn't also transfer all your crypto into TallyHo right now. The Dev team even states that outright that do not put all your eggs in this basket and it's nice to see that from the devs. It's honest that builds trust which is what I want to see.
So to end this article, I like the app and I like where they are going. I am glad I got exposure to it because if they can fix some of the shortcomings with the wallet the way it stands today then I will use it in the future.
It is also nice to see Alien Worlds already has support for TallyHo... you know if you are still into that game ;)
