Tally Ho! is a traditional English hunting cry used to alert other hunters in your group that the game (or prize?) has been spotted. 

That must be an exciting moment. I can't say I'm a big fan of hunting, and yet I can relate to the act of "the chase" or "the hunt" after a treasured goal. Isn't that a big part of life? reaching our goals?
And yet, one can not ignore the social aspect of Tally Ho! since the cry is about sharing the success of the find and not keeping it all to one's self. 

So when I read about Tally Ho! the open-source Web3 wallet , I thought to myself that that is quite a name to appropriate for a web wallet. Could it live up to it's name as community owned and driven project?

Let's start with some background.
On August 20th 2020  ConsenSys changed Metamask's license from an open source to a proprietary license as a response to Brave's launch of a native web wallet forked from Metamask, basically using Metamask's code to create a better commercial product = the Brave browser. Supposedly, a legitimate move by ConsenSys. 
At the same time, with Metamask being the most used wallet in the Ethereum blockchain ,  this change in licensing led to centralization of  Metamask's influence in the hands of  one commercial entity = ConsenSys. 

Here comes Tally Ho!

Tally Ho! is a project built by a for profit company named Thesis, which has released several successful products in its past like Fold App , and has been working on it's current project Tally Ho! for the last year.
The need for a new web wallet that will compete with existing popular wallets and will be free and community owned  was recognized by Thesis' CEO Matt Luongo & co as described in an interview from July 2021:
"People want a cross-chain experience that makes sense with decentralized finance across their wallets, so they don’t have to constantly work with a bunch of applications to do basic single wallet activity, Luongo said".
"The Web3 wallet is “not about enriching [Thesis] behind the curtain, but enriching users,” he said. As new infrastructure continuously fills the crypto space, Luongo said he wants to make sure people building in this space create open sourced products with a focus on communities and users owning it, not the companies. “If everything is close-sourced, it’s just a glorified bank,” he said."

With this mindset, on the one year anniversary of ConcsenSys decision to change Metamask's license, The people at Thesis  announced the launch of Tally Ho! : "a community-owned & operated Web3 wallet that will end the ConsenSys monopoly on the Ethereum stack".


A few thoughts about Tally Ho!
After reading the background which led to the creation of the Tally Ho! project I went ahead and tried the wallet.  
Installing is simple and easy, like any other chrome add on. Make sure you use the link from the Tally Ho! homepage and don't search for the app on your own in the chrome web store.  Please note that at the moment the available version is a community preview created for initial assessment by the community and is not fully functional.  
Loading the wallet is quicker compared to another mammal oriented wallet I know, but that could be because of the limited functions Tally Ho! has at the moment and lack of assets in the wallet. 

The interface is quite simple and cleaner. It's just clearer which functions should be adjusted in order to complete a transaction.
                                                                                           

Adding new accounts is easy and it comes with a canine avatar. at the moment there seems to be a limited amount of avatars, but I assume this is only a temporary situation.
The wallet works. I moved a little bit of MATIC and everything went smoothly. 

The community:
One of the most important ways to evaluate a new crypto project is to have a feel of it's community. As long as there is an active community , a given project has a good chance of navigating through bad weather. So... how much "community" is there in Tally Ho! ?
Well...The community exists, and it has a moderate level of activity from my experience.
Tally Ho's twitter account has 14.5K followers. The Discord server has 1400+ members, but the general chat isn't very active, no more than a few tens of messages per day, mainly from newcomers.  Some of the questions I posted got a response within a few hours, some after a day and the answer was given by Thesis CEO himself. 

There are community calls based on the discord server, I managed to join in for  a few moments, but didn't count the number of listeners. They were talking about future developments which is always a good thing. 

As a non tech person such as myself I tried to see if I can contribute to the project somehow. I was able to find a google sheet created exactly for that goal , a way for non tech community members to offer their skills.  If you check the version history of the file you can see that there was a lot of editing happening between December 2021 to middle of February 2022 but not so much after that. The last edit was more than a month ago. 

So to summarize,  there seems to be a small community, it could use a boost. 


Will Tally Ho! will always remain open source?
According to the people at Thesis, the answer is Yes. They even went the extra mile and made sure that any project that will use Tally Ho!'s code will also have to be open source, hence spreading their belief and commitment to the community and the open source movement.  


So what do I think? I'm an optimist, I always was, and always will be.  I can't think of another way to live, because being a pessimist is just not fun. What's the point?
This project seems like the right development in a world where centralizing forces are trying to stop decentralization. It seems like it's powered by the same ideals the characterize the blockchain revolution =  empowering individuals and communities , not centralized banks and governments.

I think I'll join the pack. Tally Ho!
Thanks for reading.



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Photo by Robert Horobin on Unsplash