A passport that will show you the way to Paraverse, that will protect your keys..

Unbiased notes of Dotsama Ecosystem

In collaboration with WagMedia and PolkaHaus

General Info

Talisman mission is to create the best UX/UI, community owned, wallet on Dotsama space (and beyond). Currently, the web app is live and the web extension is in Alpha, tested thoroughly by Talisman Key holders. Early days for the project from Australia, with 3.3k Twitter followers and ~2k Discord members. Github seems busy (im not a tech guy in any way), 2022 should be a great year for them.

Problems

When an investor is introduced to Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem, he faces one (big for many) problem: Polkadot.js. Used for storage, crowdloaning, voting, running a node etc.. and its a great developer tool for sure, but not for the crowd, not for regular users. Simply put, not a very good consumer product. Polkadot-JS app is the most used decentralized interface for interacting with the Polkadot ecosystem but it has been built with developers in mind. So the newcomers have to put in the time to figure out how the wallet works or in the worst case, they walk away. As for other projects that currently developing, most have an allegiance to one parachain project or another. In most cases, these wallets and interfaces are built by the parachain teams themselves, which presents a conflict of interest.

What is Talisman?

A Multichain,robust,community owned, wallet intented as extension for Polkadot and Kusama, focusing on the problem of building crosschain wallet for better user experience. It allows users to take control of their crypto assets, leverage novel use cases and help shape the future of the project via a social layer. Talisman is fully committed to building the wallet that will aid progress and catalyze composability in the DotSama ecosystem. Just as powerful as Polkadot-JS, perfect for a variety of use cases across a variety of parachains. Also, it explores what is useful for developers.

We are extending the polka JS API to give the developers some context of users balances. We are enabling some customization by the devs of transaction experience.

Two main components:

• Web App: This is your interface which someone will manage his assets. Intended to be robust and you could think of it like online banking.
• Web extension: This will be your day to day transaction slick and simple interface and you could think of it like Apple Pay.

Regarding extension, it will enable users to understand their assets in context, transaction history, liquidity they’re providing ,battletest the API. Participate in emerging DotSama DeFi activities like: Parachain crowdloans. Bonding assets and nominating validators for staking. Swapping assets on DEXes.

Challenges And Dotsama

First point here is data availability problem. How to understand my users balances (as an app) if their balances are in hundreds of parachains? how to create that without a giant centralized system to manage that?

Secondly, "Diverse systems". Think of Subsocial and how many Subsocial like apps will emerge and eventually their social tokens. Think of BitCountry with their Metaverses and future community owned tokens. Think of Dotsama Defi... Displaying all those assets is a key point for Talisman success.

Noone knows what Talisman needs to be yet. Its a journey to Paraverse (Parachains ecosystem).

We want to make it easier for web application developers to leverage Polkadot and its Parachains to improve composability.

We want to create the best multi-chain transaction experience possible with XCMP to accelerate adoption.
We want to build a community full of rich stories that help people understand web3 concepts and take full custody of their assets.

How Dotsama will benefited?

• Providing an improved transaction experience for end users who are currently using Polkadot-JS.
• Providing an API for dapp developers that offers them consolidated chain-state with the ability to interact with multiple Parachains and build composible dapps.
• Allowing everyone to explore cross-chain user experience based on XCMP.

Current Features And The Roadmap

At the moment with Talisman app, you can : View your balances across all relay chains and connected parachains View your crowdloan contributions Participate in crowdloans Purchase DOT and KSM with a credit card.

In the future: Allow you to stake assets and earn rewards Let you view your NFTs and collectibles Experience a variety of DeFi tools such as liquidity pools, lending and borrowing, swapping tokens, and much more.

Specifically, the following are planned: Polkadot Staking, Name the account, Kusama Staking, Account management page, History of transactions, Mobile-friendly UI, Shiden Dapp Staking, View NFT's, Wallet Connect Integration, Moonriver Staking, Hardware Wallet Support (Extension).

Backers And Spirit Keys

Spirit Keys are RMRK NFT's with a total supply of 3333 pieces. Their purpose is to permision access to extension (Alpha) and by holding them, you could be eligable for future utility which is unknown for now.

Talisman has raised $2.35mil with Hypersphere Ventures as main investor among others Koji Capital,Advanced Blockchain AG, Paka Fund, Digital Finance Group, D1 Ventures, Paperclip Fund,Jsquare. Angel investors included: Derek Yoo (Moonbeam) Ruitao Su (Acala) Zeeprime (Hydradx?) Hutch (Zeitgeist) Bruno Skvorc (RMRK) Brainjar (Composable Finance) Leigh Travers

"Hold on, Where is our interview?"

After spending couple hours playing with the Spirit Key and the extension, i was amazed how slick and simple the UX is and i liked alot the UI also. I feel Beta should be close!

I managed to reach Agyle, team member of Talisman, and was able to extract a little more information about the project... There you go:

-Hello Agyle!, Nice to meet you! Im writing about Tali as we speak haha..

Awesome!

-So, whats the backround of the team? On Github i can see 2 members.

Nipsey, Agyle, Swami & H00D are all co-founders who previously worked at Flex Dapps, an Australian web3 venture studio which helped a bunch of teams to go from 0-1 between early 2018 and 2021. (Flexdapps.com website is currently down because we’re currently winding down the business into hibernation and we didn’t pay for our DNS, but it will be back up soon, check internet archive for more info) Alec, JamesSangalli were devs we worked with through Flex Dapps with their own substantial dev experience.

-How big is the team?

The team is currently 11 4 x co-founder (1 exec, 1 design, 2 dev) 3 x developer 1 x legal and compliance officer 1 x part time community designer 1 x designer 1 x product manager starting in 3 weeks

-How long the current alpha version of extension will run? Whats your main short term target?

We intend to launch a public beta this quarter, the sooner we can get Talisman in the market and in the hands of users the better. However we need to make sure we set up our organisation to continually ship improvements in a safe and secure way before opening up.

-“Robust interface” is frequently used phrase by Talisman. Can you elaborate a bit more on this? what problems could you face in the future?

We see the future of the multi-chain world as creating a combinatorial explosion of balances, states and chains. Talisman will need to provide users a birds-eye view of everything and allow granular control so that people can traverse the paraverse.

-Are you going to use any tools improving the privacy of transactions?

We use fathom for our web app analytics, which is a privacy focused analytics too. https://usefathom.com/ We intend to explore privacy features soon.

-In your opinion, why Parity hasnt released any funds in order to make a better UI/UX polkadot.js ? Is dotsama THAT developer oriented and basically they dont care?

Parity have a lot of hard problems to solve, and up until now Polkadot.JS has been good enough. My understanding is that culturally parity doesn’t have much interest in product development, they are hardcore technology builders who are doing 0th principle thinking and bringing entirely new solutions to life. It’s up to community members like us to productise and apply their work.

-Whats the true purpose of Spirit Keys? can you share any more details for any future utility?

The spirit keys will be very soon used to permission access to our discord server, so that we can build a close relationship with our early adopters and ensure their feedback makes it into Talisman.

-Talisman raised 2.3 mil for developing the wallet. Are you satisfied with the amount raised and do you think that its a sufficient amount for the coming years?

The Talisman team is quite small, only 9 currently. So we have enough capital for a while, however we intend to double the size of the team in 2022 and that will cut our runway in half. We may go looking for capital from the community, the treasury or start gaining revenue this year.

-You guys have some of the best artwork around. Who is behind it? Is there some kind of story and maybe potential NFT’s in the works?

Definitely the potential for NFT works in the future, our main goal with the art we create is to explain the nature of DotSama ecosystem in a non-technical way. To create a story and world in which all the members of the ecosystem are placed in correct relation to eachother, so that as new learners go down the rabbit hole they have a mental scaffold to learn emergently, which is fun.

The artworks are illustrated by Mattias Basla, our illustrator and conceptualised by myself Matias and H00D, our head of design.

-Thank you very much Agyle! Any last comments towards Talisman community?

We are going to be working really hard this quarter to push the Talisman extension into a public beta and integrate with all your favourite dapps. Stay tuned with the project, we love seeing the community’s contribution and support. It is the wind under our wings.

A big thanx to McBeaster and Alex! https://twitter.com/andreas_seppy