In a recent interview, Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder and CEO of Input Output Global (aka “IOG”), the blockchain technology firm behind Cardano’s R&D, explained what is special about $ADA wallet “Lace”.

Lace, which is a Cardano wallet being developed by IOG, is currently at the beta stage. According to IOG, it “brings together a wealth of Web3 features, from managing digital assets, to accessing NFTs, DApps, and DeFi services, so you can discover and enjoy a new world of digital experiences.”

Source: Lace

Hoskinson’s comments were made with Peyton Winget, who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bloom Pool LLC (as well as Founder and CEO of Atirum Lab), at the “Rare Bloom” event in Denver, Colorado (October 14-15, 2002), which was hosted by the Cardano community at the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center.

When asked about Lace, Hoskinson said:

“I thought a lot about how do we get Cardano to a billion users? How do we get the ecosystem to become the world’s financial operating system?…

“What is the consumer interface? What is the portal upon which a billion people will do stuff, whether they’re playing with NFTs, they’re issuing assets, they’re doing DeFi things, they’re playing video games, there’s identity components, estate planning components managing billions of dollars, security tokens, all this type of stuff.

“So, about last year, we said let’s start a research project to imagine what a portal and interface to all of those use cases would look like to go above and beyond what a normal cryptocurrency wallet does. So, an identity-first wallet with full node security but light enough to be on a phone…

“We put some of our best people together. We took a lot of great new technologies like Mithril and Atala PRISM and a lot of legacy stuff that we invented in the cardano ecosystem, and we pulled it all together, and now Lace as a product is starting to come out to market.

“It’s one of our first commercial B2C products, and so it’s not a reference client. It’s not like Daedalus, which is a neutral playground, but rather this is IO’s view of how crypto ought to be done and our hope is that it’s going to kind of push along the standards for our entire ecosystem, get every wallet to become Mithril-enabled, have people start really getting identity seriously, talk about certified wallet standards, and these types of things.

“It’s a browser based interface. It’ll eventually come to your cellphone and to the desktop and every step of the way. It’s innovating as much as it can. So, we’re real excited to kind of demo it, build a beta movement around it with some pioneers, and hopefully we’ll be able to translate that into a very successful ecosystem that can bring in everybody, not just the crypto enthusiasts, but the entire space.

“It’s also going to be cross chain. So, it’s not just Cardano. It’ll support Bitcoin, Ethereum,and a lot of other ecosystems and showcase what we’ve created as an ecosystem to the rest of the cryptocurrency space in that respect.“