(Utopia Wallet Part III)
(3 minutes reading time)
In part II of this miniseries on Electronic Wallets I promised to have a look at the contours of the Ultimate “Electronic Wallet” with today’s standards and best practices in mind.
The sheer amount of electronic wallets in use worldwide (even though most only have limited functionally and applicability) and the many initiatives in development – of which many are not transparently published about by their initiators for competitive reasons – and the varying scope and depth of the wallets make it practically impossible to identify today’s best practice examples. For me Clinkle was just an ad-random wallet initiative to trigger this series on Electronic Wallets. Just one initiative of many that tries to solve a limited issue with today’s electronic payment landscape.
What they all miss however is the ability to disrupt current payment flows (and the parties involved) maybe with the exception of the Apple Wallet if it indeed is able to reverse the payment flow. (see: The inevitable Apple wallet will turn around the payments chain from payee to payer.)
Today’s Wallet initiatives are either done by individual or conglomerates of commercial firms. But in my assessment it is the lack of a coordinated (societal) approach that will prevent the Utopia Wallet from being created.
Achieving the “Utopia wallet” is about technology, but not technology only. It is also about having the right societal perspective and the intended standardization of many aspects at a global level.
My Ripple wallet address
If I were to name one initiative though that I think comes closest to the contours AND spirit of the Utopia Wallet it would be Ripple. As a matter of fact Ripple also makes use of a wallet but to classify the initiative as a wallet would be highly inappropriate as it has the potential to transform the world we live in by creating a new layer to enable value transactions based on a P2P distributed network protocol.
I come up with the following check list against the “utopia wallet” measurement stick for Ripple which is pretty impressive in my eyes:
NB For an explanation on the contours used above please see the original post on the contours of the Utopia Wallet.
See Part I, Part II with outline of the “Utopia Wallet”, and recent posts on Apple Wallet, and Amazon Wallet.
Update 6 march 2014:
RIPPLE OPENS DEVELOPER PORTAL; GETS ACCELERATOR PROGRAMME
Ripple is set to get a kick-start, with the outfit behind it opening up a developer portal and CrossCoin Ventures launching an accelerator to help startups working with the cypto-currency protocol.