November 12, 2018 9:07 PM
There’s a need for more decentralized Ethereum wallets, and Parity’s stepping in to help fill it.
On Friday, November 9, Parity Ethereum announced the alpha release of its light client-based wallet, Parity Fether[1]. For the moment, the Fether is only on testnets and the Parity team does not recommend it for mainnet use, but the release marks a significant advancement in UX for the decentralized access to Ethereum.
To understand the significance of this, you have to know what a light client is and why they matter.
A client (also referred to as a node) is software that connects a website or app's front-end user interface with the back-end Ethereum smart contracts and ledger.
There are a few client-types that serve different functions. Some nodes fully download the history of the Ethereum blockchain – including every single transaction since the genesis block – and record and verify all new transactions. Some nodes are also miners. These node types are essential to the security and decentralization of the network, but to run them requires a significant level of technical know-how, time, and resources.
This presents a problem, because if you want to connect to the blockchain, you have to use a client. To circumvent this barrier to entry, many apps and wallets running on the Ethereum blockchain use Infura[2], a third-party node cluster that connects the front-end user interface (UI) of Dapps and wallets to the back-end smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Essentially, wallets and dapps using Infura's infrastructure relay transactions to Infura nodes, which then write them to Ethereum. There are a few problems with this, though, because the Infura-running apps simply trust the Infura nodes, creating a single point of failure and somewhat defeating the point of
