New Indie Ethereum Tools Making Waves

The most useful launches in crypto aren’t always the ones coming from VC-backed giants. Ethereum, in particular, is full of indie builders quietly shipping what they believe in.

Good tools are good tools. Here are three low-key community projects that aren’t flashy but will immediately upgrade your Ethereum wallet and portfolio management toolset.👇

An Onchain Lost & Found

Sometimes I'm very active onchain, sometimes I'm more laid back.

In the 2017-2019 era, I was still getting my bearings in crypto, so I was firing off transactions left and right, cramming ETH wherever I could to try new projects. I learned a lot this way, and fast. But as happens when you're juggling many things, I straight up forgot about some of my ETH positions from this period.

Of course, I could go and manually hunt down these deposits, but that'd take a lot of effort and time. Plus, some things I'd miss because you can't track down things you don't even remember trying in the first place. The good news for us old timers is now we can have this hunting streamlined for us courtesy of Forgotten ETH by aaaaaaaaaaway.

This new platform scans more than 160 old Ethereum smart contracts (and counting), and, in the event it finds any lost ETH for your target address, it acts as a frontend you can use to easily retrieve your funds. It has helped recover 1,270 ETH so far across ancient projects like Aave v1, DigixDAO, EtherDelta, and beyond, so check the tool out if you were active on Ethereum prior to 2020.

You might have a little chunk of ETH waiting for you!

Transactions That Make Sense

Every year around the U.S. tax deadline in April, I'm reminded of how it can be difficult to read and piece together my transaction history.

I say this mainly with regard to non-EVM chains, as Etherscan and its L2 block explorers are great. But still, there's a long way to go to making onchain info more readily understandable. Some projects, especially NFT ones, need bespoke solutions here.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised to see a new block explorer arrive last week that's working in this direction, evm.now. Created by jalil.eth and ygg, this resource is all about making it easier to inspect and decipher Ethereum transactions, contract files, functions, etc.

So while a new block explorer might not be the sexiest of gadgets, I've really liked the UX of the platform in my initial deep dives here, and I can envision using it a lot more for future onchain analytics work. This site is also brand new, so expect more features to be revealed on a rolling basis.

An AI Wallet Interface

The downside of crypto wallets built by large teams is that they can be slow to advance new tech and new features. On the flip side, small indie teams can move fast and experiment more freely. This sort of indie energy is what recently drew me to WalletChan, a fully open-source browser wallet extension built by apoorv.eth.

The main pillar here is AI, namely using AI as the primary interface for taking onchain actions. WalletChan lets you use your Bankr AI agent wallet directly with any other onchain app the same way that you'd ordinarily use wallets like MetaMask, Rabby, Rainbow, etc.

The WalletChan v3 was also just unveiled, featuring a slew of fresh goodies like native swaps, batch transactions, transaction simulations, gasless USDC transfers (for $WCHAN stakers), and more. It's worth a look, especially if you're already a user and fan of the Bankr system.