Yoroi Wallet - Modern Wallet

Yoroi supports both Cardano and Ergo networks. When you create a new wallet, you will be asked if you want to connect to the Cardano or Ergo network. Cardano will be the most common option.

Yoroi, the light weight Cardano wallet, derives its name from the incredibly ornate ancient armor worn by Japanese samurai. The armor was a combination of iron and leather exquisitely constructed over nearly a year. This article explores some of the security centered features, and core technologies, behind the modern armor designed for your web browser and ADA funds.

There are a number of browser based wallets for both Cardano and other cryptocurrencies. Some browser based wallets are websites that you have to access on the public Internet, while other wallets are actually extensions that you can install on your browser.

EMURGO, as the official, and commercial, venture arm of Cardano — the first peer-reviewed third generation blockchain — chose to develop a browser based extension due to a number of security issues with web based wallets. Often times, unofficial web based wallets will encourage you to run a local copy of their Javascript code to create your private key and password; there is no guarantee the code is clean and most people don’t want to have to look at every line of code themselves. In contrast, Yoroi has been developed by the official organizations behind Cardano, namely EMURGO and IOHK. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that a website based wallet won’t quietly get hacked, or snooped on, by a third party at some point, given the tremendous incentive to do so.

Another reason EMURGO chose to create a browser extension was due to the cases where DNS hijacking occurred and people were redirected from a wallet to a different website that stole their money. Typos of a website domain name can also lead to similar issues. An extension doesn’t have this problem.

Similarly, people have linked to fake versions of Daedalus where the application people downloaded was actually a virus. Yoroi doesn’t have this problem, however, since the Chrome store ensures you download the right application.

The fact Yoroi runs in Chrome allows us to develop faster as there are well-made APIs we can rely on and it also protects the user as the extension runs inside its own sandbox. Chrome, in general, makes it easier to inspect packets so you can check that Yoroi is not sending your private key to our servers. With the Chrome developer tools you are able to see exactly what data is passed to the EMURGO/IOHK servers.

Select the Network tab from the developer tools main menu and you can see the polling process, for example. The Yoroi wallet will periodically send your wallet address to our server ask for all transactions that have occurred since the wallet refreshed. Currently, Yoroi has to poll the our servers to get your transaction history and to execute transactions. You can see all of the HTTPS POST requests in the remoteFetcher.js file.