Pros:
- Good support for Pulsechain tokens, and displaying prices in-wallet
- Supports swaps in-wallet and uses multiple DEXes to shop for the best deal
- Allows passive income of PLS token fees from swaps by holding T.I.M.E token in-wallet
- Supports both Chrome and mobile devices
Cons:
- Much less well known compared to MetaMask
- Despite 2 external code audits, some default OpSec choices I don’t like (e.g. default unlimited spend limit)
- Slower to load balances, often requires a manual refresh to get up-to-date balances
- No Firefox extension
If you are a user on PulseChain (or want to be), you have probably struggled with finding a good wallet for self-custody. Obviously the best wallet for any significant amount of coin is a hardware wallet like the Trezor Wallet; it boasts good security and works well with hot wallets like MetaMask for simple operations, and supports Ethereum and all its many descendants.
However, many folks want a ‘hot wallet’ to play around with small amounts on various EVM-compatible cryptos, and the go-to option for a long time has been MetaMask. Unfortunately, a severe lack of support for the Pulsechain network (no prices for tokens, must add custom network details by hand) means folks have been looking at other options. One such option which has recently come to prominence is the Internet Money Wallet.
There is a lot to like about the Internet Money folks. Their website has a lot of fun alien imagery and it explains their various tokens in good detail; there are several coins to consider, but I’m focusing on TIME for this article. I highly recommend reading up on their tokenomics, and really dig into the security audits done on their wallet and tokens, before making any decisions about deciding whether to use them for non-trivial amounts of crypto.
The wallet supports both Chrome browsers and Android/iOS on mobile; alas no Firefox support yet, which I’d really like to see. While I’m glad the wallet also works without issue on Chromium, Firefox is the only browser I actually trust nowadays, Chrome has been messing with their extension support, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who worries about the longevity of Chrome extensions, let alone whether the source to Chrome might get closed completely down the road.
Anyway, the main big plus for the IM wallet is native Pulse network and token support out of the box, as well as your classic Ethereum and other chains; by default there are 18 networks to choose from including more popular chains like Arbitrum, Fantom and Base. Adding a new token (say HDRN) is easily handled via a dropdown, no need to paste in having to look up and paste the contract address for most known coins in the Pulsechain and Ethereum ecosystem.
It’s worth talking more about how good IM’s swapping support is, as one of the main problems with Pulsechain for newer users is a ubiquitous, convenient way to swap tokens. There are now more DEXes available aside from the OG PulseX, but having the wallet support this natively is such a nice feature to have, and just makes everything so much less error-prone. The question of how to get into Pulsechain still exists, as there are no major Centralized Exchanges (CEXes) supporting Pulse yet, so folks have had to either bridge their tokens (via the official Pulsechain bridge of course), or from entities like 0xCoast or gopulse.com/buy, the latter of which has been giving me some trouble lately. But let’s praise improvements where we have them.
Anyway, for those unfamiliar with other farming/passive income features, when you receive rewards in the IM wallet there are two types of rewards to understand: claimable rewards and sweepable rewards. They are listed separately (you can see this in the screenshot above) Funds need to be ‘swept’ into your account to be claimed; the good news about this is any user can trigger this sweep transaction and it happens for all eligible wallets. I’ve not actually had to sweep funds even once so far to receive the majority of my claimable PLS reward.
The second biggie is for folks interested in passive PLS income. By holding their T.I.M.E. Dividend token in the wallet, you receive a cut of PLS token fees that the wallet charges for in-wallet swaps. Of course the amount of PLS you would be eligible to receive would be proportional to the total amount of T.I.M.E. tokens you own relative to the total amount of tokens on-chain. Looking at activity on the various networks where T.I.M.E. dividend is available, it seems most activity is on Pulse and BSC chains, so those are probably the best networks to use with IM. With the current high prices for Ethereum swaps and lower usage on that chain, I don’t know if it’s yet a good option for earning passive ETH, but that may change in the near future.
Remember that currently, there are very few places to earn PLS passively. Even the main flagship DEX, PulseX, offers the INC token instead as a reward for farming, not PLS or even PLSX. Richard Heart has claimed that single-sided staking could eventually come, but I believe personally that he neither wants to do this, nor will do so anytime.
There is one minor qualm I have with swaps in IM wallet: the default spending limit when you approve swaps in your wallet is ∞ (i.e. unlimited) by default. I really don’t like this; the default should really be the amount you’re planning to swap at present, and you can always set a new spending limit later. If this is done in case the spending limit fee were somehow prohibitively expensive, a swap is a much more complicated transaction and is always going to cost more than that anyway.
As with any project in crypto though, the developers could disappear tomorrow with your coins. As a test of what would happened if just the wallet stops working, I did a test to restore a wallet I created using Internet Money in MetaMask using the 24 seed word phrase. Happily in the recovered wallet in MM there were no problems accessing my tokens, with the usual caveat of the spotty support MM has (have to add tokens manually, etc).
One other minor item worth mentioning it at least on my browser, IM is noticeably slower than MetaMask, and I did occasionally have to refresh via the “reload arrows”, though I am a very impatient persion. I think this will improve over time, but it’s worth pointing out for those used to the blazing speed of MetaMask.
In summary, I believe that the Internet Money wallet is a reasonable choice for folks who have already invested significantly in Pulse and PulseX and are looking for other ways to earn a little extra money on the side.
Disclaimers
Trade cryptocurrencies at your own risk; this article is not financial advice. I am in no way affiliated with the Internet Money team, nor any other cryptocurrency organization. If you get rugged, I get rugged also. Never put more money into crypto (or really anything for that matter) than you can afford to lose. This not a paid article, and I do not accept paid or guest articles.
