Atomic Wallet: A Whistle Stop Tour

Welcome back all you wallet tourists, time to take another guided tour through a cryptocurrency wallet solution that is on the market. If you are interested in checking out the previous article you can find them here:

• Guarda Wallet
• Coinbase Wallet
• MetaMask Wallet
• Trust Wallet

This time around we're going to look at the 'Marmite' of all wallets that is on the market Atomic Wallet. I actually use this wallet a fair bit and I'm not going to lie (or apologise), I like it. Could it be better, sure, but that doesn't take away from it being a solid option. If you've not used it before I'll try explain a little later what I like about it, otherwise let's get on with the tour.

https://atomicwallet.io/ 

About

As with Guarda Wallet, Trust Wallet, and to a lesser extent COINBASE Wallet, Atomic Wallet is a non-custodial multi-coin wallet. While not as long in the tooth as Guarda, the Atomic team muscled their way into good standing with a a decent amount of publicity and an excellent, albeit now closed, referral scheme that saw a lot of folks jump at the platform when it was first released. There was also quite a lucrative PUBLISH0X writing competition earlier in the year which really helped to put them on the map.

In their own words the wallet is described as:

A decentralized Cryptocurrency wallet that supports more than 500 coins and tokens, providing simplicity, safety, and convenience for its users. 

Let's take a look and see if they hit the nail on the head.

Main Screen

When you open up the app you're faced with the standard overall balances screen that we've become accustom to with these type of wallets.

• 1.) At the top we have the overall balance in the currency of choice (see settings) 
• 2.) Below the main balances we have a breakdown by coins (sorted in descending fiat balance order)
• 3.) If we click on the balance at the top of the pages we are taken to another page where we see the balance again as a doughnut chart
• 4.) In this case we see a relative percentages of each items as a part of the portfolio

• 1.) Back on the main page clicking on the three lines (top left) we have the option to filter other tokens/coin to view
• 2.) Each token/coin can be toggled individually
• 3.) There are also options "Show All", update sort ordering and hid zero balances 
• 4.) When we click on a specific token we'll see the transaction history along with Send/Receive buttons
• 5.) On most other tokens (AWC not included) you'll see a small chart as well for tracking the performance of the markets

History/Exchange

Going back to the main screen there are a series of options controlled by the icons at the bottom of the page (where 'Wallet' is the main screen)

• 1.) Next to 'Wallet' we have the 'History' Tab
  • 1a.) This give the overall wallet history of all transactions
  • 1b.) Clicking on the transaction there is another screen with a detailed view (amounts, IDs Hash etc.)
• 2.) Along from 'History' we have the 'Exchange' Tab (powered by ChangeNow)
  • 2a.) The small clock icon goes to the exchanges history
  • 2b.) The exchange setup is just simple pairs, amounts and an 'Exchange' button

Buy/Stake

Continuing along the bottom tab bar.

• 1.) To the right of 'Exchange' we have the 'Buy' Tab
  • 1a.) Again here we have the previous transaction history link
  • 1b.) Similar to the Exchange tab, the bulk of this one is the purchase pair (fiat vs. coin/token). Note the 5% fee for this.
• 2.) Finally the last icon (on the right) contains, one of the best part of this app, the 'Staking' Tab
  • 2a.) Staking contains a searchable list with the estimated yield for stakes
  • 2b.) Clicking through one of the options will show you what we have staked currently and any available tokens for staking
  • 2c.) Finally it is a simple stake/unstake button functionality. Note that there are also claim buttons for some of the tokens as you may need to actively claim your rewards.

Settings Screen

Once back on the main (Wallet) screen there is a little cog symbol (top right) that will take us to the settings screen.

• 1.) First up is the ability to buy AWC for staking or rewards.
  • 1a.) These are only purchased in BNB unfortunately (personally I go to the source and use the BINANCE DEX)
• 2.) Next up we have the membership levels. If you hold certain amounts of tokens in your wallet you get a tiered kickback of the % of your trades in AWC. For me it means that if I trade any tokens in the Exchange section I'll get 0.25% of the total value back in AWC for the trade (it offsets the fees which is nice). 
  • 2a.) The total balance shows at the top and this can be either staked or unstaked (also if you're using the DEX tokens in orders count)
  • 2b.) Below we have the tier system and ways to earn AWC
• 3.) Next up is a simple way of adding other ERC20 tokens by contract as well as the ability to use wallet connect to link to DeFi projects and DEXs
• 4.) The Airdrop button doesn't do anything anymore since it has been suspended. Hopefully they will bring it back soon, this upset a lot of people.
• 5.) Security and access options are standard Passwords/Biometric log in and also access to all of your private keys (you'll need this if you want to link wallets) 
• 6.) Simple currency settings (for how you view the balances)
• 7.) A support link along with your personal 'Anonymous' Atomic ID for sending info to the team (until you send them an email from your "[email protected]" address....d'oh)
• 8.) And finally notification settings, info about the app and the ability to log out.

Desktop

Finally, one of the added bonus' of this wallet is that it also has a desktop version. Obviously as there is more space to work with this version is given more space to work with but in general the functionality is all the same.

• 1.) Section buttons are located vertically along the side (rather than horizontally across the bottom as in the phone app)
• 2.) Otherwise, the rest of the options are accessed though the small icons in the top right, along with the coin/token details being clickable.

Final Thoughts

As I said in the introduction I'm a little bias with this one. I learned about it through the writing competition and placed 3rd (not too shabby!). Since then I've seen a lot of folks jump ship and trash the wallet which is a bit of a shame. I believe this stems from Atomic's handling of the referral program, it turns out that there was considerable abuse of this and in turn a lot of the users with legitimate referrals got burned. I can see that making anyone upset, however in truth that was a bonus and shouldn't detract from the wallet's benefits in my mind.

So what are the benefits? For me the all-in-one solution is nice, getting easy access to those private keys is also handy for linking my wallet. I'll be honest I like using the built-in DEX on Trust Wallet and I like the ETH DeFi on METAMASK so I've linked some together to allow me to make the most out of them all. For this one I like the staking and really like the AWC token (and benefits). It is like this, I often use ChangeNow and the exchange you get in Atomic Wallet is ChangeNow. So why not just have a kickback on those transactions going right into a 17% staking token.....this is the gravy train. The staking side of it is really easy for beginners so I think that is a boon, also the desktop version is hand as well.

What could they do better? They could start by winning folks back over for the referral fiasco. Not everyone is a scammer so maybe benefit of the doubt would have been good. Also it would be good to allow the functionality to import other wallets using the private keys (if the functionality is there I've not found it yet). That would be a good way of folks bringing their staking over to a user friendly interface. Finally, some better linking with ETH DeFi would be good since the Wallet Connect is a bit patchy. 

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed the article, good luck y'all!