Imagine a digital safe for your Ethereum that lives on your computer and eventually, on a USB drive you can keep in your pocket. Unlike browser wallets that are constantly exposed to the internet, WIESNAR's keys stay encrypted on your own machine, never in a company's cloud. It's like having a bank vault that only you can open.

Named after Stephen Wiesner, the physicist who conceived "quantum money" in the 1970s, a currency that's unforgeable because measuring it changes it. We're chasing the same spirit with different math: a wallet where you don't have to trust us, you can verify us.

Most crypto wallets today have quiet, structural weaknesses:

Browser extensions are constantly exposed to the websites you visit, which widen the attack surface

Most wallets ask a company's server (Infura, Alchemy, and similar) what your balance is and simply trust the answer

Keys are often stored in ways that ultimately depend on trusting Apple, Google, or Microsoft's cloud infrastructure

Our goal is a wallet that removes each of these dependencies, one at a time and is honest at every step about which ones are removed and which aren't yet. Specifically, we're building toward:

Self-custody with no cloud dependency: your keys never leave your device. (Built.)

A zero-trust connection to Ethereum: verifying chain data cryptographically instead of trusting a provider's word for it. (Attempted, currently blocked on upstream tooling stability — see below.)

The ability to actually send funds, signed locally, broadcast without a middleman holding your key. (Not yet built, this is the core of what we're raising funds for.)

A hardware wallet grade experience without hardware wallet pricing: an encrypted vault file portable enough to carry on a USB drive. (Not yet built.)

Full dApp compatibility via WalletConnect, so self custody doesn't mean giving up Uniswap, OpenSea, or the rest of the ecosystem. (Not yet built.)

We'd rather ship each of these honestly, in order, than claim a finish line we haven't crossed.

🔐 Your keys, encrypted, local-only. A 24 word BIP-39 seed phrase is generated, shown to you once for backup, and verified word by word before your wallet is created. Your master password derives an encryption key via Argon2 (a deliberately slow, brute-force-resistant key derivation function), which then encrypts your seed with AES-256-GCM. The result is written to a single file on your machine. There are no cloud storage, no company servers, no transmission of your seed or password anywhere, ever.

🔑 Real address derivation. Your Ethereum receiving address is derived from your seed using the standard path (BIP-44, m/44'/60'/0'/0/0) through secp256k1 and Keccak-256, with proper EIP-55 checksum encoding, the same derivation any standard wallet uses, so your funds are never locked into proprietary software.

🛡️ Memory hygiene during encryption/decryption. The encryption key derived from your password is explicitly zeroed out of memory (via Rust's zeroize) immediately after use, rather than left to linger until garbage collection gets around to it.

🌐 Live balance checking. The dashboard can fetch your real ETH balance from the network on demand.

What "live balance checking" honestly means right now: we connect to Ethereum through a trusted RPC provider (Alchemy). This means you're trusting that provider to report your balance accurately. It's the same model nearly every wallet uses today. It is not yet the verify it yourself, trust "no one" model described in our longterm goals above. We attempted to build that this week using Helios, a real cryptographic light client and it genuinely worked, briefly, verifying real mainnet data, before hitting an unresolved bug in Helios's own sync status logic on the current unreleased branch. Helios's own maintainers currently advise against using it for high value wallet transactions. We made the deliberate call to ship the honest trusted-RPC version rather than ship something fragile and call it trustless. Closing this gap is one of the things we're asking funding for.

Transaction signing and broadcasting. Currently, WIESNAR can receive and display funds — it cannot yet send them. This is the single largest remaining piece of core functionality.

The zero-trust light client. Finishing the Helios integration (or an equivalent), so balance and transaction data is cryptographically verified rather than trusted from a provider.

USB portable hardware wallet mode. Carrying your encrypted vault file on removable media, so your keys are physically absent from any machine when unplugged.

WalletConnect support, so WIESNAR can approve transactions for dApps (Uniswap, OpenSea, etc.) without your keys ever touching a browser.

An independent security audit. Everything built so far is real, working cryptography, written quickly, by a small team, under no outside review yet. Before this holds anyone's real funds at scale, it needs eyes that aren't ours.

Automated test coverage. Current testing has been thorough but manual. A wallet handling real money needs a real test suite.

Forging a vault: Generate a 24 word seed phrase, write it down, prove you wrote it down correctly by retyping five random words. Set a master password (12+ characters, letters + numbers + symbol). Your seed is encrypted and saved locally. Your Ethereum address is derived and shown immediately.

Unlocking a vault: Enter your master password. WIESNAR tries it against every vault file on your machine; only the correct password decrypts the matching one. Nothing is sent anywhere during this process.

Checking your balance: WIESNAR asks a configured Ethereum RPC provider for your current balance and displays it.

Crypto natives who want strong security without buying a $100+ hardware wallet

Privacy advocates who don't want a company's server logging every balance check

Anyone who believes "not your keys, not your coins" and wants the software to actually live up to that, not just say it

WIESNAR is built by the team behind Fourier (reports on GitHub), an EVM gas-optimization research practice. Eleven major protocols analyzed to date, including Uniswap V3, Aave V4, GMX Synthetics, Lido, Euler, and Circle's CCTP with every finding published publicly rather than kept behind a paywall. That work is what this project draws its standard for "read the code, don't take our word for it" from.

We're building this in the open, on GitHub, for the community to inspect — including, deliberately, the parts that aren't finished yet. No hidden backdoors, no corporate agenda, and no claiming a feature works before it does.

Currently runs from source in development mode (npm run tauri dev) — there is no packaged release yet. A GitHub Releases build, with installers, is part of what funding would let us prioritize.

We're applying for funding (Ethereum Foundation, Gitcoin) to close the gaps listed above and most urgently, transaction signing and the zero trust light client. If you believe in self custody that's honest about its own progress, we'd welcome your support.

Your keys. Eventually, your USB drive. Always your rules.