Blockchain-Based Mobile Cryptocurrency Wallet

As the monetary value of cryptocurrency increases, the security measures for cryptocurrency becomes more important. A limitation of the existing cryptocurrency exchanges is their vulnerability to threats of hacking due to their centralized manner of management. In order to overcome such limitation, blockchain technology is increasingly adopted. The blockchain technology enables decentralization and Peer-to-Peer(P2P) transactions, in which blocks of information are linked in chain topology, and each node participating in the blockchain shares a distributed ledger. In this paper, we propose and implement a mobile electronic wallet that can safely store, send and receive cryptocurrencies. The proposed mobile cryptocurrency wallet connects to the network only when the wallet actively is used. Wallet owner manages his or her private key offline, which is advantageous in terms of security. JavaScript based wallet apps were implemented to respectively run on Android and iOS mobile phones. I demonstrate the process of transferring Ethereum cryptocurrency from an account to another account through Ropsten, a test net for Ethereum. Hardware wallets, such as Ledger Nano S, provide a slightly higher level of security, yet have the disadvantages of added burden of carrying additional physical devices and high costs (about 80$).