Taho’s Pledge to Web3: Building the Wallet You Deserve

Access, transparency, and ownership are all values that make up the foundation of web3 and its technology. However, not every dapp today is playing by the same rules and operating in an open and honest manner.

Wallets are essential to our everyday life in web3. They not only hold our assets but also serve as our portal to web3. This is why we started the pledge of #DefendWeb3 to remember and return to the principles blockchain was built on: a new internet powered and owned by communities, not corporations.

Taho champions accessibility, self-sovereignty, and radical transparency, and we have built a community-owned wallet that embodies and protects those values — a wallet available to anyone, anywhere on Earth, that can finance itself, that’s governed by a DAO, and that’s accountable to you, and not some faceless corporation.

Wallets in our ecosystem that are controlled by web2-style megacorporations have dire implications for our rights and freedoms, including:

   ● The monopolization of products and services controlled by large centralized           institutions
 ● Lack of user ownership and control over data, transactions, and experience
 ●  Unequal access to web3– the gross profit (price-gouging) off of essential financial services.

We are accessible to anyone— no matter where you live.

The inception of Taho was born out of the frustration of navigating the web2 financial system. You can be denied service by a centralized banking institution while calculating your interest rate and credit score. In 2014, PayPal blocked processing for our founder’s small business. These gatekeepers determined that his line of business was "too risky" and denied him access to financial services.

Amid Russian sanctions in 2022, MetaMask mistakenly geo-blocked users in Venezuela, and OpenSea blocked users in territories on the U.S. sanctions list.

These cases expose the flaws of centralized exchanges and wallets and the reality that the promise of an open internet may not be available to everyone depending on the rules that specific web3 protocols play by.

This is against the very ethos of web3, so we need community-owned infrastructure to shield users against surveillance, shutdowns, and censorship. Taho cannot block users based on nationality, conduct surveillance, or enrich shareholders over community members. Quite the opposite, users are empowered to reject any measures against the project’s underlying ethos.

How does a community-run wallet decide on personal data and privacy? Taho strives to balance user privacy and behavior to improve the product. When launching Product Analytics earlier this year, we did so by creating safeguards to ensure the community is informed and empowered regarding their data.

Every Taho user has a clear notice and opt-out option for sharing product analytics data through in-wallet notification. We limit the usage data collected and do not intentionally collect or store identification data, blockchain activity, or account information. Your IP address is never linked to wallet activity; thus, the geo-targeted blocks that took place with MetaMask and OpenSea will never happen to Taho users.

We also use open-source analytics tooling, self-host our product analytics, and automatically route RPC requests from your wallet to a round-robin of different infrastructure providers—so no one provider receives the complete picture of your on-chain life. Our privacy policy outlines the data we collect in plain English.

We are radically transparent— our code is & will continue to be 100% open source.

Free and open source software (FOSS) means faster development of new ideas, more robust security, and participation in governance. Taho is and will always be 100% open source under GPLv3, a software license that offers the most robust protections under the law to ensure that Taho — and all the code we write as a community — remains free.

But that’s certainly not the case everywhere, particularly when it concerns our more foxy friends. In August 2020, ConsenSys moved MetaMask from an open source to a “tiered proprietary license,” limiting how people could use its code. Within two months, it also launched in-wallet swaps charging its users exorbitant service fees (as much as 1% per transaction). The following year, MetaMask’s in-wallet DEX aggregation amassed a whopping $237 million in revenue from service fees charged to its users.

One has to ask where the money is going and how it’s used, especially when their previous funding rounds have included investors like HSBC, JP Morgan, and MasterCard. It would be hard to believe that a web3 wallet that has gotten in bed with traditional banks and thinks of one day going public cares about decentralization, user ownership, or any of the principles that make up web3.

Taho users can trust that security will always be our first priority and that any revenue from users will be reinvested back into the community. Taho Swaps provides DeFi users a new way to swap while charging almost half the cost and all fees going back to the community via the Community Multisig. We also use Blocknative for superior gas estimates and 0x to get the best exchange rates.

We are wholly community-owned— value will always flow transparently to you and the community, & not corporate insiders.

People have always formed communities to create value together and build public utility. Recall web2 peer-to-peer file-sharing systems like Napster and BitTorrent that, although they were considered fringe activity and piracy, were also about access and community participation. In many ways, these early online projects were the world’s first decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Their ideals formed the foundation of the Internet before monopolization and monetization took over, ownership was taken away, and advertising revenue started polluting the Internet's veins.

That’s why any new, open internet must be transparent and community-owned.

A community-run wallet also ensures that its operators and users have aligned incentives and common interests because they share ownership of the wallets. As a result, it would be tough for Taho to misdirect wealth or act against its users’ interests, further improving wallet security for everyone.

A more accessible and open web3

Taho stands for access over privilege, open source over restrictive licensing, and community control over centralized profiteering. If we intentionally build decentralized, open-source, community-owned infrastructure to replace today’s centralized monopolies. We stand a chance at delivering a decentralized, community-controlled wallet that may support the longevity of a genuinely decentralized world.

We have always wanted and will forever need all paws on deck. Sign our pledge to #DefendWeb3 and join over 468,842 🐕 Tahomies in our Discord. And if you’d like to take a more active role in the community, keep up with developments in the launch of our on-chain DAO.

Web3 awaits. Download Taho today.