Crypto wallet prototype found in Microsoft Edge update
Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft vice president, speaks during an event in February at the company’s headquarters. Chona Kasinger—Bloomberg/Getty Images
While Microsoft has recently grabbed headlines for investments in AI chatbots, the tech giant has been quietly exploring another technological frontier, according to a software researcher in Central Europe.
On Friday, Lukas, who is known for reverse engineering Windows products and goes by Albacore on Twitter, found a prototype for a crypto wallet in a beta version of Microsoft Edge, the company’s web browser. (Lukas refused to give his last name for reasons of privacy.)
The wallet is non-custodial — users, not a third party, have control over the wallet’s keys — according to screenshots he posted on Twitter. It also includes price information for assets in a user’s wallet, a crypto-specific news feed, and links to Coinbase and MoonPay. Security measures to access the wallet are conventional, including a user-generated password and security question.
Latest in the gauntlet of questionable upcoming Microsoft Edge features, a crypto wallet 💸
Not quite sure how you feel about this sort of thing being baked into the default browser, what are your thoughts?
More screenshots of the user interface in the next tweet ➡️ pic.twitter.com/GAUPiZGLIY— Albacore (@thebookisclosed) March 17, 2023
“We regularly test new features to explore new experiences for our customers,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune. “We look forward to learning and gathering feedback from customers, but have nothing more to share at this time.”
Microsoft’s exploration of a crypto wallet continues the tech giant’s sporadic forays into Web3. It has also flirted with creating virtual reality technology for workers in what it called the “industrial metaverse”. In February, after creating an industrial metaverse team just four months earlier, it laid off its entire staff of roughly 100.
But given Microsoft’s dispersed workforce of hundreds of thousands of employees, it’s no surprise that it has continued to develop crypto products, despite a public focus on ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that has recently taken the world by storm.
— Albacore (@thebookisclosed) March 17, 2023
Lukas, who saw that Edge is slated for a redesign, found the prototype for Microsoft’s crypto wallet after launching a special instance of Edge to access the browser’s unreleased features. After scrolling through the list, he noticed the crypto wallet, he said Fortuneand was able to experiment with it.
He said recent release notes from Microsoft confirm the finding. Shortly after he posted screenshots of the wallet on Twitter, the company posted a link to a new policy titled “CryptoWalletEnabled” among its updates.
Lukas, who regularly dives into unreleased features for Edge, says he’s “pretty sure” the feature will be released to a wider audience. But his reactions to the wallet are mixed.
He said it’s “stupidly easy” to set up the wallet and worries, given crypto’s association with bad actors, a more easily accessible wallet could entice crypto-naives to potentially lose their tokens.
“I’m sure there are people at Microsoft who take a bunch of risks into account. I doubt a decision like this will be made blindly, he said Fortune. “But giving people a much easier way to set up new wallets sounds a tiny bit problematic.”
