Wallet Access

The kinds of operations we can perform with a Wallet instance depend on whether or not the wallet has a signer attached to it.

In order to differentiate between Wallet instances that have a signer and those that do not, we use the Wallet<Unlocked<S>> and Wallet<Locked> types respectively.

Wallet States

The Wallet<Unlocked<S>> type represents a wallet that has a signer. A wallet must be of type Wallet<Unlocked<S>> in order to perform operations that involve signing messages or transactions.

You can learn more about signing here.

The Wallet<Locked> type represents a wallet without a signer. Instead, Wallet<Locked> only knows its public address. A Wallet<Locked> cannot be used to sign transactions, however it may still perform a whole suite of useful operations including listing transactions, assets, querying balances, and so on.

Transitioning States

A Wallet<Unlocked<S>> instance can be locked using the lock method:

let wallet_locked = wallet_unlocked.lock();

Design Guidelines

When designing APIs that accept a wallet as an input, we should think carefully about the kind of access that we require. API developers should aim to minimise their usage of Wallet<Unlocked<S>> in order to ensure signers are stored in memory no longer than necessary to reduce the surface area for attacks and vulnerabilities in downstream libraries and applications.