initial coin offerings,” the Internet is becoming awash in digital tokens, which can be used to buy digital services but are more commonly held as a speculative investment. This has led to demand for an easy way to transfer and store these tokens.
This is what led digital wallet maker Bread (formerly BreadWallet) to announce a major update on Wednesday to its iOS app, which will soon allow people to store all manner of tokens. This has the potential to increase the demand for some of the more exotic forms of digital money.
Bread, which raised $7 million from venture investors this spring, has been around since 2014 and marketed itself as a user-friendly way to store bitcoin, which is the original digital token.
According to Bread co-founder Aaron Lasher, the decision to relaunch the app and rebrand the company serves to acknowledge that the cryptocurrency world is infinitely bigger and more complex than it was a few years ago.
“Bread was made in 2014 as a simple secure solution at a time when wallets were so complex only geeks could use them. But now anything can be tokenized and crypto-currency is part of the world of portfolio management,” Lasher tells Fortune.
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What is means in practice is that the revamped bread wallet will soon support any token built on the standard known as ERC-20, which is itself based on Ethereum, a popular form of cryptocurrency and a versatile alternative to bitcoin.
Lasher says the Ethereum features will be available in the near future, but that the current updates to the app already reflect a major overhaul to its design, including a simpler interface. Here is a picture:
The new app also includes a new feature that makes it easier for users to attach memos to their bitcoin transactions, and to choose whether they want to optimize those transactions for speed or for cost.
Bread, like rival wallet service Blockchain, is different from popular services like Coinbase in that it permits users to maintain control over the private keys that open and close the wallets. In Bread’s case, the app generates a series of 12 random words that serve to replicate the private key.
According to Lasher, Bread is the most popular wallet on iOS but is still making up ground on the Android front. He adds that, down the road, Bread intends to become an online exchange where people can buy and sell digital tokens as well as storing them.
This is part of Fortune’s new initiative, The Ledger, a trusted news source at the intersection of tech and finance. For more on The Ledger, click here.
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