Telos Wallet 3.04 and Transcendence Dashboard Beta have been released to Github.

This is actually a bit of a old news already, but I didn’t want to write about this until I had tested Dashboard myself since I was actually expecting Dashboard to be much more than it currently is yet and was expecting to be writing a long article telling you all about it.

Now don’t get this wrong, Dashboard is still a great piece of work and I personally at least like it quite much in that it shows to be quite promising with the little there is already.

Wallet version 3.04 was released in hopes of fixing some unintended forking happening, and at least so far it seems it has worked.

Along with the Wallet 3.04, there is also now a Beta version of the long waited Transcendence Dashboard and I am finally starting to see what Pascal has been meaning all this time about not needing exchanges anymore, etc. that Dashboard could be one in all solution.

Yes, we are still far from that point, but the underlying technology is already there, and using just a little bit of imagination you can see how that all will happen, and indeed, I can see how there wouldn’t be a need for exchanges anymore, but all trades would happen as basically, OTC trades, even at the same time they would be like exchange trades as long as there’s a system to keep track of them and their prices.

Anyway, right now there is only quite a little on the Dashboard yet. There are lots of menu options that are shaded out as not there yet, but they will give you a hint about the future.

At this point Dashboard is basically only working as a Telos and Bitcoin Subsidium wallet.

What is interesting with this is that instead of Dashboard being a wallet in itself, it is actually more of an interface to work with the wallets. So in practice you will still have the usual Telos and XBTX wallets running, but they are basically invisible since you just don’t need to worry about them since basically Dashboard is supposed to take care of them.

This however is not true yet, as it is still only on Beta stage and missing some crucial pieces still, like if your wallet doesn’t get automatically connected to nodes, you actually need to go and do stuff on the wallet, since Dashboard doesn’t have these features implemented yet, although they are planned to come.

However, after you get your wallet running smoothly, you can see how handy Dashboard actually is. For instead of flipping back and forth with different wallet softwares, you can just choose from Dashboard which coin, Telos or XBTX, to look at, and Dashboard will show all the info regarding that coins wallet of yours.

What I also liked was that while the old QT-wallet was a bit limited in how to show transactions, that you could see them only one way basically, Dashboard, on the other hand, gives you a chance to display them in different ways, like you could choose to look only received or sent transactions, or only from the certain time period. Just choose the filters to use, see the result and even save it in sort of CSV form. Sort of CSV since it actually isn’t CSV, since CSV would be Comma Separated Values, but this is actually using Tab to separate values. However, when you open this file in Excel, for example, you can choose to have separation done using Tab instead of Commas, and it works.

Also, when you close or open the Dashboard, you can choose to run or stop running all the associated wallets with Dashboard.

So instead of starting XBTX wallet and Telos wallet separately, I simply open Dashboard and Dashboard opens them both automatically. Or when I close dashboard, it asks if I also want to close my Telos and XBTX wallets, choose yes, and they are both closed instead of me needing to close them separately.

This alone can be pretty handy feature if you for example have 10 different wallets that you just want to sync and see the situation once a month. Instead of opening them all separately and having possibly 10 different interfaces to deal with, just open Dashboard and get them all automatically synced and save the transactions using just one interface instead of 10.

Now there is however a downside to this too, for opening all these wallets and running them at the same time will also take lots of memory. It seems to me that running Telos and XBTX wallet at the same time takes about 5 Gb of memory, so that needs to be taken into consideration. If you have less than that of memory, there is an option to run only one of the wallets at a time however.

Couple of Instructions regarding DASHBOARD that you might run into:

The first problem you might encounter is your AntiVirus not letting you run some parts of the Dashboard or wallets. In this case, you need to check your Antivirus settings and there should be some place where you can choose to give permission for some files manually. You might need to give permission to all files regarding Dashboard as well as regarding wallets, including wallet.dat files. My own AntiVirus (F-Secure) actually even tends to delete wallet.dat files if I don’t tell it to ignore them first, and that is a pretty scary thing to happen.

Next thing is that running the Dashboard requires about 5 Gb of free memory (just based upon my own test and only at the time I tested, it might take more in the future) Having less than this amount of memory can result in strange behavior, errors, and crashes.

If you can’t have enough Memory, you can try opening only one of the wallets

When you start Dashboard for the first time, it will make a certain folder called “Transgui”-folder to a certain location.

This location is usually located at:
C:Users/Username/AppData/Roaming/transgui

Notice that “Username” refers to the user name you are having on your computer and to see AppData, you need to enable seeing hidden files.

In here you will find a file called “cfg_autostart.exe” open this to your notepad and you will see a line reading “XBTX=true” now change this line to “XBTX=false” save the file and start your dashboard as usual and it will now not try to start XBTX wallet and hence saves you a lot of memory.

Then the problem you might encounter is that your wallet doesn’t get any connections.

To fix this, You need to locate your Blockchain folder. When you first time started your Telos Wallet, or if you have never started it, then in case when you first time started the Dashboard, it is asking for a folder where to save the Telos Blockchain.

Locate this folder and inside this folder you will see a file called “transcendence.conf” open this file and in this you need to add addnode lines. as an example:
addnode=12.34.56.789

Thing is, you cant use just any numbers, but these numbers need to be actual node addresses.

To find them, you could first try if ones in the Telos Explorer work for you:

If ones on the Explorer don’t seem to work for you, then you can go to Transcendence/Telos community discord and search from there for the most recent list of Add nodes.

With these instructions and a fair warning that we are talking of a Beta version that might still contain some bad bugs in it, go and try Dashboard.