A few times on the Forum in the last couple of years, I’ve proposed the Frankenwallet — a DIY process to build an air gapped, encrypted Linux environment on a removable drive, with the Cardano CLI and other tools for key management — as an alternative to keeping a second machine just for running SPO tools, transaction signing, cold key storage, etc.
The material has evolved since then; mainly: being reworked into the officially endorsed Air Gap Environment tutorial on the Cardano Developer Portal and breaking the “air gap” for end-user configurations like sandboxing of light wallets and running some CLI tools which require restricted network access.
The Frankenwallet has been a vital part of my own SPO workflow because it maintains access to all my main computer’s files while I’m working with Cardano CLIs in the sandbox. It would be a nightmare for me to use the conventionally suggested, separate “air gap machine” and I have always hoped my own workflow benefits could be more widely shared with the SPO community.
So I am calling out to SPOs to consider voting for the Frankenwallet in Catalyst Fund 11, which in the middle stage of the project will focus on consolidating features for stake pool operators, as well as Cardano developers who need security isolation for building transactions and resources.
This article reviews, in about 13 minutes, all that’s been done in the last 3 years and the features on offer through our Fund 11 proposal:
Particularly the proposal calls for a period in which SPOs can give feedback about installing & using the Stake Pool Operator Scripts in a Frankenwallet, according to peer-reviewed instructions… reporting and improving those instructions based on the usual GitHub paradigm for software development (issues, discussions, and pull requests)… with a goal of having a workflow tested by a healthy population of SPOs by the end of the year. cc @Nicolas @Terminada