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 well 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 internet browser. (Lukas declined to provide his last name out of privacy concerns.)
The wallet is non-custodial—users, not a third party, have control of the wallet’s keys—according to screenshots he posted on Twitter. It also contains pricing information for assets in a user’s wallet, a crypto-specific news feed, and connections to Coinbase and MoonPay. Security measures to access the wallet are conventional, including a user-generated password and security questions.
Newest in the gauntlet of questionable upcoming Microsoft Edge features, a crypto wallet 💸
— Albacore (@thebookisclosed) March 17, 2023
Not really sure how to feel about this kind of thing being baked into the default browser, what are your thoughts?
More screenshots of the UI in the next tweet ➡️ pic.twitter.com/GAUPiZGLIY
“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 collecting feedback from customers but have nothing further to share at this time.”
Microsoft’s exploration of a crypto wallet continues the tech behemoth’s sporadic forays into Web3. It has also flirted with creating virtual reality technology for workers in what it dubbed the “industrial metaverse.” In February, after creating an industrial metaverse team only four months earlier, it laid off the entire staff of approximately 100.
However, given Microsoft’s sprawling workforce of hundreds of thousands of employees, it’s no surprise that it's continued to develop crypto products, despite a public focus on ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that’s 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 he launched a special instance of the Edge to gain access to the browser’s unreleased features. After scrolling through the list, he noticed the crypto wallet, he told Fortune, and was able to experiment with it.
He said that recent release notes from Microsoft corroborate his find. 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 confident” that the feature will be released to a wider subset of the public. But his reactions to the wallet are mixed.
He said it’s “stupid simple” to set up the wallet and is worried, given crypto’s association with bad actors, a more easily accessible wallet could lure the crypto naive into potentially losing their tokens.
“I'm sure that there are people at Microsoft who are taking a bunch of risks into account. I would doubt a decision like this would be taken blindly,” he told Fortune. “But giving people a much easier way to set up new wallets sounds a teeny tiny bit problematic.”
