Building Vela in public
Why we're documenting every step of building a self-custodial wallet that has no seed phrase — and what to expect from this blog.
This is the first post on the Vela blog, so it’s worth saying plainly what this space is for.
Vela is a self-custodial wallet for ETH and ERC-20 tokens. You sign with a passkey — your face or your fingerprint — and there is no seed phrase to write down, lose, or have phished out of you. That single decision shaped almost every other part of the product, and the stories behind those decisions are what this blog is about.
What we’ll write about here
Three kinds of posts, roughly:
- Build notes — the engineering decisions, the dead ends, the trade-offs. Why passkeys instead of seed phrases. Why every wallet is a Safe smart account. How recovery works without a custodian.
- Release notes — what shipped, what changed, what’s next. Short and honest.
- The longer story — the why behind the project. Who it’s for, and what we think a wallet should feel like in 2026.
Why build in public
Two reasons, and they’re both selfish.
The first is trust. A wallet asks you to believe that the people who wrote it are careful, honest, and not going anywhere. You can’t earn that with a landing page. You earn it by showing your work — the reasoning, the mistakes, the fixes — over a long time. Vela is open source for the same reason.
The second is that writing things down makes them better. Every time we’ve had to explain a decision clearly enough to publish it, we’ve found the weak spots ourselves first.
So: welcome. If you want the short version of what Vela is, the docs are the place to start. If you want the long version, it’ll show up here, one post at a time.