Bob Wallet vs Tilde: an honest comparison

If you own Handshake names today, you probably got them through Bob Wallet. It’s the desktop GUI most of the ecosystem was built on — open source, built by Kyokan, maintained in the bob-wallet GitHub organisation — and it ships an integrated hsd node, which means it validates the chain itself rather than trusting anyone’s API.

We are not going to pretend Bob is bad software so that ours looks better. Bob is good, and some of what it does we can’t do at all. The useful question isn’t “which wallet wins”, it’s “which machine is the name deadline going to find you on”.

The short version

Bob is a desktop wallet with a full node: maximum verification, hardware wallet support, and the widest feature set, on a computer you sit at.

Tilde is a native iPhone wallet with an SPV light client: less verification than a full node, no hardware wallet support, but it’s in your pocket when a reveal window closes on a Sunday.

Side by side

Use Bob when it’s the better tool

We mean this literally — these are cases where we’d tell you to open Bob:

• You want full-node verification. A full node checks every transaction and can prove nobody minted coins from nothing. SPV can’t. If that matters for the value you’re holding, that’s a real argument and it favours Bob. We wrote up exactly where our SPV stops so you can judge it yourself.
• You keep keys on a Ledger. Tilde has no hardware wallet support. If your threat model requires a signing device, Tilde is not it.
• You’re claiming an existing DNS name via DNSSEC, or claiming the airdrop. Bob does these; we don’t.
• You’re buying or listing on Shakedex. Not something Tilde does.
• You’re editing a lot of DNS records at once. Twenty TXT records is a keyboard-and-large-screen job, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

Use Tilde when the desk is the problem

• Reveal windows and renewals don’t wait for you. A reveal window is 1,440 blocks — roughly ten days — and missing it means your locked-up bid is gone permanently. Renewal is a two-year window that ends in a specific block. Any desktop wallet can only warn you when you’re at that desk with it open; a phone can warn you at 90, 30 and 7 days wherever you are.
• You don’t want to run a node to check your own names. Tilde connects straight to the Handshake P2P network over encrypted connections and verifies headers and name proofs itself. There’s no server of ours in the path, and nothing to install on a machine that has to stay up.
• You want to show someone. This is the honest reason Tilde exists. Pulling up a live name/ on a phone in front of a skeptical friend is a completely different argument than describing a desktop app. tildewallet/ was won from the app, and this page is served at that name.

The best answer is often both

These wallets aren’t fighting over the same slot on your device. A reasonable setup:

• Bob at the desk for full-node verification, hardware-wallet signing, and the heavier operations.
• Tilde in your pocket for deadlines, quick bids and reveals, renewals, and demos.

Two things make that pairing work better than it might sound:

Tilde can point at your own node. Its “My node” mode takes the address of an hsd node you control — including the one Bob is already running — instead of the public P2P network, and a node you configured is never silently swapped for anything else. You’ll need that node reachable from your phone (a LAN address or your own VPN) and its API credentials, so it’s a deliberate setup step, not a tick-box.

Bid blinds are derived hsd’s way, not randomly. Tilde computes bid nonces with the same derivation hsd uses, pinned by test vectors generated from hsd itself — which is why a lost bid record isn’t fatal in Tilde: the seed plus the exact bid amount re-derives the nonce. In principle that shared scheme means a blind is reconstructible outside the wallet that created it. We have not tested a cross-wallet reveal end to end, though, so treat that as theory, not a supported workflow, and don’t plan a live bid around it.

Questions people actually ask

Can I use the same seed phrase in both wallets?

Both use BIP39 mnemonics and Handshake’s standard BIP44 derivation (m/44'/5353'/…), so in principle the same seed produces the same addresses in both. We have not certified Bob-to-Tilde import as a supported workflow. If you try it, try it first with a wallet holding an amount you can afford to lose, and confirm the addresses match before moving anything real.

Is Tilde a Bob Wallet replacement?

Not in features, no. Bob does things Tilde doesn’t and validates the chain more thoroughly. Tilde replaces the specific experience of needing a laptop to check on, bid on, or renew a name.

Does Tilde run a full node on my phone?

No, and no phone wallet honestly can. It’s an SPV client: it verifies proof-of-work on headers and verifies name ownership with Urkel tree proofs against those headers, so no peer can lie to it about your names. It does not validate every transaction in every block. The full scope is here.

Are you affiliated with Bob Wallet or Kyokan?

No. Tilde is independent. Bob is a separate open-source project by other people, and the reason a lot of the names it manages exist at all.

Which should I use to bid on a name right now?

Whichever you have in front of you. Bidding from either is fine; what actually decides the outcome is whether you’re reachable when the reveal window closes.

Related: What SPV actually verifies · Handshake name auctions, explained from your phone · How to renew Handshake names