Opera Touch On iOS Gains Crypto Wallet And Web 3 Support

For some people, the browser wars have mostly been reduced to a fight between Chrome and everyone else. That "everyone else" fortunately has a lot of room for all sorts of browsers with priorities beyond becoming the world's #1. Opera might still dream of eventually dominating the browser market but it is doing so via a rather unconventional route. Instead of trying to appeal to the masses, it is pushing its resources towards supporting the Web users of the future. That mostly means supporting blockchains and distributed systems, features that have finally landed on its iOS app.

Many tech pundits believe that the future will be decentralized and Opera is right there along with them. In fact, it seems to have embraced Web 3 wholeheartedly. For those who remember the whole Web 2.0 buzz, Web 3 is an umbrella term that encompasses blockchain-based distributed systems. In other words, cryptocurrencies and dApps.

For the former, Opera is the first to include a built-in Crypto wallet to support all kinds of crypto transactions. It also supports Ethereum's decentralized apps or dApp natively. While Opera has made these features available on the desktop and on Android, it's making it available on iOS for the first time with the latest version of Opera Touch.

Opera knows too well how esoteric the whole Web 3 idea can be and it is taking steps to simplify it for some users. The Marble.Cards dApps, for example, turns the Web into a curious card collecting game where each web page can become a unique card. These cards can then be traded or shared with others, just like cryptocurrencies.

Opera Touch does have a ton of other features beyond Web 3 but this latest release focuses on those unique unconventional features. That said, it remains to be seen if support for cyrptocurrencies and especially dApps will eventually run afoul of Apple's strict App Store policies, one of which disallows apps that install other apps.