The latest release includes a lot of improvements to the UI, and also one of the main base features we were building towards: account impersonation.

There are also a few backend performance improvements that we stealth-released in 0.4.0 a few weeks ago.

Account impersonation

I’m a big fan of impersonator.xyz. But most of our development work is done locally, through Foundry tests and anvil nodes, where this external tool can’t be reached.

But in fact, the job done by this tool is surprisingly simple. It’s nothing more than a glorified anvil_impersonateAccount , but needing to go through the WalletConnect Protocol and an awkward experience of manually pasting URLs. Mainly because the wallets we use are not prepared for such behaviors, primarily needed by developers and security researchers.

In fact, it’s eye-opening to learn that a surprising number of people in the space are not even aware that impersonation is a possibility, and of what can be done with it: locally reproduce the UI state of someone else’s account.

This is an incredibly powerful feature for anyone working on a protocol frontend, where it’s crucial to have reproducibility of whatever bugs our users report.

The only caveat, as you may have guessed, is that this has minimal use for websites that require signing a message at connection time.

But for those that don’t, such as Uniswap, here’s what you can do:

New logo

This was quietly released during the crazy EthCC week but is only now being made official, and broadly available in all components (extension icon, taskbar icon, and overall branding).

Revamped UI

Our lead front-end has been focused on providing as much of a desktop-native experience as possible. That includes improving on the UI itself and going through the slow & painful process of doing OS-level improvements.

The new sidebar makes for a much more compact and comfortable design. And those of you running macOS may notice some additional tweaks that make Iron feel increasingly more like a native macOS / Linux app rather than a website.

Onboarding flow

If you now open the wallet for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a new onboarding flow, where you’ll have the opportunity to go through some basic settings that are crucial to know about, and were previously hidden away (unless you’ve been following all these posts)

This flow will still suffer more iterations in the future, and we hope this can help reduce the barrier to first getting started with the app.

What’s next?

The impersonation feature is an important milestone, as it means we’re 50% done with our goal of providing the main features we showcased at ETHGlobal Lisbon. The second part (transaction simulation) will expand even more the possibilities of what you can do.

We also plan to be in San Francisco with fellow ETH / Rust developers, so hit us up if you’re there! We’d be happy to hear any constructive feedback, and get our product in as many developer hands as possible.