Getting Started With YecLite
Backing up your wallet, receiving YEC, and sending YEC to a shielded address
Introduction
In this article, we will show you how to get started with using YecLite, a lightweight Ycash wallet for MacOS, Linux, and Windows. We will walk you through downloading YecLite, backing up your wallet, receiving YEC into a transparent address, and then sending a portion of that YEC to a shielded address.
Note that screenshots used in this article are from the MacOS version of YecLite and may differ slightly from what you see if you are using either the Linux version or the Windows version.
[Note: The screenshots below are from an earlier version of YecLite, and will be updated soon.]
Step 1: Download the latest version of the authentic YecLite
The latest version of the authentic YecLite is available from this website:
https://github.com/yecdev/yeclite/releases
Any software named YecLite on any other site is fake and very likely malicious. Please, do not download YecLite from any other site.
MacOS
Download the DMG file and double click the file to open it. You will see the YecLite application and a link to the Applications Folder. Drag-and-drop YecLite to the Applications folder to install it.
Windows
Download the ZIP file and extract the contents. You will see the yeclite.exe application. Move the application to the location of your choosing.
Linux
Download the TAR.GZ file and extract the contents. You will see the yeclite application. Move the application to the location of your choosing.
Step 2: Back up our wallet
This is the most important step in this article, because if we fail to perform it, we are at risk of losing our precious YEC.
After launching the application, we see this screen:
Because we are creating a new wallet, we leave the “Create a new Wallet” option selected and click on the “Next” button. This screen then appear:
Our unique “seed phrase” (which we have redacted) is the 24 words in the text box, in the specific order displayed. We will treat this seed phrase with the upmost caution. Importantly:
- Our seed phrase is the only way to restore our YEC in the event of any type of failure (like our computer hard drive crashing).
- Anyone that knows our phrase has the ability to steal all of our YEC in our YecLite wallet.
Best practices for backing up seed phrases is beyond the scope of this article. Because we only plan on storing a small amount of YEC in this particular wallet, we will simply transcribe the 24 words (in exactly the same order as they are displayed on the screen) onto a piece of paper, triple-check our transcription, and then keep the piece of paper in a safe place. For large amounts of YEC, we would take additional precautions.
Once our seed phrase is backed up onto our piece of paper, we click the “Done” button. After a brief syncing process, we see our Ycash addresses for the first time:
Step 3: Receive YEC to our transparent address
We see that our wallet is already populated with two addresses. Because all Ycash shielded addresses start with a “y” and all Ycash transparent addresses start with an “s”, we note that we have one shielded address and one transparent address.
We have 2 YEC on an exchange that we want to withdraw to YecLite. Because our exchange only supports withdrawing to transparent addresses, we want to provide our transparent address to the exchange.
We see that there is a “Receive” tab near the top of the window, but for the purposes of this article, instead of visiting the “Receive” tab we will simply right-click on our transparent address and select “Copy address”:
We then visit the exchange’s website to initiate a withdrawal of 2 YEC, pasting into the withdrawal form our transparent address.
A few minutes later, we check the Transactions tab and see that our 2 YEC withdrawal from the exchange has arrived!
Switching to the Balances tab, we see our 2 YEC balance in our transparent address as expected:
But unexpectedly, we see a second transparent address! What’s going on here? It turns out that the YecLite will sometimes automatically generate new addresses in the ordinary course of managing the set of addresses associated with our seed phrase, so we need not be alarmed.
We see that our “Total” balance across addresses is 2 YEC. We also notice that the “Verified” amount is also 2 YEC. In YecLite, an address balance is “verified” if it has a sufficient number of confirmations on the blockchain. For shielded funds, 2 confirmations are required for verification. For transparent funds, only 1 confirmation is required for verification. Importantly, YecLite requires that funds must be verified before they can be spent, so the maximum amount of YEC that can be sent at any given time is the verified amount.
Step 4: Sending YEC to a shielded address
We now have 2 precious YEC in YecLite! We decide to generously donate 1 YEC to the Ycash Foundation’s shielded donation address:
ys1z37kemxfj3qmzr7w9yt29jku7wu3hectwm8smfsycm0ksp7ejnpqcagqql2m8fct5kky6knqa6z
We visit the Send tab and enter the transaction information:
We then click “Send”, which brings up a confirmation window:
We then confirm the transaction by clicking “OK”. After YecLite broadcasts the transaction, we are automatically taken to the Balances tab:
Note the warning in red: “Some transactions are not yet confirmed. Balances may change.” Because the transaction we just sent is not yet confirmed on the blockchain, YecLite cannot accurately display the aggregate total, verified total, and individual address balances. So we aren’t alarmed by all of our individual addresses having an interim balance of zero. YecLite is performing automatic fund management, and the correct balances will appear once our transaction is confirmed.
A few minutes later, our transaction now has 2 confirmations:
Returning to the Balances tab, now that our transaction is confirmed on the blockchain, we see that YecLite correctly displays the aggregate total, verified total, and individual address balances:
We started out with 2 YEC and donated 1 YEC to the Ycash Foundation. That transaction had a .0001 YEC transaction fee, so our remaining balance is .9999 YEC.
Notice that our remaining .9999 YEC is now in a shielded address! When we initiated our transaction to the shielded Ycash Foundation donation address, YecLite took the opportunity to send the rest of our remaining transparent funds to one of our shielded addresses. This is an example of YecLite’s automatic fund management at work.
Summary
In this article, we walked through how to get started with YecLite. We downloaded YecLite, backed up our seed phrase, received YEC to a transparent address, and then sent YEC to a shielded address. Along the way, we learned about verified funds and the saw YecLite’s automatic fund management at work.
For important Ycash-related announcements, consider following the Ycash Foundation on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/YcashFoundation
For questions, consider joining the Ycash Foundation Telegram Group or the Ycash Foundation Discord.
Thank you for your interest in YecLite and Ycash!
