2. Using the Abelian Desktop Wallet and Creating a New ABEL Wallet Account
Press LOGIN after entering the Master Password. The following is the dashboard of the Abelian Desktop Wallet.
If you are a new user, the first thing you want to do is to create an ABEL wallet.
Go to the upper right corner and press Select Account. At the pull-down menu, press Create Account.
Before an ABEL wallet is created, name your wallet by entering some name that you like. For example, we call our wallet “PQabel”, which represents our passion to post-quantum and ABEL. After giving a name to your wallet, press the button CREATE.
After waiting for a while (about 10 seconds for a conventional laptop nowadays), the message “Account created.” will be shown at the lower left corner. This shows that the ABEL wallet is successfully created. Press DONE to go back to the dashboard.
After going back to the dashboard, the upper right corner shows the name of the ABEL wallet account. Under the Services, in the middle of the dashboard, there are two items Abec and Abewallet.
Abec is a process which runs an Abelian full node. Such an Abelian full node connects to the Abelian Mainnet by communicating with other Abelian full nodes on the Mainnet and synchronizing all the blocks. Abec must be running to bring the Abelian Desktop Wallet online. If Abec is Inactive, your Abelian Desktop Wallet is considered offline.
Abewallet is a process which manages and carries out operations for each ABEL wallet account. The Abewallet service scans through all the blocks collected by the Abec service from the Abelian Mainnet and retrieves all transactions related to the ABEL wallet account. It calculates the balance, receives, and sends ABELs, generates wallet instances, and etc. The Abelian Desktop Wallet can let users manage multiple ABEL wallet accounts.
Each ABEL wallet has one corresponding Abewallet. In other words, the Abelian Desktop Wallet can have multiple Abewallet processes running with respect to multiple ABEL wallets. Abec service, however, has only one process per machine.
To begin synchronizing the Abelian Desktop Wallet, we start the Abec service item by pressing the Start service button of Abec.
Once Abec service is started, the status of Abec will be changed from
While Abec service is synchronizing with the Abelian Mainnet, we can press the View service log icon to read the details of the synchronization. For example, we can find out the block number which is currently synchronizing to and many other interesting information there.
For the first time of running the Abec service, it will take several hours for synchronizing all the blocks from the Abelian Mainnet. As of this writing, the Abelian Mainnet already has more than 165,000 blocks. Depending on your network bandwidth, it may take around 10 hours to catch up all the blocks. Once all the blocks are synchronized, when we run the Abec service again in the future when restarting the Abelian Desktop Wallet, the Abec service only needs to catch up new blocks. Hence, it’ll be much faster to complete the synchronization.
In case you are running the Abelian Desktop Wallet on a laptop or when you are on the road, you may want to save the bandwidth from synchronizing the blocks or you may want to save the battery power by pausing the synchronization. To do so, we simply press the Abec service play button again to toggle the Abec service from
As the Abec service downloads all the blocks from the Abelian Mainnet onto your machine, we need to make sure that the machine has enough free disk space for storing the blocks. As of this writing, a 100GB free disk space is needed.
Once the Abec (Abelian full node) is in the
While the Abewallet service is reading the blocks synchronized by the Abec service from the Abelian Mainnet, you can also read the log details by pressing the View service log button of the Abewallet service.
For the first time running the Abewallet service, it reads through all the blocks synchronized by the Abec service from the Abelian Mainnet. In the Abewallet service log, we can find out the block height that the Abewallet service is currently synchronizing to (e.g. [INF] TMGR: Current sync height 3526 in the example of the screenshot). As of this writing, there are more than 124,000 blocks on the Abelian Mainnet, and it will take a while (about 30 minutes) to complete the scanning of all the blocks. The scanning is completed when the Abewallet service log shows a line says “WLLT: Done catching up block hashes”.
