Proton, known for its privacy-focused services including the popular Proton Mail with over 100 million users, has launched Proton Wallet, a new self-custodial bitcoin wallet. “If you are one of the millions of people who have a Proton Mail email address, you can now automatically receive bitcoins with your email address,” said Proton’s CEO, adding that the wallet has “a number of features that we believe make it the easiest way to introduce bitcoin safely to newcomers.”
Proton Launches Self-Custodial Bitcoin Wallet: 100 Million Proton Mail Users Can Now Receive BTC via Email
This article was published more than a year ago. Some information may no longer be current.
WRITTEN BY
SHARE
Proton Introduces Secure Self-Custodial Bitcoin Wallet
Proton, the company behind Proton Mail, has launched Proton Wallet, a self-custodial bitcoin wallet with robust security and user-friendly features. Announced by founder and CEO Andy Yen on Wednesday via Proton’s blog, the wallet aims to uphold Proton Mail’s reputation for privacy and security, which serves over 100 million users in more than 150 countries.
“Our long-term vision is for Proton Wallet to be a digital wallet that gives you full control of your digital assets. While the type of assets that you can hold in Proton Wallet may evolve over time as we add more capabilities in response to community demand, Proton Wallet is starting as a self-custodial bitcoin wallet,” Yen explained, emphasizing:
Proton Wallet is not just another self-custody bitcoin wallet — it has a number of features that we believe make it the easiest way to introduce bitcoin safely to newcomers.
Key features of Proton Wallet include end-to-end encryption and exclusive control over users’ bitcoin. “Proton Wallet is a non-custodial wallet, and we utilize end-to-end encryption to ensure that we never have access to your bitcoin, even when you are executing transactions via Proton Wallet,” Yen detailed. “Unlike bitcoin exchanges, Proton never pools your bitcoin with the coins of other users in a centralized place where they could be accessible to a hacker.”
Unlike traditional exchanges, Proton Wallet ensures users retain full ownership through a recovery seed phrase that is independent of Proton. The CEO described: “Each wallet has a recovery seed phrase that’s only known to you (Proton never sees it). Even if Proton were to entirely disappear someday, you would still have access to the bitcoin in your Proton wallet with your recovery phrase.”
Proton Wallet streamlines bitcoin transactions by allowing users to send bitcoin using only an email address, utilizing Proton’s encryption infrastructure. “By leveraging Proton’s existing encryption key management infrastructure that powers the end-to-end encrypted services that we use to support over 100 million accounts today, sending and receiving bitcoin is now as easy as sending and receiving email,” Yen noted, elaborating:
As long as both the sender and recipient have a Proton Wallet, you only need the recipient’s email address to send them Bitcoin. That also means that if you are one of the millions of people who have a Proton Mail email address, you can now automatically receive Bitcoins with your email address.
Managed by Proton Financial AG, a Swiss subsidiary of Proton AG and primarily owned by the nonprofit Proton Foundation, the wallet reflects Proton’s commitment to financial freedom. “One of the goals of Proton Wallet is to bring bitcoin out of the domain of the tech-savvy and into the hands of anybody who wants to access the financial freedom it enables. This was done through conscious user experience and design choices that are apparent once you use the wallet for the first time,” Yen noted. While adding fiat currency capabilities is a potential future development, it would require a Swiss banking license, which is not currently feasible.
What do you think about Proton Wallet’s features and security measures? Let us know in the comments section below.
