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Introducing Proton Wallet – a safer way to hold Bitcoin | Proton
9–11 minutes
Published on July 24, 2024
What is Proton Wallet?
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. Bitcoin is the most widely adopted digital currency used by millions of people around the world, particularly in countries where inflation is high and citizens are still largely locked out of the traditional banking system. While we may seek to add fiat currency capabilities in the future, this requires a Swiss banking license and is, therefore, not possible today. However, 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.
Why build Proton Wallet?
Early in our journey, we experienced first-hand what it’s like being cut off from the financial system and at the mercy of large banks and institutions — an ordeal that affects millions of people across the globe. In the summer of 2014, as the original Proton Mail crowdfunding campaign was in progress, Proton had a near-death experience when PayPal froze our funds(new window), questioned whether encryption was legal, and whether Proton had government approval to encrypt emails.
Fortunately, in that instance PayPal returned the blocked funds, and Proton was able to start the journey that we’ve been on for the past decade. However, that dangerous moment has always stayed in our minds, and we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.
Having experienced firsthand the unreliability of the traditional financial sector, building Proton Wallet is an important strategic move to make Proton more resilient and independent in the future. By enabling us and the entire Proton community to more easily adopt means of payment that deliver on the promise of financial freedom for all, we better insulate Proton from the risks posed by traditional finance.
How does Proton Wallet early access work?
Earlier this month, when we launched Docs in Proton Drive, unprecedented demand meant that at the end of the first day, Docs suffered half an hour of partial downtime when we were temporarily unable to bring capacity online faster than new users. To prevent a similar situation, we are employing an early access system for Proton Wallet.
Proton Visionary and Lifetime users have immediate access.
Proton Visionary and Lifetime users have limited invites to share with anybody they want.
During the early access period, we will make it possible to get Proton Visionary accounts again (ordinarily, these accounts are not available).
If you have invites, please don’t sell them. While not prohibited, it is against Proton’s nonprofit ethos.
Invited users will also receive a smaller number of invites, as the ability to invite some friends makes Proton Wallet more useful.
A waiting list will be available if you can’t get access to Proton Wallet using the above means, and we will invite people off the waiting list as capacity allows.
You can find out more about Proton Wallet at the Wallet homepage. From there, you can create a Proton Account to access Proton Wallet or log in to Proton Wallet if you already have a Proton Account. You can also either get Proton Visionary or join the waiting list after you log in.
Proton Wallet is operated by Proton Financial AG, an independent Swiss subsidiary of Proton AG, whose primary shareholder is the nonprofit Proton Foundation.
What makes Proton Wallet unique?
As with everything we do, Proton Wallet reflects Proton’s unique emphasis on security and privacy.
Mathematically guaranteed ownership
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. 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. As a Proton Wallet user, your encryption keys, and consequently your Bitcoin, belong exclusively to you. And you’re not dependent on Proton in any way to keep access to your Bitcoin. 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.
Bitcoin via Email
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.
One of the challenges with managing digital assets like Bitcoin has been the complexity of sending and receiving them, particularly if you want to do it in a private way. This typically requires manually verifying the recipient’s Bitcoin address (a complicated 26-to-62-character alphanumeric identifier that is hard to remember) over a communication channel that may be compromised. For privacy reasons, reusing this alphanumeric identifier multiple times is not advisable, meaning a new address is needed for each transaction.
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. 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.
Even if the recipient does not have a Proton Mail email, as long as they have a Proton Account (which can also be created with third-party email addresses, like Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, etc.) and are using Proton Wallet, you can send and receive Bitcoin with them via their email address(new window).
Buy Bitcoin securely in 150+ countries
If you are new to Bitcoin, Proton Wallet also has integrations that make it easy to buy Bitcoin in 150+ countries, and we have also put together a comprehensive Bitcoin guide for newcomers(new window).
Open source and publicly auditable
Like all our services, Proton Wallet is open source so all of our security claims can be checked by the public to enhance security. We have also published the Proton Wallet security model(new window) so you can understand how Proton Wallet protects both privacy and security. Summarized information can be found on the Proton Wallet security page(new window).
Enhanced security with Proton Sentinel
Proton Wallet features built-in support for two-factor authentication(new window). It’s also possible to set an optional wallet passphrase that’s separate from your Proton login information as an additional layer of protection. While offline hardware wallets can theoretically be more secure, the associated expense and increased complexity limits their use cases, so Proton Wallet aims to be the most secure, always-accessible Bitcoin wallet.
While this provides good security for most members of the Proton community, we have long protected activists, journalists, and international organizations at the highest risk of sophisticated cyberattacks. This led us to develop Proton Sentinel(new window), a special high-security program for notable users who are at higher risk of cyberattack.
Proton Sentinel uses advanced machine learning and AI that’s analyzed millions of logins to detect and block malicious login attempts with high accuracy. This enables Proton to protect your account, even in situations where you have already been compromised and an attacker has gained access to your login credentials.
Moreover, because AI and machine learning cannot replace human intelligence, suspicious login attempts are also escalated to a team of human security analysts that operate 24/7 in order to deliver a detection accuracy that is higher than possible with AI on its own.
Financial freedom for all
Proton is not a crypto company. We do not speculate in crypto, we are not a crypto exchange, and we do not participate in crypto lending. Nevertheless, we believe in the principle of giving you control of your financial freedom.
In the last 50 years, society has transitioned from cash payments to digital payments that big banks and Big Tech can monitor, which has eroded our privacy. These trends have handed immense power to central institutions and intermediaries whose interests are not aligned with the individuals they serve.
With Proton Wallet, anyone can have a free, secure, and easy-to-use Bitcoin wallet that gives you complete control over your digital assets.
https://proton.me/blog/proton-wallet-launch
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