ProtonThe Swiss tech company that creates privacy-preserving online tools like ProtonMail and ProtonVPN, is launching Proton Walleta self-custodial bitcoin wallet.
This new product will integrate with ProtonMail and allow users to send bitcoins as easily as sending an email.
“bitcoin’s value to society has been hampered by the difficulty of transacting and security concerns, and we designed Proton Wallet to specifically address both of these issues,” said Andy Yen, Founder and CEO of Proton in a press release shared with bitcoin Magazine. “Proton Wallet’s ability to support bitcoin via email now makes bitcoin transactions as easy to use as PayPal, while preserving the decentralized and non-custodial nature of bitcoin.”
Proton Wallet is the latest addition to their suite of end-to-end encrypted tools that help Proton users stay private when using the internet.
Before we delve into the details of this new product, it’s important to understand Proton’s motivation behind creating it.
For Proton, Proton Wallet is personal
If it weren't for bitcoin, Proton might not exist.
“This summer is actually Proton’s 10th anniversary,” Yen told bitcoin Magazine in an interview.
“In July 2014, we launched our original crowdfunding campaign and halfway through the campaign, PayPal froze our funds. So Proton had a near-death experience at the beginning,” he added.
“We added a bitcoin donation link when the crowdfunding campaign was cancelled and that’s when we started receiving our first bitcoins. It was at that time, 10 years ago, that we first realised the true power of bitcoin and what it can enable.”
Yen also mentioned how grateful the Proton team was to have bitcoin when Credit Suisse, the bank it used to manage its fiat trading funds, collapsed in March 2023.
“Credit Suisse went through a limbo moment where we weren’t sure if they were going to be bailed out or not,” Yen recalled. “The fact that we had a large portion of our reserves in bitcoin was actually a prudent thing to do because it kind of ensured the long-term sustainability of the business.”
Dingchao Lu, director of Proton Wallet and the company’s first employee, is also grateful for the role bitcoin has played in Proton’s story and wants it to play a similar role for Proton users around the world.
“We want to reduce the world’s dependence on centralized financial institutions,” Lu said in the press release shared with bitcoin Magazine. “By giving users control over their own encryption keys and their own digital assets, we offer financial freedom, increased privacy, and security to millions of people around the world.”
Lu also shared that Proton has felt the financial benefits of holding the bitcoin it has accepted for payments over the years.
“We have been accepting payments in bitcoin since we launched the beta version in 2016,” he told bitcoin Magazine in an interview.
“That has worked well for us. The price of bitcoin has gone up about 100 times since those early days, and we have held on to our bitcoin,” he added.
The details
Proton will leverage its existing infrastructure to make the Proton Wallet easier to use.
To use Proton Wallet to make a bitcoin transaction via email addresses, both the sender and the receiver must have the wallet. The sender only needs to have the recipient's email address, whether that address is a ProtonMail address or not, to send the bitcoins. (Users can also send bitcoins from their Proton Wallet to any standard bitcoin address.)
When sending bitcoins via email addresses, Proton will rotate bitcoin addresses each time a user sends or receives bitcoins behind the scenes, helping to prevent addresses from being linked to a user's identity.
As mentioned, Proton Wallet is non-custodial, meaning that only users have access to the funds in the wallet. Proton will offer “robust recovery methods” for such keys, which will include a recovery seed phrase for the wallet as well as a recovery phrase for the Proton account. Bitcoins held in Proton Wallet can be recovered even if Proton goes offline.
Proton provides more details on its recovery and safety model in This blog post.
All transactions using Proton Wallet will be done on the base chain as Proton has not yet implemented Lightning for one main reason.
“It’s very difficult to capture lightning without custody,” Yen said.
“If you want to do non-custodial Lightning and you want people to open their own channels, that's a user experience that's not really figured out right now,” he added.
“But Lightning support is something we can add in the future as we find ways to address the user experience issue.”
Proton will also make it easier to buy bitcoins, offering integrations in over 150 different countries.
Additionally, Proton Wallet will also provide support for two-factor authentication, including hardware security keys, and offer users access to Proton Sentinel, which employs machine learning and artificial intelligence to help stop malicious login attempts. Proton Sentinel helps protect users’ accounts in the event that the account has been compromised or if an attacker has gained access to a user’s login information.
How to get started with Proton Wallet
Currently, Proton Wallet is only available to Proton Visionary users. Proton plan Normally only open to legacy users, it has been reopened for a limited time and to “select members of the bitcoin community” as part of an early access program.
These participants can invite their friends to join, while the product will be available to all Proton users in the future.
In the press release shared with bitcoin Magazine, Proton also shared that it will be issuing a waiting list for those who want to start using the Proton Wallet.
