Bitcoin Forum

I have a question in my mind. Maybe my question is very unimportant and seems like a joke. But I'm curious and there's no harm in asking here

First, I would like to thank the electrum development team for creating an amazing wallet and I can use electrum for free. But this is where my curiosity arose, when all electrum services are free, then where does electrum's financial source come from??

It's a good question. As you know, Electrum is an open-source software wallet. Since it's open source, developers worldwide can help develop features and fix the bug. My best guess is either they run it with their own expenses or some servers run from donations from users and the community to cover development costs and server expenses.

I did not think about it before. After seeing your topic, I went to their website and found no donation address there. But, I found an option in Electrum to donate them. But unfortunately, it says, "No donation address for this server."

Electrum does not accept donation and the code is maintained by anyone who wants to contribute to it. They aren't paid for their efforts.

Each server does incur a running cost. You can donate to your server by going to Help>Donate to server if they have put a donation address for it. Else, they can also put it in their server banner which is in Console. To see console, go to View>Show Console and press the console tab.

As I thought. They are good people who have contributed a lot to bitcoin. I hope that one day I can contribute and support them by donating. For now maybe I can only say thank you for their hard work in developing electrum. They really are Big Man

Electrum guys own a registered company and run service called TrustedCoin[1] (registered in 2013 in San Francisco) which is used in the 2FA wallet types which you can create using Electrum software. This service is also available to be used by other software as the secondary signer in multi-signature setups.
Each time a 2FA wallet user creates a transaction they are paying a small additional fee to this service (or rather every 20 transactions IIRC).

Keep in mind that the Electrum servers (except one) have nothing to do with the Electrum team, they are run by other volunteers which you can donate to independently.

[1] https://trustedcoin.com/

You can search for developers and you will find that some of them work in companies like Blockstream, but a Google search will give you better data.
I'll try Thomas Voegtlin aka Founder Electrum

linkedin profile show Researcher INRIA In addition to Electrum  https://de.linkedin.com/in/thomas-voegtlin-0537435


I am not sure if this data is correct or if this is his personal account.

Some of these servers are managed by Chainalysis and some transaction tracking services and not part of the wallet team. Therefore, connecting it to your full node is a better option for anyone who wants to enhance their privacy.

Sure, but most of the servers are run by the community and there is no verifiable way of ensuring that they are not keeping any logs. However, this shouldn't discourage people from donating funds to the servers if they want to. Running a server is expensive and they aren't being compensated. Not everyone has the capability of running an Electrum server or a full node.

trusted coin is a separate company. it's not owned by electrum. electrum does receive some of the 2fa wallet fees though. but it's not enough to cover their expenses.

This is the first time that I heard about this, it is good that you mentioned it.

The fee are of two types, depending on how you want it:

0.000025 BTC/tx for 20 transactions which amounts to 0.0005 BTC in total
0.0000125 BTC/tx for 100 transactions which amounts to 0.00125 BTC total in total

It is on the FAQ of the link that you posted above: https://trustedcoin.com/#/faq#fees

Can we know more about how the fee is. I mean the percentage given to Electrum?

For donation, it would have been better if Electrum include a donation address to their website or on Electrum wallet. But Electrum developers do not want that.

You could ask thomas or ghost on the #electrum irc chat channel.

That's good question. I've read what other user said and perform quick check. But i wonder if there are any other company which fund/hire developer specifically to develop/maintain Electrum? We know there are many company help fund Bitcoin Core development[1].



For concerned/curious reader like, here are few reference i found
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1738501.msg17392386#msg17392386 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1738501.msg17392386#msg17392386)
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/7049#issuecomment-784166442 (https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/7049#issuecomment-784166442)

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[1] https://blog.bitmex.com/who-funds-bitcoin-development/ (https://blog.bitmex.com/who-funds-bitcoin-development/)

Thanks for the link you provided


I was very impressed by what he had to say. He was truly an extraordinary person with great dedication and ideas. I think he is a person who can enjoy his great contribution with electrum and he can have fun with it, most people would look to benefit from their contributions and ideas, but it doesn't seem to be the case for @ThomasV

Hopefully electrum can be a good portfolio for ThomasV, and he will get other benefits for his dedication to electrum