Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone!
As a fanatic of programing, I was thinking on creating a crypto wallet with open-source, pro-privacy and a lot of security options.
I wanted to ask here if there is already a wallet with these qualities, and also that you give me ideas of whatever it takes to develop it.

I want to have more wallets that support Bitcoin Silent Payments, so far Cake wallet is the best option for this new feature, and it has other cool stuff.
There are also wallets that have integrated coinjoin like Wasabi, and best option for security is combination with open source hardware wallets.
Starting a brand new wallet in 2025 is not something I would do in 2025, but you can do your own thing.

Try checking out Wallet Scrutiny (https://walletscrutiny.com). You will get a list of wallets that meets the at least the open source and reproducibility standards, and you can check them out.

Yes, we really need more pro-privacy wallets around, and a number of wallets capable of doing that has dropped over time. Just be ready to face the pressure from other entities, especially law enforcement. Perhaps it's good to start off anonymously.

Why are you not ready to starting a new wallet on your own this 2025, are you thinking much about the funds for the price quotations of softwares and other tools to be acquired not available yet? What exactly the reasons why you are not ready for building a new wallet this year,? These are questions I have to ask you though, please, don't view me as someone who loves to intrude into someone's privacy, nah, but I'll love if your answers are generally based point.

Judging from OP's post history, it seems like he already plans on contributing to existing projects like JoinMarket. OP, I think you should focus on looking for projects like that and try to contribute first instead of building a wallet from scratch if your goal is to become a developer. Who knows, maybe one of those projects is what you're trying to build, so you don't have to start from the beginning. That being said, if your experience is vast, you can easily make one yourself. Good luck on your endeavor. CMIIW.

Start by contributing to privacy-focused wallets like JoinMarket or Wasabi before building your own from scratch.

An open-souorce, pro-privacy wallet is what the community loves here, so you know that answer to your question is yes. I'd love to see someone creating a wallet like Electrum but with better UI/UX design. Recently, we saw a good alternative, a wallet called Sparrow Wallet but the problem is that it's not for mobile devices and it's not really the best in terms of UI/UX design. If you can create a wallet for Desktop and Mobile and fix the current problems of user experience, that will be amazing.
I don't know what to say about privacy features because it's getting riskier to implement. Sparrow had one good privacy feature but removed it after some accidents.

My humble opinion is that OP should start by contributing to open-source software that already exists to gain familiarity. The cool thing with open-source contributions is that there are no limits. You can contribute in many projects and stop whenever you don't have the necessary time. Nobody will force you, so you can have your own pace.

After that, you will have gained some experience both coding-wise but also in regards with the community and you will have realized what the community lacks.

Good luck!

If OP is truly passionate about doing such tasks and finding new ways to improve - then he surely will excel.

People's dreams never end ;)

In the meantime best recommendable secured Wallets are the hardware wallets such as the "Ledger Nano X, BitBox02, Trezor Model T" and the rest few of them which are certainly open source rated as security Pro.
You said you are program and we here are just consumers (users) which my ideal, not everyone here do have the technological knowledge of the programs.
You also know better what you are up to develop, so, go ahead with your project while we would only rate your work and as well tell missing features that is expected to be and advance to existed ones.

That's a good start and if he ever find something that doesn't satisfy him, at least he knows where to start and probably not from scratch. An open source code would be something to start with, he could just modify something for his needs and the people who sees it will be a follower of his new wallet.

Thinking of the future though, the regulators might find this not ideal and they regulate the wallets too. AFAIK MiCA was planning to.

You can check Electrum, Sparrow and Bluewallet. These are the bitcoin wallets that I use most. A good bitcoin wallet may be open source, able to have good fee estimation algorithm, synchronize with the servers fast, having RBF and CPFP features, have coin control, support segwit, able to connect to hardware wallet, can have multisig and it 2FA feature is possible etc. Just go through a wallet like Electrum and check what it can do.

If you want to do something impactful you could go to Wasabi Wallet and finish the Silent Payment receiving part which is almost done or implement the UI por payments in coinjoin or implemente the coinpool idea from scratch. There are also less complex things to do like publishing indexers and coordinators behind onion services by default and even trivial tasks as allowing Wasabi to connect a chosen list of trusted bitcoin nodes instead of random ones discovered using the p2p gossip protocol.

Definitely . First study state of art of open privacy focused wallets and by contributing there you will see what is it lacking and that will give you idea what to bring.
BTW if you are really on it we have foundation in Crypto Community Center for open source projects. We already helped little bit on project that helped clear mempool in BTC.

There are a lot of open source bitcoin wallets and provide multiple safety options, but for me the best software wallets are Electrum and Bluewallet, where there are many safety options that suit all users.

If you want to create an open source wallet, you can take advantage of the open source Electrum code and make some adjustments you need, you have to focus on the safety aspects that users prefer, such as:
- Multiple signature
- Cold storage: transactions are signed from a PC that is not always connected to the Internet and broadcasts from a device
   that does not have Private keys
- supports hardware wallets: LEDGER, Trezor, Keepkey...etc
- You can also make it built with Coinjoin's feature

Hi OP, you will need to make sure you are implementing something that is unique in your wallet, otherwise you are going to run into this problem:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

Many wallets already have different privacy options such as PINs, multisig, biometrics and others. Why don't you try adding Silent Payments? I haven't seen any wallet do that yet. (Maybe there was one, but I forgot which one it was.)

This community can't say no to creation of a new open-source, privacy-focused wallet because they love it but to be honest, if you are a fanatic of programming you should have already known about current wallets but it doesn't matter much, anyway.

I think it will be amazing if you have a feature like P2P mixing. For example, first person sends 0.001 Bitcoin to a X address, second person also send 0.001 Bitcoin to Y address. Then it gets mixed and in the end, it is like, the first person sent 0.001 Bitcoin to Y address and the second person sent it to Y address (instead of 1st X, 2nd - Y). Is this possible? If yes, then will it cause a trouble or not? I think it will be a very good feature for everyone to improve their privacy.

In addition to the above options and obvious features you'd expect from a good wallet, I'd look to include the following cryptographic features:
- Encrypted backup support.
- Multiple address script support (legacy, p2sh-segwit, bech32 and bec32m) with privacy guard in the same wallet/keystore (Similar to what bitcoin core does).
- BIP-85 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5505458.0) support for creating mnemonics derived from the master seed.
- Seed-XOR (currently only coldcard supports this).
- Seed-OTP (https://github.com/brndnmtthws/seed-otp) - similar to seed-xor, generates encrypted decoy seeds and an OTP code that is the multifactor key to revert the encrypted seed to the original. Awesome!
- Full support for descriptors and mini-scripts.
- Privkey import/export functionality.
- Privkey reading and sweeping with BIP38 support.
- CoinJoin

However, I recommend starting by contributing to excellent projects that are already in production, such as electrum, bitcoin core, sparrow, wasabi, bluewallet... That way, you gain experience and ideas to create your own.

Consider including coin control, address reuse prevention, and integration with Tor or I2P by default for network calls.
CoinJoin implementation or PayJoin for Bitcoin could give users built-in transaction mixing – although that adds complexity.
Many privacy wallets are too complex; maybe a dual-mode interface (simple mode for newbies, advanced for power users) could strike a balance.

There's many wallets which are open source & pro privacy. If you're going to make wallets it won't be unique because other ppl have made them. I'm using electrum it's one of the best. Why didn't you find open source wallets ?

One wallet kind I haven't seen (but I may be wrong) would be something like Monero's Feather.

Feather does not provide data about addresses to servers. Instead, it downloads ranges of blocks and then, on the user's machine, searches the blocks for relevant transactions, and then deletes the block data again.

You could imagine it as a "pruned (almost) full node without blockchain storage".

This has the big advantage that you don't leak address and transaction information to the full nodes / servers, which may be operated by chain analysis companies who gather information about "wallets".

I hope you are still around, otherwise my merit was too rushed ;)

There are many wallets which are focused on pro-privacy and are open source. If you want to create a wallet that outperforms these, you need to ask yourself what they are lacking, what kind of problems they do not address and where you could improve on that.


Silent payments are an interesting concept. Most so for OP because the protocol is upgradeable and focuses on privacy. If I were OP, I would definitely want to start building on top of that.

I have not tried it out yet in cake wallet, but it seems like a promising thing.

If you're a programming fanatic you should've been busy reading & replying. You've asked for ideas to develop your privacy wallet but aren't reading them so I don't know if you're serious. What's your git ?