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.

"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)."