Proton, the Swiss technology company that creates privacy-preserving online tools like ProtonMail and ProtonVPN, is launching Proton Wallet, a self-custody Bitcoin wallet.
This new product will be integrated with ProtonMail and will enable users to send bitcoin as easily as sending an email.
“Bitcoin’s value to society has been hindered by the difficulty of transacting and security concerns, and we designed Proton Wallet to specifically address both,” 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 in its suite of end-to-end encrypted tools that help Proton users maintain privacy when using the internet.
Before diving into the details of this new product, it’s important to understand Proton’s motivation in creating it.
If it weren’t for Bitcoin, Proton might not exist.
“This summer is actually the 10 year anniversary of Proton,” Yen told Bitcoin Magazine in an interview.
“In July 2014, we had our original crowdfunding campaign, and halfway through the campaign, PayPal actually froze our funds. So, Proton actually had a near-death experience at the very beginning,” he added.
“We added a bitcoin donation link when the crowdfunding campaign got shut down, and that’s when we started receiving our first bitcoin. It was at that moment 10 years ago that we first realized the true power of Bitcoin and what it can enable.”
Yen also touched on how grateful the team Proton was that it held bitcoin when Credit Suisse, the bank it used to manage its fiat business funds, collapsed in March 2023.
“Credit Suisse had that moment of limbo where we were not sure if they were going to get bailed out or not,” recalled Yen. “The fact that we had a big portion of our reserves in bitcoin was actually something that was prudent to do because it more or less 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 that Bitcoin has played in the history of Proton, and he wants it to play a similar role for Proton users worldwide.
“We want to reduce the world’s dependence on centralized financial institutions,” said Lu in the press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. “By giving users control of their own encryption keys and their own digital assets, we’re offering financial freedom, improved privacy and safety to millions of people around the world.”
Lu also shared that Proton has felt the financial benefits of holding the bitcoin it’s accepted for payments over the years.
“We’ve been taking Bitcoin payments since we launched out of beta back in 2016,” he told Bitcoin Magazine in an interview.
“That has been working well for us. The Bitcoin price has gone up something like 100 times since those early days, and we’ve held onto our Bitcoin,” he added.
Proton will leverage its existing infrastructure to make Proton Wallet more user-friendly.
To use Proton Wallet to make a bitcoin transaction via email addresses, both the sender and receiver must have the wallet. The sender need only have the recipient’s email address, whether that address is a ProtonMail address or not, to send the bitcoin. (Users can also send bitcoin from their Proton Wallet to any standard Bitcoin address.)
When sending bitcoin via email addresses, Proton will rotate Bitcoin addresses each time a user sends or receives bitcoin behind the scenes, which helps to prevent the addresses from being linked to a user’s identity.
As mentioned, Proton Wallet is non-custodial, which means that only users have access to the funds in the wallet. Proton will offer “robust recovery methods” for said keys, which will include a recovery seed phrase for the wallet as well as an Proton account recovery phrase. Bitcoin managed in Proton Wallet can be retrieved even if Proton goes offline.
Proton offers further details on its recovery and security model in this blog post.
All transactions using Proton Wallet will occur on the base chain, as Proton has not implemented Lightning yet for one main reason.
“Lightning is very difficult to do in a non-custodial way,” said Yen.
“If you want to do non-custodial lightning and you want to have people open up channels of their own, that’s a user experience that at the present moment still isn’t really solved,” he added.
“But Lightning support is something that we can add in the future as we find ways to work around the user experience problem.”
Proton will also make it easier for people to buy bitcoin, as it will provide on-ramp integrations in over 150 different countries.
What is more, Proton Wallet will also provide support for two-factor authentication, including hardware security keys, and it will offer users access to Proton Sentinel, which employs machine learning and AI 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 obtained access to a user’s login information.
Proton Wallet is currently only available to Proton Visionary users, a Proton plan normally only for legacy users but that has been re-opened for a limited time, and “select Bitcoin community members” as part of an early access program.
These participants can invite 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 issue a wait list for those looking to get started with Proton Wallet.
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