After publicly testing for around six months, Proton, known for its encrypted email and other online privacy-protecting products, has released its bitcoin (BTC) wallet to the general market. It aims to secure additional revenue with paid versions of the product.
Proton, which claims to have 100 million users of its Proton Mail product alone, said that more than 100,000 members of its community have already used the early access version of Proton Wallet.
The company claims that this is a self-custodial wallet and that Proton doesn't have access to the private keys of these wallets or the codes needed to access BTC in a specific address. After the initial announcement last year, some bitcoiners doubted that this was the case. However, the company rebutted the claims and has now stressed again that it can't access the funds.
The open-source wallet is now BTC-only. However, other crypto assets, as well as fiat money support, might be added in the future. The wallet also has integrations that allow its users to buy BTC.
Besides its privacy features, Proton Wallet also supports sending BTC via email, but only if the recipient is using Proton Wallet as well. According to the company, this makes sending BTC simpler, as a user doesn't need to deal with lengthy BTC addresses. In either case, BTC users often use QR codes to send bitcoin, while email-like BTC addresses are getting increasingly popular on the Lightning Network (LN), a bitcoin scaling solution.
Proton Wallet doesn't currently support LN, but the company confirmed that it's "under consideration."
To use the now open-to-all wallet, users need to sign up, which is not necessary for all BTC wallets. Also, the company offers three subscription plans, now ranging from a free version to $29.99 per month.
What is also different from other BTC wallets is that Proton limits the number of wallets a user can have, depending on their subscription plan. For example, the free version allows users to create up to three wallets, with a maximum of three accounts per wallet. An account within a wallet is a subsection that allows users to manage their funds according to their needs for each account, such as accounts for different revenue sources or different features.
Meanwhile, the most expensive version allows users to create up to 50 wallets, with up to 50 accounts per wallet. Paying customers also receive perks such as additional storage, email domains, VPN, password manager, encrypted storage, extra account protection, and the ability to add more users.
As reported by Cybernews.com last December, researchers found a vulnerability in the preview version of Proton Wallet. However, the vulnerability, which could weaken private key security, was present only for a day.
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