Proton Wallet Review: A Solid New Bitcoin Self-Custody Option for Newbies

In July of last year, Swiss privacy tech company Proton (makers of Proton Mail) announced it would be launching its own bitcoin wallet — Proton Wallet.

Swiss privacy tech company Proton, known for its Proton Mail service, has now launched its own bitcoin wallet, called Proton Wallet.

A number of people, including myself, were given early access to the wallet in July of last year to test it out. I was particularly impressed with the user interface. One feature I found especially useful was the ability to link a user’s email address to their bitcoin address so that you only need to input the email address when sending bitcoin.

I covered the wallet in more depth in a previous article, which you can read here.

Now that the wallet is generally available to the public, I will be recommending it to anyone I know who’s finally ready to move their bitcoin off an exchange and into their own custody. I’ll also be recommending it to anyone who’s looking to make semi-regular bitcoin payments on-chain with a relatively small amount of bitcoin.

Here are my reasons for recommending the wallet.

The only downsides to the wallet are that it doesn’t support Lightning transactions (consider the Breez SDK, Proton team!) and it doesn’t let you manage your UTXOs (loose change from bitcoin transactions, in layperson's terms).

The latter isn’t super important, though, as, again, I’d recommend this wallet to those new to bitcoin self custody. UTXO management is more of a practice for moderate to advanced Bitcoin users.

All in all, Proton has created yet another fine product here for its 100 million users and counting, and it’s one that I’ll be recommending to Bitcoin newbies moving forward.