
// Mobile apps
How to Create Bitcoin a Wallet App?
// Mobile apps
Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, which is regularly used by several dozen million people. Hundreds of millions own some number of BTC. We’ll tell you how to create your bitcoin wallet for integration with your business or the launch of a new project.
The first decision to make when creating your bitcoin wallet is to understand who will be using it, how, and what for. Type, features, design of a wallet and marketing strategy will depend on these things. For instance, if you just need a possibility to accept payments in bitcoins, then this wallet can be easily created with various APIs. The development of a wallet for a commercial SaaS project requires more significant effort and money.
Here are the main examples of the use of bitcoin wallets:
Such wallets are mainly created with a focus on bitcoin enthusiasts, miners, and blockchain developers because only they are ready to tolerate some restrictions of desktop wallets. Some of them are high requirements for hard disk capacity (now it’s 300 GB), constant linkage to a computer, and the necessity of reliable protection of this computer from all kinds of malicious software, frauds, hacker attacks, and DDoS attacks.
Examples: Exodus, Armory, Bitcoin Core, Electrum.
Hardware wallets. These usually are flash drives, which have to be connected to a computer or a laptop to get access to cryptocurrency balance management. Their particularity is that they always store private keys inside the device, due to which hardware wallets are considered the safest. These wallets are managed by an app that is embedded in a flash drive.
Hardware wallets are created with a focus on investors, miners, businessmen, and other users, who operate with a big number of bitcoins and want to protect them from hackers and frauds as best they can. It’s more difficult to develop such a wallet than other types because you need to create not only an app but also a hardware device, which the software will be integrated into.
Examples: Ledger Nano X, Ledger Blue, and Trezor Model T.
Mobile wallets. These are apps to buy, sell, and transfer bitcoins via smartphone. Usually, they’re simple, convenient, have an attractive design, and offer additional features: QR code scanner, fingerprint authentication, Lightning transactions, etc.
Depending on the developer, these apps store private keys either inside a phone or on an external server, which is not very safe. For this reason, such wallets aren’t recommended to be used for operations involving huge amounts of money. They are most suited for small-scale daily transactions.
Examples: Bitcoin Wallet, Electrum, GreenAddress, Infinito, and Edge.
Paper wallets. As a rule, the creation of a bitcoin wallet, in this case, entails the development of software for encryption of public and private keys, so that they can be stored in paper form safely. Approaches to encryption may be various. The most important thing is for them to work quickly and be reliable. Those, who don’t trust digital protection methods, use paper keys.
Examples: Wallet Generator and Eth Address Wallet.
Online wallets. These are SaaS platforms that allow managing the assets with the help of any device that has Internet access. These wallets combine the accessibility of mobile wallets and the capability of desktop wallets, which comes at a price of lower security since the online wallets store the users’ public and private keys on their servers.
Examples: BitGo, Coinbase, GreenAddress.
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Software Development Kit (SDK). You can use such public libraries as Coinbase, Bitcoinj, or Blockchain to speed up and simplify the development of your app. Here’s how much it might cost.
Creating from scratch. It requires more time and money, but this is the best approach if you want to develop an app with a unique design and functionality. Here’s the estimated development cost.