We’re pleased to announce that we’ve acquired GreenAddress, a leading bitcoin wallet software provider based in Europe. GreenAddress has a demonstrated track record of providing its users with an industry-leading product that prioritizes security, privacy, and convenience.
GreenAddress has been a project of a three-person team with a deep commitment to Bitcoin. Their users are passionate, and technically minded, early adopters in the community who have sought the highest levels of privacy and security for their bitcoin wallets.
Today’s announcement is not a signal of our intention to begin acquiring companies in the Bitcoin or blockchain technology space. As we looked at our sidechain technology roadmap, including an open source, well-tested, and production-ready wallet was a natural choice. It was necessary to give depth to the platform and to meet requirements of many of our enterprise applications.
Lawrence met with our co-founders during some of our earliest gatherings in Blockstream, in one of our rented Airbnb houses in California before we had an office. It was clear to all of us that we shared a vision about the importance of putting Bitcoin users first, striving for the right balance between security and usability, as well as seeing exciting new possibilities for collaboration. After almost two years, coming together as one team just made sense to us.
GreenAddress is available for Android and iOS. All code is published on GitHub and apps are open source, something we will continue to support. The wallet’s per-transaction, two-factor authentication, multi-signature and deterministic design allows for unprecedented control over transactions. A key feature we really appreciate as fellow bitcoin users ourselves is that GreenAddress never stores private keys, not even encrypted.
GreenAddress was one of the first wallets to deliver features like HD multisig, hardware wallet support, dynamic fees based on Core fee estimation, and transaction replacement. The team has already started on an impressive lineup of new features, too, including a new, multi-platform wallet library, privacy and security enhancements, and sidechain support throughout the platform. Extending GreenAddress to work with sidechains will mean you will have the ability to support not only Bitcoin, but other assets and features coming online via this exciting area of innovation.
GreenAddress’s founder Lawrence Nahum emailed users of the wallet this morning informing them of the acquisition and our shared commitment to support their continued use of the wallet and some of our plans to make the wallet even more convenient, private, safe, and feature-rich. The GreenAddress development team is joining our engineering teams, and Lawrence is assuming the role of Senior Architect to continue to oversee GreenAddress as well as contribute to our other products and services. (Team page to be updated soon!)
We are pleased to welcome Lawrence and his team to Blockstream, to commit to the GreenAddress user base continued support and development of their wallet of choice, and to share our excitement for adding wallet support to an end-to-end sidechain technology stack.