Building the world’s best Bitcoin Cash wallet

Last week we released our all-new Bitcoin.com wallet. The new overhaul, built from the ground up, is our most ambitious wallet release to-date with a host of new features that make using Bitcoin Cash faster and easier than ever before.

In this article, we want to share some of the thought processes that went behind our decisions in the new release. All of these are informed by our goal to make the best Bitcoin Cash wallet experience in the world and help bring Bitcoin Cash to millions of people.

SLP is the future of Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash SLP is the world’s first scalable token protocol. Anyone, anywhere, can use tools like mint.bitcoin.com to create a token in minutes that can represent any real-world or virtual good, from airline points to corporate shares to event tickets and more. 

Even better, you can use our dividend calculator tool to do airdrops and dividends to token holders as quickly, cheaply and reliably as sending Bitcoin Cash to a friend. 

This is the future of Bitcoin Cash—an entire ecosystem of tokens, token-backed business models, and token projects built on top of a framework of fast, reliable, digital cash. Bitcoin as it was meant to be.

We wanted to make using and receiving tokens as easy as possible, and with our new wallet update, you can access these tokens right inside your Bitcoin.com wallet and send them just like you would send Bitcoin Cash.

Five seconds is too slow

With traditional retail payment technology improving, waiting in-store five to ten seconds while you fumble with your wallet to swipe the payment confirmation is too slow! We need a better experience to reach mass adoption.

We’ve added a new Instant Pay feature which allows you to fill payment requests instantly up to a spending threshold set by you. Just hold your scanner up and it will auto-complete the payment without you having to do a thing.

This is the fastest retail payment experience of any Bitcoin wallet, ever, and we’re working in future releases to continue making it even better in retail and online commerce.

Building an increasingly profitable business that is in Bitcoin Cash for the long-term

As we’ve said, everything we’re building at Bitcoin.com is informed by the goal of making Bitcoin Cash accessible for the entire world. 

In order for us to do this, we need to build products and services that are world-class, constantly improving, and profitable for us at scale.

Here are some of the ways we’re doing that.

A wallet for the real world, not just early adopters

We’re thinking 5, 10, and 15 years into the future with everything we’re building at Bitcoin.com.

This means design and feature choices in our wallet are informed not just by the existing cryptocurrency community, which we love, but also by the vast majority of people who haven’t tried cryptocurrency yet but who will in the next decade. We want to make it easier than ever for somebody who is new to Bitcoin to start using it for saving and spending. We want it to be the kind of wallet you can download on your friend or family member’s phone and get them started with Bitcoin Cash in minutes.

To borrow the ideas of Peter Thiel, what got Bitcoin from zero to 1 will likely be very different from what got Bitcoin from 1 to n. We’re focused on building products that appeal to the next 50 million people and to our existing users. This new wallet update is one of them. 

Real-time user feedback 

We collect a limited amount of anonymized user in-app data so that we can keep building the world’s best Bitcoin Cash wallet for our users. The wallet is non-custodial and we have no KYC data associated with any tracking. The only data tracked are basic wallet metrics like total transactions sent per day, total purchases made using our wallet, retention rates, and total sends by coin and volume. 

The sole purpose of this information is to allow us to continue improving the wallet and make it more useful for you. We’re building a wallet that we plan to see used by tens of millions of people around the world and without that information, we’d be grasping in the dark to try to figure out what is and isn’t working for our users. The limited information we gather helps us get much closer to that goal.

For customers who want even more privacy in-app, we’re working on new features for future releases.

In-app offers and services

If you open your wallet now, you’ll notice a robust ‘Discover’ section that is filled with products and services we love and trust, from Purse.io where you can buy anything in Bitcoin Cash on Amazon at a discount to CheapAir and Travala, where you can book flights and hotels in Bitcoin Cash around the world.

This makes it easier than ever before for new users of Bitcoin Cash to discover how they can use it to buy things they need, and they allow us to grow as a profitable business so that we can be around for the long-term in building things for the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem.

The money we earn through our products is pumped right back into new products and services for you, like the Bitcoin Cash Register, our SLP products, the Bitcoin Cash faucet, and a ton of stuff we haven’t announced yet.

Looking forward

As with any new release, we can only put so much in at one time, but we’re so excited for the next year of improvements to the wallet. Coming down the pipeline are more privacy features like Cash Shuffle and a lot of other things we’ll share in future updates.

If you’re a current user, let us know what you think. We listen.

If you haven’t tried it, head on over to your App Store and give it a download!