Electrum is a free non-custodial

cryptocurrency wallet A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or an online service which stores the Public-key cryptography, public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cr ...

for

Bitcoin Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under ...

and

Lightning Network The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment protocol built on the bitcoin blockchain. It is intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes (independently run members of the network) and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin sca ...

. It is available for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

(pre-installed on Tails OS),

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

and Android. Electrum is written in

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (prog ...

and uses the Qt widget toolkit for the user interface. Electrum is a lightweight client: it does not download the entire

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

and instead uses simplified payment verification. Transactions are sent to public servers. It was released in 2011.

Reception

Mayank Sharma of ''

TechRadar ''TechRadar'' is an online technology publication owned by Future plc. It has editorial teams in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia that provide news and reviews of tech products and gadgets. It was launched in 2008 and expanded t ...

'' praised the wallet's advanced features, such as multisignature transactions, while noting that the wallet is not designed for inexperienced users. Marco Monroy Robles of ''Money'' liked Electrum's simple setup process, but criticized its lack of direct customer support.

Security

Although wallet files are encrypted with

PBKDF2 In cryptography, PBKDF1 and PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 1 and 2) are key derivation functions with a sliding computational cost, used to reduce vulnerability to brute-force attacks. PBKDF2 is part of RSA Laboratories' Public- ...

, private keys are encrypted with AES256 with the user's password. This could allow an attacker with access to the encrypted data to decrypt the private keys using a

dictionary attack In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is an attack using a restricted subset of a keyspace to defeat a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase, sometimes trying thousands or ...

or a brute force attack.

References

External links

*
Overview of Electrum
on the bitcoin.org {{Authority control Bitcoin Cryptocurrencies Private currencies Cryptocurrency exchanges