BlueWallet’s Mission: Building a Wallet Bitcoiners Can Trust

In 2017, during the height of the block size war and fee spikes that made simple transactions cost ten or twenty dollars, most people argued online about whose vision of Bitcoin was correct.

Igor Korsakov, now the CTO of BlueWallet, chose a different response. He opened his laptop and started writing code. Back then, the iOS wallet landscape was messy. Many apps did not support SegWit even though it reduced fees, and they ignored useful tools already existing in the protocol.

Replace-by-fee (RBF) existed, but almost no mobile wallet exposed it. Fee controls were rigid; users either accepted whatever the app recommended or did not send the payment at all.

“I noticed that a lot of wallets did not support the latest network upgrades like SegWit,” Igor said. “There were pretty cool features already built into the protocol like replace-by-fee. A lot of wallets did not support that. Especially on iOS.”

At the same time, the wallet he personally used was acquired, drifted into altcoins, and moved away from a simple Bitcoin focus. That was the moment something clicked for him.

He started building BlueWallet in 2017. By early 2018, the first beta was ready. At that stage, BlueWallet was tiny; Igor remembers seeing five downloads a day. It would take years of open-source work, Lightning experiments, and a series of technical breakthroughs for it to become one of the most respected wallets in the industry.

From the beginning, BlueWallet focused on features that mattered to real Bitcoin users instead of chasing trends or becoming eye candy.

Replace-by-fee was live on day one. Users could adjust fees with precision rather than choose between “slow” or “fast.” This allows transactions to be canceled or bumped. Batch sends made on-chain use more efficient. Incoming transactions could be fee-bumped as well, something that even today many wallets ignore.

This specific feature utilizes a mechanism called Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP). It solves the common frustration of receiving a payment that gets stuck because the sender attached a low fee.

BlueWallet allows the user to create a new transaction moving those unconfirmed coins to themselves with a much higher fee attached. Since miners cannot claim the new high fee without processing the original stuck transaction first, this effectively pulls the incoming payment through the network.

Igor and the early contributors built the app around the idea that a wallet should expose the tools that the Bitcoin protocol already gives you. “Back in the day a lot of wallets were like, ‘Here is your fee, just pay it or do not send the transaction,’” Igor said. “You could not adjust it.”

Lightning arrived soon after, and BlueWallet moved fast. Their first Lightning feature was custodial. It started as a small weekend experiment but exploded in usage.

“It really blew up when we integrated Lightning,” Igor said. “But people noticed that a lot of features in BlueWallet are not Lightning focused. They are on-chain focused.” However, running a custodial Lightning node was never the long-term vision.

Igor and the team did not want to manage user funds. A few years ago, they shut the node down. Users withdrew almost everything very quickly, which confirmed that most of them had a solid understanding of self-custody.

A breakthrough from BlueWallet, is their work on secure signing without trusting cables or network connections. BlueWallet was among the first to integrate animated QR code signing with the hardware wallet that began as Cobo and now exists as Keystone.

“It is one hundred percent air-gapped,” Igor explained. “You can only scan from the device and scan it back. There is no wire and no network connectivity.” This is why many people with large balances rely on BlueWallet as the coordinator for their cold storage.

The keys remain on offline hardware wallets while the phone only handles Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs) and broadcasts signed transactions. BlueWallet also became a powerful multisig coordinator.

Igor explained that BlueWallet never holds keys in this setup; it simply helps different signers talk to each other. “You can set up multisig with different signers,” he said. “BlueWallet acts only as a coordinator, and all the signers are different devices from different vendors or even software signers. You are only throwing PSBT files between cosigners. Who signs it does not even matter.”

This makes it easy to build serious multisig arrangements where keys live in separate locations on unrelated devices such as Coldcard, Keystone, Passport, Sparrow, or Electrum.

For Igor, open source is not a branding choice. It is the only way anyone should trust software that manages private keys.

“In our industry, that is the only way to do it,” he said. “No one will trust you if you are not open source.” He breaks a wallet down to its core function: “What is a wallet? It is a piece of software that acquires entropy, stores it really securely, and does some magic with this entropy, like signatures. Everything else is just bells and whistles.”

The problem is that entropy (randomness) cannot be audited unless the software is visible. Broken randomness can drain wallets immediately. Igor gave the example of a past wallet that used a website as its entropy source. When the website’s security certificate expired, the wallet began using an error string as "randomness." Bots cleaned those wallets out instantly because the private keys became predictable.

It is also why one should use multisig with different vendors. If one source of entropy fails, the others protect the user. Open source is how people verify these systems. There is also a practical advantage. Because BlueWallet is open source, it receives a long list of free services from companies that support open development. GitHub builds, browser testing suites, and supply chain security tools all come at no cost.

When BlueWallet shut down its custodial node, there was an assumption that something would eventually replace it. Running custodied channels for millions of people was not feasible as it required enormous amounts of capital.

“We eventually figured out that maybe it is not really working because you need to allocate a lot of capital,” Igor said. That is why BlueWallet is now integrating ARK from Ark Labs. Igor believes it is the most promising path for mobile Lightning.

ARK uses "virtual UTXOs" that do not immediately touch the chain. They each have an exit path. If the user wants to transform them into real UTXOs, they can broadcast the necessary transactions. Until then, they exist without an on-chain footprint.

“You keep your virtual UTXO and you have zero on-chain footprint,” he said. “If you want to get self-custody and have a unilateral exit, you broadcast and you get your virtual UTXOs turned into real UTXOs.”

ARK operators provide Lightning bridges, meaning users can send and receive Lightning payments that settle through their virtual balances. Igor sees this as part of a bigger pattern. “There are a bunch of L2s and they will all talk through Lightning to the greater economy,” he said.

Systems like ARK, Liquid, and others will use Lightning as the payment bridge between them.

For someone who has been building in Bitcoin for more than ten years, Igor has a relaxed view of the recurring fears that dominate online arguments. Quantum computers? He compares the constant predictions to nuclear fusion. Noting that “It reminds me of nuclear fusion reactors. If you ask a fusion scientist when there will be commercial reactors, they say within five years. They have said that for sixty years.”

He believes caution makes sense, but panic does not. He also points out the obvious truth: if quantum computing breaks Bitcoin, it likely breaks the entire internet first. Miner death spirals? He has seen that argument since Bitcoin was worth two hundred dollars. “Ten years later everything is working as expected,” he said.

The difficulty adjustment keeps the network alive. Satoshi Nakamoto? Even the founder is not a mythical figure to him. “He made pretty dumb mistakes coding the initial implementation,” Igor said. “That is how we know Satoshi was not a super intelligence sent from the future.”

And if Satoshi returned today, it would not change much. “He is irrelevant at this point,” Igor said. “This is good. He cannot steer development or tell people what to do.”

Igor uses AI daily but in a grounded way. He believes code is one of the best use cases because it is verifiable. Tests catch errors. Unlike legal or tax tasks, where hallucinations can cause real damage, software can be checked with precision.

“I personally love AI,” he said. “It helps write a lot of code.” He likes the idea of "Vibe Engineering": writing a plan, breaking the work into steps, and letting the model assist while he verifies each part. This way, the human stays in control, but outsources much of the tedious work to the machine.

The next releases of BlueWallet are set to include:

These are practical upgrades that strengthen self-custody without unnecessary complexity. After spending time with Igor Korsakov, it becomes clear why BlueWallet stands out.

It is not flashy, and it does not chase hype. It solves real problems with simple engineering and a deep respect for the user. Bitcoin needs wallets that do not try to outsmart the protocol or hide its features.

Igor built one by returning to the basics: give people real control, expose the tools Bitcoin already offers, make it secure without making it painful, and keep the code open so anyone can verify it. BlueWallet is what happens when someone sees something broken, refuses to complain, and writes their own fix.