How to Create a Bitcoin Wallet app?

As you might guess, Bitcoin is a vivid example of another major shift in the world’s economy. Yet, for the most people cryptocurrency is still a pig in a poke. How does it work? Is it illegal? Where can I buy it? So that you never feel confused when talking about Bitcoin wallet development, we’ll try to get all the ducks in a row right now. Read on!

👨‍💻 Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Digital Wallets: Everything You Should Know about It

If you’re already familiar with all these concepts, and Blockchain or Bitcoin doesn’t sound like a secret hackers’ tool from a spy movie, feel free to scroll down to the paragraph about blockchain wallet development. Otherwise, keep on reading as we’re going to make everything clear and dispel all myths about this digital money system. Let’s start with basics!

What is Сryptocurrency? 💸

Firstly, you may think of it as an ordinary currency (like USD or EUR) but with 3 substantial features:

1. It only exists in the digital/virtual form and can’t be printed or minted.
2. The part “crypto” has nothing in common with aliens. It just denotes the use of cryptography to create a brand new level of security.
3. There is no any central authority that can manipulate or interfere this currency since it’s not associated with any country or government.

Secondly, despite the status of cryptocurrencies is still mostly undefined, it’s mostly not illegal to use them. Why mostly? Cause I’m not talking about China and other countries with specific regulations of the digital sphere.

⚙️ Developing a Mobile Bitcoin Wallet: What is It and What Features should It Include?

Mobile banking has never been as popular as now. According to Statista, the number of users who actively access mobile banking services only in the USA reaches more than 110 million people. Take a look:

🛠️ Technical Side of the Project: How Difficult is it To Build Such an App?

Luckily for you, tech side of the Bitcoin app development isn’t too complicated. There are a few public libraries that can be used to create transactions on your server, implement standard functionality and synchronize with the Blockchain. For example, Chain-java and BitcoinJ libraries are suitable for this purpose.

Also, pay attention to popular SDKs. They can make development much easier too.

For example, Blockchain.Info offers developers a full stack of APIs. Blockchain Wallet API is the one you need. It gives you the opportunity to implement the main functionality of the Bitcoin mobile app: creating a personal wallet, handling payments and transactions, address management and so on.

BitcoinJ SDK is implemented in Java, yet, it’s possible to use it with other JVM-compatible languages (for example, JavaScript, C++ or Ruby). This SDK provides Bitcoin developers not only with the standard set of tools for sending/receiving cryptocurrency and checking the current balance. It may be also useful when you need to implement encryption.

Another advantage is the SPV mode. It allows to download and work with only a part of blocks from the blockchain. Taking into account that the full blockchain size is already over 100GB (and it doubles every year), you can save a lot of space on your server.

It’s also possible to use Coinbase SDK on BackEnd to create a Bitcoin wallet app. Official libraries are available for Java, Python and other programming languages. The main advantage of Coinbase SDK is support of other digital currencies (Litecoin and Ethereum).

Thus, cryptocurrency wallet development (its FrontEnd side) will take from 560 hours or from $22,400.

Note: we took an average rate of $40/hour but it depends on many different factors so don't think of it as the final price.

💡 Conclusion

As you may notice, in this article we did not mention the BackEnd part. Cryptocurrency apps have a complicated structure of server part, so each case requires an individual approach.

As for the FrontEnd part, its’ development is no rocket science. However, if you need help with your Bitcoin wallet app development - you know where to find us (it’s the nice button below 😉).