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Revenue model of wallets
416 sats \ 6 comments \ @brunenzio 5h bitcoin
I have a simple question: how do wallets like bluewallet and similar sustain themselves? Do they rely only on donations?
I'm asking for mainly two reasons. Essentially, knowing the revenue model helps evaluating:
  1. the privacy risks of using a service because you can have a better estimate of the likelihood of selling whatever sellable data
  2. the estimated lifespan of the project because you may infer how much time they have before they run out of funding and stop developing a tool you may have become accustomed to
I understand the situation may be different from wallet to wallet, but I hope a kind of bird's-eye view of the topic is possible.
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55 sats \ 5 replies \ @Scoresby 1h
There's not a great answer to this. I tried to do some research on it earlier this year (#944967).
The tldr is that on chain wallets don't have any good options for revenue.
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107 sats \ 4 replies \ @brunenzio OP 1h
Thank you for replying. I have been quite sloppy and did not do my research correctly, otherwise, I would have found your post #944967 and this other one #573439 from which I could have gathered the TLDR you mention.
It's unfortunate that there's still no solid way to sustain these projects except donations. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of donations, but it also has it's downsides because it leaves the user with an unclear situation (how much do I contribute? How often? If it's still going, it means others are already contributing so I can spare it until I really understand if this service has all the things I need) that may very likely end up in an unsustainable flow of donations.
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102 sats \ 2 replies \ @justin_shocknet 59m
I think the more appropriate question to ask first is, what value do these wallets add beyond just using Bitcoin QT directly
If a wallet is little more than a UI wrapper for things QT already does then yea there's no monetization vector
Additional services beyond that are what would get monetized, then the wallet itself is just a distribution channel for those services
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @brunenzio OP 53m
I get your point. However, there are different types of added values that are kind of necessary. For instance, mobile wallets. Then, the very fact of having alternative desktop wallets is an added value to the ecosystem imho.
Therefore, it seems to me it's already necessary to have more of these UI wrappers.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 30m
Many of the wallets make it easier to do multisig (Blue, Liana, Bitcoin Safe, Nunchuk, Keeper, Specter, Sparrow) and some of them make it easier to interact with hardware signers. But even these features are difficult to monetize, imo.
Monetizing services can lead to situations like Theya, which seems now to be going hard into selling people a bitcoin loan collateralized with their house (Horizon).
I'm hopeful that the lightning wallets find monetizing more straightforward.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 35m
I still think they should just charge for the software, probably for each release, but I'm not a developer and it's easy for me to talk.
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