Episode notes
In todays episode I spoke to Craig Raw the sole developer and maintainer of Sparrow wallet.Sparrow is a #bitcoinwallet for those who value financial self sovereignty. Sparrow’s emphasis is on #security, #privacy and usability.
Sparrow does not hide information from you - on the contrary it attempts to provide as much detail as possible about your transactions and UTXOs, but in a way that is manageable and usable. Craigs hope is that sparrow is as much a tool for education as it is a tool for interacting with the bitcoin network. Ive found this wallet really usable while still having all of the features you would expect from a modern Bitcoin wallet.
Full support for single sig and multisig wallets on common script types
A range of connection options: Public servers, Bitcoin Core and private Electrum servers
Standards based including full PSBT support
Support for all common hardware wallets in USB and airgapped modes
Full coin and fee control with comprehensive coin selection
Labeling of all transactions, inputs and outputs
Lightweight and multi platform
Send and receive to PayNyms, both directly (BIP47) and collaboratively
Built in Tor
Testnet, regtest and signet support
Sparrow is unique in that it contains a fully featured transaction editor that also functions as a blockchain explorer. This feature not only allows editing of all of a transaction’s fields, also easy inspection of the transaction bytes before broadcasting.
I asked Craig about some of the features in the new release v1.7.2 and we went into detail on unique visual fingerprints for a wallets now being displayed in the Settings tab and passphrase entry dialog. This makes it easy for more visual people like myself to quickly recognise colours and shapes rather than a string of letters and numbers.
We also discussed #BIP329 which defines a standard for importing and exporting wallet labels. I was happy to see Craig pushing this forward as its an issue I'm currently experiencing myself and I don’t think I'm alone. As other wallets implement this standard, it will become easier to migrate between different wallet implementations using seeds, output descriptors and label exports.
It was a pleasure speaking to Craig and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed recording. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out and ask me.
Sparrow does not hide information from you - on the contrary it attempts to provide as much detail as possible about your transactions and UTXOs, but in a way that is manageable and usable. Craigs hope is that sparrow is as much a tool for education as it is a tool for interacting with the bitcoin network. Ive found this wallet really usable while still having all of the features you would expect from a modern Bitcoin wallet.
Full support for single sig and multisig wallets on common script types
A range of connection options: Public servers, Bitcoin Core and private Electrum servers
Standards based including full PSBT support
Support for all common hardware wallets in USB and airgapped modes
Full coin and fee control with comprehensive coin selection
Labeling of all transactions, inputs and outputs
Lightweight and multi platform
Send and receive to PayNyms, both directly (BIP47) and collaboratively
Built in Tor
Testnet, regtest and signet support
Sparrow is unique in that it contains a fully featured transaction editor that also functions as a blockchain explorer. This feature not only allows editing of all of a transaction’s fields, also easy inspection of the transaction bytes before broadcasting.
I asked Craig about some of the features in the new release v1.7.2 and we went into detail on unique visual fingerprints for a wallets now being displayed in the Settings tab and passphrase entry dialog. This makes it easy for more visual people like myself to quickly recognise colours and shapes rather than a string of letters and numbers.
We also discussed #BIP329 which defines a standard for importing and exporting wallet labels. I was happy to see Craig pushing this forward as its an issue I'm currently experiencing myself and I don’t think I'm alone. As other wallets implement this standard, it will become easier to migrate between different wallet implementations using seeds, output descriptors and label exports.
It was a pleasure speaking to Craig and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed recording. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out and ask me.
