Electrum is a free Bitcoin wallet for desktop computers and Android, first released in November 2011 and developed by Electrum Technologies GmbH in Berlin. It handles only bitcoin, on-chain and over the Lightning Network, and its code is open source.

Electrum starts fast because it does not download the blockchain: it asks public servers about your addresses, and those servers learn which addresses are yours unless you run your own.

The only official download site is electrum.org. Electrum’s own documentation warns that attackers copy the site on lookalike domains and advertise them with paid search ads, while the project says it buys no Google ads.

Who Holds the Keys

According to Electrum, your keys are created on your computer or phone and never leave it, and the developers cannot see or move your coins; this is the self-custody model in Electrum’s own description. Electrum Technologies keeps no user accounts and says it cannot freeze funds or reverse a payment. The keys and the seed phrase are encrypted with your wallet password, and the wallet file is encrypted on disk by default.

The phrase Electrum creates is 12 words long and uses the same 2048-word list as BIP39, but it is not a BIP39 phrase. Electrum hides a version number in the phrase that tells the software which kind of wallet to rebuild, and a wallet that reads only BIP39 phrases cannot restore it. Electrum publishes this format, its code is MIT-licensed, and it can export your private keys for use in other Bitcoin software, so the phrase does not depend on Electrum Technologies staying in business. Electrum can also restore wallets from BIP39 phrases and SLIP-39 shares made elsewhere.

You can add a passphrase, extra words that turn the same phrase into a different wallet. The phrase is shown on your computer or phone screen when you create a wallet, and the keys stay on that device, which is connected to the internet. Malware on it that reads the wallet file or memory can take the phrase and keys. Electrum’s documentation also lists other common ways people lose bitcoin with it: programs that swap a copied address for the attacker’s, fake copies of the app and people posing as support. For larger amounts it suggests a multi-signature wallet across several devices, a hardware signer or an offline computer that only signs.

Losing Your Phrase

The seed phrase is the only way back. If you forget the wallet password, you can restore the wallet from the phrase and set a new one. If you lose both the password and the phrase, Electrum says there is no way to recover the money, and no company can do it for you.

Lightning adds one exception. In wallets created from an Electrum phrase with version 4.1 or later, Electrum derives the Lightning keys from the phrase. In a wallet made from a BIP39 phrase or an imported master key it does not, the app warns that channels cannot be recovered from the seed, and you need the channel backups the app exports. In September 2026, version 4.8.2 fixed a flaw: such backups for one type of channel, called anchor channels, lacked a key needed to claim the funds on-chain after asking the other side to close the channel; the app now warns affected wallets, and older backups of those channels have to be exported again.

What the Server Sees

Electrum keeps connections to about ten Electrum servers, picked automatically from a public list. Anyone can run such a server. One of them, picked automatically, receives all of the wallet’s addresses so it can report new payments; the others only send block headers and fee estimates. Electrum’s own documentation says this server “can now reasonably guess that all these addresses belong to the same entity”. Every connected server also sees your IP address. The servers cannot take your coins, since private keys are never sent to them, and Electrum checks confirmed payments against block headers from several servers. A server can still hide transactions from you, and it is trusted about payments that are not yet confirmed.

You can avoid this by running your own Electrum server in front of your own full node and telling Electrum to connect only to it. Without your own server, Electrum can send all its traffic through Tor if Tor is already running on the computer: the app looks for a Tor proxy on the usual local ports, but it does not include Tor itself. Tor hides your IP address from the servers; it does not stop the main server from linking your addresses.

Coin control is built in. A Coins tab shows the wallet’s coins, you can freeze coins or whole addresses so a payment does not touch them, and by default the app picks coins in a way that, once it spends one coin from an address, spends all coins from that address and avoids change that is much larger than the amount sent or very different from it. Electrum has no built-in purchase or exchange, so there is no identity check inside the app. Bitcoin transactions are public on the blockchain whichever wallet you use, so these settings only limit what Electrum adds to that record.

A few optional features contact other services. The two-factor wallet type uses TrustedCoin, a US cosigning service that receives the wallet’s master public keys, and through them all its addresses, plus an email address if you give one. Each time it cosigns a payment, TrustedCoin logs your IP address, your app’s user agent and the transaction data, and it keeps the time and IP address of each login attempt for up to 15 years. Fiat prices are off by default; when you switch them on, the app asks a price provider you choose, CoinGecko by default.

Lightning payments by default go through one of three fixed trampoline nodes, one of them run by Electrum, which find the route on the app’s behalf and so take part in every payment you send. When the recipient’s wallet does not support trampoline payments, Electrum gives the last trampoline node the recipient’s node ID so it can reach them; Electrum’s release notes say such payments offer less privacy.

If the app crashes, it offers to upload a crash report to GitHub, where it becomes public. You see the report before sending it, and Electrum’s privacy policy says it may contain IP addresses, timestamps, device name and OS version.

Lightning and Multisig

Electrum is Bitcoin-only: its documentation says it has never supported other coins, and versions of it for other coins are separate projects run by other people. Lightning is built into the app, for opening channels and paying invoices.

Multi-signature wallets are native. Each cosigner creates a wallet with their own seed, the wallets exchange master public keys, and a payment needs the agreed number of signatures, passed between devices by file, QR code or an optional plugin that relays them encrypted. The two-factor wallet type is a 2-of-3 version of this, with TrustedCoin holding the third key; Electrum says the phrase alone restores the wallet if TrustedCoin goes offline. Electrum also works with several hardware wallets as signers and supports watching-only wallets that hold no private keys.

Open Source and Security Record

The app is open source under the MIT licence, and so is ElectrumX, the server software the project names as its official implementation. Electrum says its builds are reproducible: the current release is signed by five builders, three of whom are not among the two developers with write access to the code. Changes to electrum.org and new releases have to be signed by both lead developers before they go live, and the download page explains how to check the signatures.

Electrum has published no third-party security audit. There is no bug bounty; security problems are reported privately to the two lead developers. Every release since August 2025, seven in a row up to 4.8.2 in September 2026, is marked as a security update, so it pays to install new versions soon after they come out; the app’s automatic update check is off by default.

Incidents and Vulnerabilities

Electrum has an incident history. The most serious cases:

January 2018: a flaw in versions 2.6 to 3.0.4 let a malicious website send commands to a running Electrum. Wallets without a password could be emptied, and any wallet’s addresses, labels and contacts could be read. Electrum knew of no theft through the flaw and fixed it in version 3.0.5.
December 2018: an attacker started many Electrum servers. When a user sent a payment through one of them, the server answered with an error message, shown as formatted text with a link, telling the user to install a “new version” that was malware. Every release before 3.3.3 displayed such messages; Electrum 3.3.3, released in January 2019, stopped showing server text that way.
Fixed April 2023, disclosed September 2023: on Android, versions 4.0 to 4.3 skipped a check when sending Lightning payments, so a direct channel partner could take a payment without passing it on. Version 4.4.0 fixed it in April 2023, and Electrum published the details in September 2023.
April 2026: in versions 4.6.0 to 4.7.1, a program already running on the computer with access to Electrum’s data folder could make Electrum load its own plugin code. It was fixed in 4.7.2.

Electrum’s GitHub page lists further advisories of medium severity: in 2022, a payment request could make the app open a local file (fixed in 4.2.2), and in 2023, a flaw let an attacker trick the app into accepting part of a Lightning payment as the whole (fixed in 4.4.6). Version 4.8.0 in July 2026 fixed a low-severity flaw in the check that confirms a payment is included in a block.

Ownership and Jurisdiction

Electrum Technologies GmbH is a German company in Berlin, founded in 2013 by Thomas Voegtlin, who wrote the first version of Electrum. The company develops and distributes the app and runs electrum.org. According to its website it stores no user account data and is not an intermediary between the app and the Bitcoin network. Anyone can run an Electrum server, and none of the 84 servers in the app’s built-in list is on Electrum’s own domain.

Electrum gives no private support. Its website says that anyone offering “Electrum support” in a private message is most likely trying to steal your bitcoins.

Price

Electrum is free on every platform, with no paid tier. The optional two-factor wallet type is the only part that costs money: TrustedCoin adds a cosigning fee to your outgoing transactions, 0.0005 BTC for each batch of 20 transactions or 0.00125 BTC for a batch of 100, and says the fee is shared with the Electrum developers.

Pros and Cons

Keys are created and stored on your device, and the company holds no accounts, according to Electrum
You can connect only to your own Electrum server, so nobody else learns your addresses
Coin control lets you choose and freeze the coins each payment spends
Passphrase and multi-signature wallets are built in, and hardware wallets work as signers
Open source under the MIT licence, with the current release signed by five builders
Free, with no in-app purchases or identity checks

By default a public server picked automatically learns all of your addresses and your IP address
The seed phrase uses Electrum's own format, which wallets that read only BIP39 phrases cannot restore
Tor works only if you run it yourself; the app does not include it
No published third-party security audit and no bug bounty
In 2018 attacker-run servers showed users of every version before 3.3.3 a message linking to malware
No iOS app

Our Rating

Key Custody & Recovery7.5/10
According to Electrum, the keys are created and kept on your computer or phone, and the developers cannot see or move your coins. The 12-word phrase uses Electrum's own published format, which wallets that read only standard BIP39 phrases cannot restore. An optional passphrase and multi-signature wallets are built in. The phrase is shown on the same screen that malware on the computer can read, and losing it means losing the funds.
Network & Metadata Privacy6.5/10
By default Electrum picks a public server run by someone you do not know, and that server learns all of the wallet's addresses together with your IP address. You can connect to your own Electrum server instead, route traffic through a Tor proxy you run and choose which coins each payment spends. There is no built-in purchase and no identity check.
Security & Transparency7.0/10
The app and the server software are open source under the MIT licence, and the current release is signed by five builders; Electrum says its builds are reproducible. No third-party security audit is published, and there is no bug bounty. In 2018 attackers ran servers that showed users a message with a link to malware disguised as an update, and in April 2026 Electrum published a fix for a medium-severity flaw in its plugin system.
Usability & Chain Support7.0/10
Electrum supports only Bitcoin and Lightning, which is all it sets out to do, on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android; there is no iOS app. The desktop app shows server, fee and coin settings on the main screens, which suits readers who know Bitcoin better than beginners.
Price & Value9.5/10
Electrum is free. Only the optional two-factor wallet type costs money: TrustedCoin takes 0.0005 BTC for every 20 outgoing transactions.

Overall7.3/10

Key Custody & Recovery 30% · Network & Metadata Privacy 25% · Security & Transparency 20% · Usability & Chain Support 15% · Price & Value 10%

See our rating methodology →