As part of our commitment to the Bitcoin ethos, and the guiding principles of openness, freedom, and transparency that make Bitcoin itself one of the most revolutionary technologies in existence, AQUA Wallet is now fully open-source software.

Deeply rooted in cypherpunk ideology, Bitcoin’s first steps out into the world - from the mining of Genesis Block to Hal Finney’s first few days “Running bitcoin,” or Laszlo Hanyecz’s pizzas - were all byproducts of collaborative community efforts that continue to be the basis for many of Bitcoin’s developments.

For us, making AQUA a non-custodial open-source wallet was never up for debate, rather it has been our plan from the start. Our team worked tirelessly to release AQUA on January 3rd, 2024, a very special date that is also the namesake for JAN3. Now, after AQUA’s successful launch and the overwhelmingly positive initial feedback, we have redirected our efforts towards fixing any minor bugs that appeared, and cleaning up our codebase as best as possible so others can more easily review it. Starting today, AQUA’s repositories can be found on our GitHub page under the MIT license. For those die-hard Bitcoiners who have limited their use of AQUA due to this, now is the time for you to verify, and dive into what we believe is a very special and potentially revolutionary Bitcoin wallet. 

The only component within AQUA we will not be open-sourcing is the Marketplace. Although AQUA’s current open-source code includes it, this will later become JAN3 proprietary software. As the Marketplace relies on custom integrations and unique business relationships with providers, it doesn’t make sense to include them as open-source code. Despite this omission, every other element that makes AQUA a super app will still be there.

Note that we are currently using a SideSwap-maintained fork of GDK. As Green Development Kit is core to AQUA, our users benefit from the reliability of a battle-tested library developed by Blockstream and utilized by wallets like Green. GDK handles AQUA’s seed creation, wallet restoration, address generation, and transaction signing. In the coming months, we will be reverting to mainline GDK.

Open source means AQUA will soon be available on F-Droid and privacy-focused users will still be able to get AQUA’s latest updates without the need for Google Services. Until we are on F-Droid, the AQUA APK will still be linked on the AQUA website, meaning power users will still be able to download the AQUA APK from GitHub, along with its source code.

JAN3 maintains that there is no substitute for Bitcoin self-custody, and proper open-source software is the only real guarantee for that. With this step, we hope AQUA becomes the go-to open-source wallet thousands of Bitcoiners recommend today and, in the future, the preferred Bitcoin app for billions of people.

If you’re interested in contributing to AQUA’s development, feel free to reach out to us using our contact form.