Armory, a popular bitcoin wallet considered by security experts and bitcoin developers including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as the world’s most secure bitcoin wallet has officially terminated its operations today.
Over the past five years, Armory had led the evolution of bitcoin wallet technologies by providing the most advanced and secure bitcoin client tailored for large storage of bitcoins. The problem, however, appeared in the business and financial aspect of the company.
Ultimately, Armory is an independent business, which relies on its own funds for the development of advanced bitcoin-focused technologies. Despite the support of its users and security experts worldwide, Armory needed to secure investment and financial partners during its ascend, and should have continued the development of commercial technologies for mainstream users. However, the business failed to raise capital for its development, and sustained the development of advanced bitcoin-related technologies which the Bitcoin space wasn’t ready for.
Over time, the financial issues of Armory caught up with a mess of legal and corporate complexity, which virtually disallowed the Armory team to operate with its intellectual property. Such complexities made it difficult for Armory Technologies, Inc. Founder, CEO and Lead Developer Alan Reiner to continue the development of the Armory wallet platform. He stated:
“I want to take this time to thank the community, which has been instrumental in getting us even this far.”
With the official announcement of Reiner, Farhod, experienced veteran developer who has worked with Reiner over the past few years, will take over the role as the lead developer and release his own version of Armory, 0.94 in the future.
Despite the resignation of Alan Reiner and the end of Armory as a commercial business, the public software of Armory is still the most powerful and desperately needed piece of software for the Bitcoin space. Considering its significance and impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem, Farhod decided to continue the open source development of Armory, on his own public github repository. He added:
“Even in its current state, the public version of Armory is a powerful, unique, and much needed piece of software which I think has made a significant impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem.”
Beginning this week, the new codes submitted by Farhod would become his property, under the MIT license. The open source development of armory will also resume from 0.03.3 due to the deadlock state of Armory’s IP.
The entire process and open source development of Armory will be funded by Farhod himself, after an attempted acquisition fell through. As the development progresses however, Farhod aims to list a set of features to develop or modify and layout a time estimate for each task along with a hourly fee. In the future, Farhod plans to have his share of the development funded by the bitcoin community.
“I will continue to work Armory full time,” said Farhod.
