We’ve heard a bit on BitPay’s doings in the open source field, and today, the company announced on their blog that they’ve got a multisig, open source wallet in the works called Copay.
We’ve heard of Copay previously, but now it’s got its own website at Copay.io, and has launched in beta.
At BitPay, we’ve been working on a multi-signature wallet to help us manage our company funds and we decided that we should make it available to everyone to use and (we hope) build upon. Copay is built on top of bitcore (a highly successful open source bitcoin stack). It also uses Insight, an open source block chain explorer and API. Copay requires the use of a trusted Insight node for querying the block chain. In the interests of promoting decentralization, we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to run your own Insight server and encourage people to do so.
The multi-signature technology ensures that bitcoin transactions are protected to the highest order by requiring multiple signatures/approvals before funds are moved.
[ot-video type=”youtube” url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Qjf9GQSiyU”]
Copay comes in several forms, which includes a browser extension for both Google Chrome and Firefox, along with a web-based version. The developers warn, however, the the quality of the code is, well, beta. So you can expect to see some bugs here and there.
In addition, the developers warn that Copay — as of right now — is “a bit of a power users’ tool.”
With bitcore, insight and copay, we’re building an easy to use open source technology stack that promotes decentralization. There are a number of bitcoin companies already building on these platforms and we will continue innovating on them ourselves. If you’re interested in using these tools, join the github projects and let us know about it. We’re eager to assist in any way we can.