Electrum Bitcoin wallet review: what it costs and where it stops

Electrum is a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, published under the MIT licence by Electrum Technologies GmbH in Berlin and in continuous development since November 2011. 

Installation costs nothing, and storage costs nothing. On an ordinary send, you pay the miners and nobody else, because Electrum adds no fee of its own.

Three limits decide whether it suits you. Electrum holds Bitcoin and nothing else — no Ethereum, no Solana, no tokens. It offers no way to buy Bitcoin with a card. And it provides no built-in cross-chain swap interface, so you cannot exchange BTC for an asset on another blockchain from inside the wallet.

Electrum itself charges no installation, custody, subscription or ordinary on-chain send fee. Optional services such as TrustedCoin two-factor wallets and submarine-swap providers can charge separately.

Test profile

This review is based on one hands-on session. Here is the setup, so you can judge how far it carries over to yours.

What we tested, and what we did not

Scope of the hands-on session, on Windows:

• download the installer from electrum.org and check its GPG signature against the published fingerprints;
• create a wallet from scratch;
• walk through the Receive and Send screens and record what each one displays;
• restore the wallet from its seed on a clean machine.

Desk research, already complete: the licence file, the privacy policy, the release notes back to version 2.0, and every security advisory in the repository.

Out of scope: submarine swaps between the on-chain and Lightning balances, Lightning payments generally, the Android app, hardware wallet pairing, a 2-of-3 TrustedCoin wallet, a self-hosted server, and third-party plugins. Everything this review says about those comes from Electrum’s documentation rather than our own use, and carries a label that says so.

Electrum at a glance

How to set up Electrum

Installation is quick. Download the .exe from electrum.org, run it, and the install itself finishes in under a minute. The wizard then takes six screens to a working wallet.

Screenshot: electrum.org download page

Tested on version 4.8.1, on August 17, 2026.

Step 1. Create a new wallet, or open an existing one

The wizard opens on the wallet file. Click New to create one, or enter the password for a wallet already on the machine to open it.

Screenshot: the wallet file screen

Step 2. Pick the wallet type

Choose what kind of wallet to create: a standard wallet, a 2-of-3 wallet with two-factor authentication through TrustedCoin, a multi-signature wallet, or an import of existing keys or addresses.

Screenshot: the wallet type screen

Step 3. Create a new seed, or restore from one

Generate a fresh seed phrase, or enter an existing one to restore a wallet. Electrum’s own seed format is not BIP39, though it accepts a BIP39 seed from another wallet here.

Screenshot: the seed choice screen

Step 4. Save the seed phrase

Electrum displays the words once. Anyone who reads them controls the coins, on any machine, without your password. Paper only — no photographs, and no notes app that syncs somewhere you do not control.

Screenshot: the seed phrase screen

Step 5. Confirm the seed phrase

The next screen asks for the words back, so the backup is checked before the wallet exists rather than after.

Step 6. Set the password

The password encrypts the seed and private keys with AES-256-CBC and encrypts the wallet file on disk, a default since version 2.8. Electrum neither stores it nor can reset it. Lose the password and the seed together, and the coins are gone.

Screenshot: the password screen

After finish

The wallet opens on the History tab, which lists each transaction by date, description, amount and balance. Three further tabs sit alongside it: Send, Receive and Channels, the last for Lightning.

Screenshot: the History tab after setup

How Electrum receives bitcoin

Receive sits alongside Send, History and Channels as one of the wallet’s four tabs. Per Electrum’s release notes, it issues a unified payment request carrying a Lightning invoice, a BIP21 URI and an on-chain address at once, and reports whether current channel liquidity can accept the amount off-chain; if a payment settles over Lightning, the unused on-chain address is recycled into the next request.  

Screenshot: the Receive tab showing a unified request

One convenience is easy to miss: a new payment can join an existing unconfirmed transaction through a drop-down rather than go out on its own, which saves a second fee.

Two behaviours are worth knowing before the first send. Electrum treats any transaction it cannot check by SPV as unconfirmed, so a balance may lag a block explorer briefly. And the connected server is trusted on unconfirmed transactions specifically: confirmed history is verified cryptographically, but a server can stay silent about a transaction it would rather you did not see.

How to send bitcoin from Electrum

Electrum charges nothing to move bitcoin. The whole cost of a payment is the network fee, and Electrum gives you more control over that number than most wallets do.

Step 1. Open the Send tab

The address field accepts a plain address, a BIP21 URI or an OpenAlias name, the last of which Electrum checks against DNSSEC before use.

Screenshot: the Send tab

Step 2. Enter the amount

Amounts display in the unit set under Tools, then Preferences. An exclamation mark sends the maximum balance instead of a typed figure.

Screenshot: the amount field

Step 3. Set the fee

The slider targets either a confirmation time or a depth in the mempool, using Electrum’s own mempool-based estimates rather than a fixed rate.  

Step 4. Choose which coins to spend, if it matters

The Coins tab lists every unspent output separately, so a payment can draw on a selection you choose rather than whatever the wallet picks. A frozen output stays out of every transaction until you release it.

Step 5. Read the preview before signing

The preview shows the transaction size in vbytes, the fee rate in sat/vbyte, the total fee and the change output. Replace-by-fee is set by default, which is what makes step seven possible.

Step 6. Sign and broadcast

Signing requires the wallet password unless the wallet is already unlocked. Electrum broadcasts through its main server.

Step 7. Bump or cancel, if the fee was too low

From the history tab, a right-click offers Increase Fee, Child Pays For Parent, and Cancel by double-spend.  

What a send costs

Electrum takes no cut of a payment, so the entire cost is the network fee. Three things set that figure, and none of them is under Electrum’s control:

• Demand for block space. Fee rates rise and fall with the mempool, which is why any number printed in a review is stale within hours.
• How many inputs the payment spends. A transaction assembled from many small unspent outputs is physically larger, and fees are charged per vbyte, so a wallet holding lots of dust pays more to move the same amount.
• The confirmation target chosen. Electrum’s slider trades speed against cost explicitly rather than picking for you.

Because the first changes continuously, this review embeds no fee figure. Check the rate in the app before sending: Electrum’s estimates come from mempool data, and the preview shows size in vbytes and rate in sat/vbyte before anything is signed.

Electrum swaps move bitcoin between layers, not between coins

Electrum provides no built-in cross-chain swap interface. It holds no asset other than bitcoin and integrates no exchange provider, so anyone who arrives expecting a tab that swaps BTC to USDT or ETH will not find one.

What Electrum does offer is a submarine swap, which is a different operation despite the shared word. It moves your own bitcoin between your on-chain balance and your Lightning balance, trustlessly, in either direction. According to Electrum’s release notes, two charges apply: the provider’s percentage and the mining fee on the on-chain leg. Electrum takes neither. The reference swap server ships with a 0.5% default that any operator may change, so check the live provider list in the app rather than trust a figure in a review.

no operation inside Electrum converts your bitcoin into anything else. To hold a different asset you must exchange Bitcoin (BTC) through an outside service and send the proceeds to a second wallet, because Electrum provides no mechanism for either half of that.

Can you buy bitcoin with a card in Electrum?

No. Electrum has never integrated a payment provider, and no purchase route appears in the release notes, the documentation or the published plugin directory.

Electrum is not a complete fiat-onboarding wallet. A first-time buyer needs an external service or must receive bitcoin from another person — so you buy crypto elsewhere first and send it in.

Networks and assets

Electrum supports Bitcoin. That is the complete list, on-chain and over the Lightning Network, and the documentation states plainly that the project has never supported anything else.

Coverage within Bitcoin runs deep:

• legacy, P2SH-wrapped SegWit and native SegWit addresses, with new wallets defaulting to native SegWit;
• bech32 and bech32m encoding, and sends to any witness version;
• PSBT, so a transaction can cross between wallets and signing devices;
• multi-signature schemes of up to fifteen cosigners.

Anyone holding Ethereum, Solana (SOL), Tron (TRX) or Monero (XMR) needs a second wallet permanently. No in-wallet exchange bridges the gap either, so moving value between Electrum and that second wallet means an outside service both times: once to convert, once to send.

What else is in the app

Electrum has grown a wide surface beyond send and receive, and nearly all of it removes a dependency rather than adds a convenience.

• Your own server. Electrum keeps connections to about ten servers running ElectrumX or Electrs. One becomes the main server and learns which addresses belong to you. Run your own and that leak closes.
• Tor routing. Native, either through a single onion server or across several servers behind the Tor proxy.
• Cold storage. Generate the wallet on an air-gapped machine, export the master public key to a watching-only wallet online, then carry transactions out unsigned and back signed.
• Two-factor authentication. TrustedCoin cosigns a 2-of-3 wallet against an authenticator code. Your seed still holds two of the three keys, so the coins survive if the service disappears. TrustedCoin sets its own charge, published on its site rather than in Electrum.
• Plugins. The directory at plugins.electrum.org carries Nostr Wallet Connect, a Nostr cosigner, timelock inheritance, silent payments, a full-node connector and a swap server of your own.
• Merchant tools and a daemon. A JSONRPC interface, a scriptable command line, hold invoices, watchtowers that punish channel cheats while you are offline, and signed payment requests through the payserver, a separate plugin since version 4.7.0.

Note the absences: no exchange, no dApp browser, no WalletConnect, no token approvals, no NFT gallery, no staking, no ads. Every one of those is a place where something asks for a signature, and Electrum users never reach any of them.

What you can verify yourself

Four things anyone can confirm without taking our word for it:

• Source code. The complete client sits under the MIT Licence at github.com/spesmilo/electrum. That has held since version 2.6.
• Build integrity. Binaries are built reproducibly and signed independently by five people. Website changes require signatures from both ThomasV and SomberNight, checked by a script before anything becomes public, and releases need at least those two keys before the server exposes them.
• Privacy policy. Electrum requires no account, name, email or identity verification for ordinary wallet use. Its optional public crash reports may contain IP addresses, timestamps, device names and operating-system information, and the privacy policy also permits third-party service providers to process data needed for their functions.
• Security disclosures. Each advisory carries a severity rating and a fixed version. Version 4.7.2 fixed a medium-severity plugin authorisation bypass that allowed local code execution, plus a low-severity spending-limit bypass in the Nostr Wallet Connect plugin; 4.8.0 fixed a low-severity SPV verification flaw.

What you cannot confirm is an independent audit. No dated report from a named firm appears in the repository or on electrum.org, and none surfaced in our research. Version 4.8.1, the current release, states only that it contains important security fixes and that details will follow later.

Security incidents

Four documented security or reliability events: two phishing-related theft episodes, one server-availability attack and one malicious-translation incident. The 2020 loss landed two years after the fix, on a version the user had never updated. That is the argument for the signature check in step two, restated as a sixteen-million-dollar receipt.

The February 2026 episode is the one to watch, because it is recent and because its lesson is uncomfortable. Independently signed builds protect the binary, and nothing protected the words rendered inside it.

Recovery: does the backup work?

The test is a removal of the application, a fresh install on a clean machine, and a restore from the twelve words written down in step five — stored the way a seed phrase should be stored.

Result: the restore succeeded, the addresses matched character for character.

Three caveats matter more here than the result, and each comes from Electrum’s own documentation.

• The seed does not recreate a usable Lightning channel or its live state. Depending on the channel and available backup data, Electrum may be able to request or perform a force-close and return recoverable funds on-chain. A static channel backup can help close a channel, but it does not restore the channel itself.
• Addresses past the gap limit are not scanned. Electrum stops after twenty consecutive unused addresses. Funds beyond that point stay invisible on restore until you raise the limit or generate addresses forward to reach them.
• Imported-key wallets have no seed at all. A wallet built from pasted private keys or watched addresses can be recovered only from the file itself. Copy the file somewhere safe, or lose it.

The Lightning caveat above comes from Electrum’s release notes rather than a test of our own, since Lightning was out of scope for this session.

Where the interface confused us

Screenshot protection makes the wallet invisible in captures. Electrum renders its own windows as black rectangles in any screen capture on Windows, a defence against capture tools and Microsoft Recall that is on by default. The behaviour is documented in Electrum’s own FAQ, which is itself the tell: the question “why can’t I see anything?” appears there because users hit it without explanation. The switch sits in Settings under Misc, or in the config file as screenshot_protection. 

Screenshot: Prevent screenshot settings 

Strengths

• Fully open-source client under the MIT Licence, with reproducible and independently signed builds.
• Deep Bitcoin transaction controls: coin selection, manual fee rates, RBF, CPFP, cancellation, batching and PSBT.
• No Electrum fee on ordinary on-chain sends.
• Support for multisig, hardware wallets, cold storage, Tor and a self-hosted server.
• Clean-install recovery reproduced the tested address.

Limitations

• Bitcoin only, with no fiat on-ramp or cross-asset exchange.
• No private customer-support channel.
• A public Electrum server can associate queried addresses with the user’s IP unless a private server or Tor is used.
• Lightning recovery and channel backups are more complex than ordinary seed recovery.
• No public third-party audit of the shipped client was found.

Verdict

Electrum is a strong choice for Bitcoin users who value verifiable builds and detailed control over transactions. It is a poor fit for users who want a multi-asset wallet, fiat funding or a consumer-style support service.

Who Electrum suits, and who it does not

If you hold Bitcoin and want to check what you run

This is the case Electrum was built for. You can read the code that generates your keys, confirm that the binary you downloaded came from that code, and point the client at a server you run yourself, so no third party links your addresses to your IP address.

If you want fine control over transactions

Coin control per UTXO, frozen outputs, manual rates in sat/vbyte, RBF and CPFP from the history tab, batching, PSBT, and offline signatures across an air gap. Wallets that abstract these away are easier; they also decide for you.

If Bitcoin is one of several assets you hold

Electrum manages none of the others, and the project states it never has. A second wallet becomes permanent. With no exchange feature to fall back on, every move between the two ecosystems routes through an outside service rather than anything in the interface.

If this would be your first wallet

Three things point the other way. No card purchase means funding depends on an account you already hold elsewhere. The wizard asks about wallet architecture before anything else. And Electrum publishes no private support channel by policy, so a problem at eleven at night goes to a public GitHub issue rather than a chat window.

Alternatives

• Exodus — the opposite trade. Bitcoin sits alongside dozens of other assets, a card on-ramp works inside the app, and support runs through live chat. Its core application is closed source with no published third-party audit, and its in-wallet swap carries a measurable cost against the market rate where an Electrum send carries none. 
• Trust Wallet — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Tron from one recovery phrase, and card purchases inside the app. Broader coverage than Electrum by a wide margin, without the coin control, the verifiable builds or the option to run your own server.
• A hardware wallet with Electrum as the interface — the desktop build drives Ledger, Trezor, Coldcard, BitBox02, Jade and three other brands, which keeps Electrum’s fee handling and coin control while the keys stay off the computer. Electrum added a seed-entropy security notice to the Coldcard plugin documentation in version 4.8.1.

Frequently asked questions

What does Electrum cost?

Nothing to install, and nothing to hold bitcoin in. Electrum takes no cut of a payment, so a send costs only the network fee, which goes to miners and varies with demand for block space. There is no subscription and no paid tier. Optional two-factor wallets carry a separate charge set by TrustedCoin, not by Electrum.

Is Electrum safe to use?

No breach of Electrum’s build pipeline or published binaries has been recorded, and the full source is public. Flaws in the client have been found and fixed, though — including the rendered server messages behind the 2018 phishing losses — and the current release ships security fixes it has not yet described. Verify every download’s GPG signature, and update promptly.

Does Electrum support Ethereum or Solana, or let me swap between coins?

No to both. Electrum supports Bitcoin and never supported anything else. There is no cross-asset exchange. Electrum’s submarine swaps move bitcoin between on-chain and Lightning balances without converting it into another asset.

Can I buy bitcoin with a card in Electrum?

No. Electrum integrates no payment provider and offers no purchase route, so bitcoin has to arrive as a transfer from an exchange, another wallet, or someone paying you. The company frames this as deliberate: it describes itself as a software publisher rather than a money transmitter, and a card on-ramp would contradict that.

Is Electrum open source, and has it been audited?

Open source, yes, entirely, under the MIT Licence — read it, run it, modify it, redistribute your own build. Binaries are reproducible and signed independently by five people. Audited, no: no named firm’s dated report appears in the repository or on the site. Electrum discloses through GitHub Security Advisories with severity ratings and fixed versions instead.

Can I fully restore an Electrum Lightning wallet from the seed?

Not as an active Lightning wallet. The seed restores the on-chain wallet, but channel recovery may require a force-close or channel backup and does not recreate the original channel state.

Does Electrum offer customer support?

Not privately, and this is policy rather than an oversight. All issues are resolved in public, on GitHub or Bitcointalk. Electrum states directly that anyone offering help through a private message is most likely an imposter after your bitcoin, which reflects how often support impersonation has been used against users of this wallet.

Which hardware wallets work with Electrum?

Eight brands, per Electrum’s own hardware wallet documentation: Ledger, Trezor, Coldcard, BitBox02 and Blockstream Jade, plus KeepKey, Archos Safe-T mini and Digital Bitbox. Linux users need udev rules to grant USB access to the device. Electrum also added a seed-entropy security notice to the Coldcard plugin documentation in version 4.8.1, worth reading before you generate keys there.

Sources

All links checked on August 17, 2026.

• Electrum official site, download page and privacy policy
• Electrum source code and MIT Licence
• Electrum release notes — version 4.8.1 (August 10, 2026) back to 2.0
• Electrum security advisories
• Electrum documentation: frequently asked questions
• Electrum documentation: two-factor authentication
• Electrum documentation: cold storage
• Electrum documentation: hardware wallets on Linux
• Electrum documentation: submarine swap servers
• Electrum documentation: GPG signature verification
• Electrum documentation: Tor
• Electrum plugin directory
• CoinDesk on the December 2018 phishing attack
• Malwarebytes on the ElectrumDoSMiner botnet, April 2019
• CoinDesk on the 1,400 BTC loss, August 2020
• Bitcoin Optech on submarine swaps