When we launched Samourai back in 2015 we decided on taking some shortcuts to get our product in the hands of bitcoin users as early as possible. This allowed us to foster a special relationship with each member of our growing user base - to really understand their use case and their motivations - so we could create a bitcoin wallet that people actually want to use.

The biggest shortcut we took is to rely on public 3rd party API’s to power the wallet during the Alpha stage instead of building out our own infrastructure. While this strategy introduced some valid privacy concerns, it allowed us - a team of 2 at the time - to get our product on the market as soon as possible and start receiving the most valuable resource of all: feedback from users.

We have made a pledge from the very beginning that Samourai would remain alpha software until all wallet related 3rd party API calls were replaced by our own internal self hosted infrastructure.

As of Samourai Wallet 0.95 released on 31st July 2017 your wallet will no longer rely on external 3rd party API services, instead our own custom built and Iceland based API server - built on top of Bitcoin Core - will be used instead. This is a huge step for us and a major step forward on the road to Samourai 1.0 full release. We haven’t pulled out 100% of the 3rd party API calls, but we’re almost there.

The first time you load up the wallet after this update it may take a few minutes (depending on the size of your wallet) to get everything synced. Please let it finish or you may experience display issues.

If you do not see the Bitcoin amount you expect to see do not panic, your bitcoin is completely fine. Just contact us by live chat or email and we’ll have it fixed right away.

We will be releasing the source code for the Samourai API server as open source licensed under the Unlicense once we release the 1.0 version of Samourai Wallet.

As always we rely on your feedback. We are available to answer any questions or concerns you might have. Visit our brand new support center to view helpful articles or live chat with a support agent at support.samourai.io