Muun's New Open Source Model
We're happy to share that Muun is moving to a new open-source model, much more aligned with the values of the bitcoin's community and our mission.
As announced in the Muun 2.0 launch, we are committed to building a bitcoin wallet that makes self-custody easy and safe for everyone in the world. Since the launch, several people from the bitcoin community have reached out to us and shared their concerns about our open-source model. We've come to understand that self-custody cannot truly exist without easy auditability and openness, which motivated us to make this change.
As of today, Muun's native apps can be entirely built from the code published in our public repository, our software is licensed as MIT, and we are working on having reproducible builds.
How we got here
From early on, we knew that auditability was a key component of self-custody, and our code has always been published in a public repository. At the same time, we were (and still are!) worried about this software being used to distribute malicious copies that steal users’ funds. Sadly, this is an all-too-real risk for newcomers and clearly goes against our mission.
For this reason, when we released Muun 1.0 we decided to publish the apps' source code without the UI layer. This would make it easy to audit the relevant parts of the codebase, but make it really difficult for scammers to replicate a malicious version of the app.
Many things have changed since then. Reproducible builds are now viable for mobile applications distributed through the official app stores. App store providers have expressed their willingness to work with us to identify and remove scams from their stores. Finally, we now have a larger user base helping us detect and report scams.
All this encouraged us to review our past decision. We believe that having verifiable builds is the only way to provide true self-custody. Muun is now ready to take its auditability to the next level.
Roadmap
Today we are happy to share that both the Android and iOS apps can be entirely built from the source code. We are currently working to have reproducible builds for the Android application, which will be available soon. We are also looking into how to build the iOS application deterministically, which is much harder and, to our knowledge, hasn't been done before. It will take some time, but we are excited about bringing this to iOS as well.
Finally, as we go forward, we’ll be moving towards a much more open development process, in order to make auditabilty easy and true self-custodianship a reality. This will take us time, but we’ll keep moving in that direction.
Thanks for your support and feedback! We'll keep up the hard work.
Download Muun for Andoid or iOS: get.muun.com
Originally published at https://blog.muun.com on February 1, 2021.
