At the beginning of 2025, I mentioned in a number of places that I thought during 2026 we’d get to the point where building your own highly competitive self-custody bitcoin wallet would be doable with an LLM during the year.

Sadly, what mostly happened instead is that wallet developers continued to double-down on fully trusted and custodial platforms, further centralizing Bitcoin and bringing pervasive censorship on Bitcoin closer to reality.

Still, we did (almost) deliver the software required to bring the original claim to bear, with a full graduated wallet in a simple library allowing wallets to offer highly competitive fees and overall UX being close to ready…if anyone wanted it.

I spent a few days over the holidays testing it out, having an LLM build me a native iOS graduated wallet, and it nearly entirely works, basically only missing some bugfixes and the ability to store and display transaction descriptions. At least we built it.