The team of Muun, a self-custodial wallet for bitcoin and lightning, has announced that Muun is moving to a new open-source model. As of now, Muun’s native Android and iOS apps can be entirely built from the source code published in the Muun public repository.
Muun is currently working to have reproducible builds for the Android application, which will be available soon. They are also looking into how to build the iOS application deterministically.
A statement from the Muun team reads as follows:
“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. 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 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.”