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name: bitcoin-infrastructure-sparrow description: | Sparrow Wallet: power-user desktop wallet for Bitcoin. PSBT-first, HW wallet support, multisig coordination, Silent Payments, PayJoin, BIP47. USE WHEN: power-user wallet workflows, evaluating Sparrow vs Specter / Electrum. allowed-tools: Read, Grep, Glob

Sparrow Wallet

Java desktop Bitcoin wallet by Craig Raw. Power-user oriented: detailed UTXO control, PSBT-first, multisig, HW wallet support.

Repo: github.com/sparrowwallet/sparrow. Current release 2.5.4 (27 August 2026).

Features

• Single-sig + multi-sig wallets.
• HW wallet support: Trezor, Ledger, Coldcard, BitBox02, Jade, Passport, Keystone, SeedSigner, Krux, Specter DIY. USB devices go through Lark, Sparrow's own Java library (initially a port of Python HWI), which replaced the bundled HWI in 2.1.0 (4 February 2025); airgapped devices go over QR/microSD instead. Newer devices added in the 2.4/2.5 line: Trezor Safe 7, Ledger Nano Gen5 and Keycard / Keycard Shell (2.4.0, February 2026), ERA (2.5.3, July 2026).
• Airgap via animated QR (BCUR), microSD.
• Multiple backends: Bitcoin Core, Electrum (electrs/Fulcrum/ ElectrumX), Bitcoin Knots.
• PSBT comprehensive editor. Internal representation is PSBTv2 (BIP370) by default since 2.4.0 (10 February 2026); exports to file, QR, clipboard and PayJoin are converted back to PSBTv0 unless the transaction carries silent-payment fields, so v0-only signers are unaffected outside Silent Payments.
• PayJoin (BIP78).
• BIP47 PayNyms support (retained).
• Silent Payments: sending in 2.3.0 (October 2025), BIP375 PSBT fields plus DLEQ proof verification for hardware signers in 2.4.0 (February 2026), receiving wallets — including airgapped signers — in 2.5.0 (May 2026).
• BIP353 human-readable names with DNSSEC proofs carried in the PSBT (2.3.0, October 2025).
• No built-in CoinJoin: the Whirlpool client was removed in 1.9.0 (25 April 2024) and has not been replaced.
• Tor via SOCKS5 proxy (internal Tor upgraded to 0.4.8.21 in 2.4.0, February 2026).

Detailed UI

• Coin control: explicit input selection per tx.
• Transaction inspector: full PSBT, scripts, witness.
• Address verification: per-device confirmation flow.
• Wallet backups: encrypted .mnemonic / descriptor exports.

Multisig

Supports cross-vendor multisig with descriptor-based config. Excellent UX for HW wallet signing rounds.

Setup

Download installer for Mac/Windows/Linux. Configure Bitcoin Core or Electrum server in settings. Optionally enable Tor.

Compared

Aspect	Sparrow	Specter Desktop	Electrum
Language	Java	Python + Vue	Python
HW wallet support	best	rich	partial
PSBT detail	richest	rich	basic
Multi-sig UX	top	top	OK
Mobile	no	no	yes (legacy)
Privacy features	strong	strong	basic

Use cases

• Power users with mixed HW wallet setups.
• Multi-sig custody.
• Privacy-conscious workflows (PayJoin, PayNyms, Silent Payments, Tor).

Common issues

• Java JVM: running or building from source requires Java 25+ as of the 2.4/2.5 line (2.4.0, February 2026, moved to Java 25.0.2; release binaries are built with Eclipse Temurin 25.0.2+10). The bundled installer remains the recommended route.
• No CoinJoin — history: Sparrow shipped a Whirlpool client until 1.9.0 (25 April 2024) removed it along with the other Soroban features and dependencies, following the Samourai shutdown. Nothing replaced it; mixing now needs an external coordinator/client. In-wallet privacy is PayJoin, PayNyms and Silent Payments.
• Tor connection: ensure Sparrow's Tor proxy port matches your Tor instance.
• HWI instructions are stale: guides that tell you to install or upgrade Python HWI for Sparrow predate 2.1.0 (4 February 2025), which replaced it with Lark; on macOS and Windows Sparrow now deletes the leftover HWI cache directory. Upstream HWI went feature-frozen / maintenance-only in August 2026 (bitcoin-core/HWI issue #850, 18 August 2026, with BHWI named as successor), which no longer affects Sparrow.

See also

• specter-desktop/SKILL.md
• electrum-wallet/SKILL.md
• ../hardware/hwi/SKILL.md
• ../privacy/coinjoin/SKILL.md
• ../privacy/payjoin/SKILL.md