Electrum Purple - Lightweight BitcoinPurple Wallet

Unofficial fork of Electrum with support for the BitcoinPurple network.

Licence:         MIT Licence
Fork author:     Davide Grilli <davide.grilli@outlook.com>
Original author: Thomas Voegtlin
Language:        Python (>= 3.10)
Upstream:        https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum

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About this fork

This project is an unofficial, independent fork of Electrum, maintained by Davide Grilli. It adds first-class support for the BitcoinPurple (BTCP) network — a Bitcoin fork with 1-minute blocks and a 120-block difficulty retarget window — while keeping full compatibility with the original Electrum codebase and all upstream bug fixes.

This fork is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by the original Electrum project or its developers. For the official Bitcoin wallet, use electrum.org.

What is different from upstream Electrum

• --bitcoinpurple and --bitcoinpurple_testnet launch flags
• BitcoinPurple chain parameters (1-min blocks, 120-block retarget, adjusted PoW limits)
• Lightning Network timeouts scaled for 1-minute block times
• Branding and packaging renamed to electrum-purple / Electrum Purple

Everything else — wallet format, Lightning support, hardware wallets, plugins — is identical to upstream Electrum.

Licence and credits

This software is released under the MIT Licence, the same licence as the original Electrum. All original copyright notices are preserved as required by the licence.

Original copyright: © 2011-2024 Thomas Voegtlin and The Electrum developers. Fork additions: © 2024-2026 Davide Grilli.

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Getting started

(If you've come here looking to simply run Electrum, you may download it here.)

Electrum itself is pure Python, and so are most of the required dependencies, but not everything. The following sections describe how to run from source, but here is a TL;DR:

$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-dev
$ ELECTRUM_ECC_DONT_COMPILE=1 python3 -m pip install --user ".[gui,crypto]"

Not pure-python dependencies

Qt GUI

If you want to use the Qt interface, install the Qt dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt6

libsecp256k1

For elliptic curve operations, libsecp256k1 is a required dependency.

If you "pip install" Electrum, by default libsecp will get compiled locally, as part of the electrum-ecc dependency. This can be opted-out of, by setting the ELECTRUM_ECC_DONT_COMPILE=1 environment variable. For the compilation to work, besides a C compiler, you need at least:

$ sudo apt-get install automake libtool

If you opt out of the compilation, you need to provide libsecp in another way, e.g.:

$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-dev

cryptography

Due to the need for fast symmetric ciphers, cryptography is required. Install from your package manager (or from pip):

$ sudo apt-get install python3-cryptography

hardware-wallet support

If you would like hardware wallet support, see this.

Running from tar.gz

If you downloaded the official package (tar.gz), you can run Electrum from its root directory without installing it on your system; all the pure python dependencies are included in the 'packages' directory. To run Electrum from its root directory, just do:

$ ./run_electrum

You can also install Electrum on your system, by running this command:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools python3-pip
$ python3 -m pip install --user .

This will download and install the Python dependencies used by Electrum instead of using the 'packages' directory. It will also place an executable named electrum in ~/.local/bin, so make sure that is on your PATH variable.

Development version (git clone)

(For OS-specific instructions, see here for Windows, and for macOS)

Check out the code from GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum.git
$ cd electrum
$ git submodule update --init

Run install (this should install dependencies):

$ python3 -m pip install --user -e .

Create translations (optional):

$ sudo apt-get install gettext
$ ./contrib/locale/build_locale.sh electrum/locale/locale electrum/locale/locale

Finally, to start Electrum:

$ ./run_electrum

Run tests

Run unit tests with pytest:

$ pytest tests -v

(can be parallelized with -n auto option, using pytest-xdist plugin)

To run a single file, specify it directly like this:

$ pytest tests/test_bitcoin.py -v

Creating Binaries

• Linux (tarball)
• Linux (AppImage)
• macOS
• Windows
• Android

Contributing

Bug reports, testing, and pull requests for BitcoinPurple-specific features are welcome.

For issues unrelated to BitcoinPurple support (core wallet, Lightning, hardware wallets), please check the upstream Electrum project first — fixes merged upstream can be rebased into this fork.

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Electrum Purple is an independent fork and is not affiliated with the Electrum project. Original Electrum translations are maintained on Crowdin.