What it built
The Armory repository was created on GitHub on 19 November 2011. Its idea was that the computer holding your keys should never touch a network, and that this should be workable by someone who is not a system administrator.
The mechanism is a split. An online machine runs a watching-only wallet, which knows every address but no private key, so it can see incoming payments and build an unsigned transaction. That transaction is carried to an offline machine on removable media, signed there, and carried back to be broadcast. Armory's own description is blunt about the consequence: "only someone with physical access to the offline computer can steal your Bitcoins."
It shipped the other early self-custody primitives too. Paper backups that restore a whole wallet rather than one key. Fragmented backups, splitting a backup into pieces of which some subset reconstructs it. Lockboxes, which are multi-signature addresses several parties fund and spend together. Armory also chose not to implement its own networking, relying on Bitcoin Core to validate the chain, on the reasoning that reimplementing consensus-relevant code is how you end up on the wrong chain.
What went wrong, and what happened next
The fragmented backup feature was broken. In a disclosure on its own site, the maintainer recorded that Gregory Maxwell had warned him the Shamir's Secret Sharing implementation derived its polynomial coefficients deterministically from the secret rather than at random, which leaks information a correct scheme would not. The advice was to "consider all wallets that use fragmented backups to be compromised". The fix shipped in 0.96.3.
On 4 February 2016 the company posted that "Armory Technologies Incorporated has decided to discontinue the development of the open source Bitcoin Armory software", handing it to the maintainer Farhod Fathpour with no further support. Code up to 0.93.3 stays under the GNU Affero General Public License; everything after is MIT. The credits page lists Alan Reiner as project creator and former project lead.
The last stable release, 0.96.5, is dated December 2018. A 0.97 release candidate appeared in May 2026 and the repository still takes commits. Armory Technologies, Inc. still asserts copyright on bitcoinarmory.com. No registration for that company could be established here, which is why the structure is left undocumented.