A wallet can hold keys correctly and still be unusable, and until 2020 there was no shared reference for the second half of that sentence. The Bitcoin Design Community was formed to build one. Its stated aim is to make bitcoin more intuitive and accessible so that people can participate regardless of technical expertise or geography, on the argument that this requires creators everywhere to have resources and a community, not just better code.
The work started in the summer of 2020 as draft outlines in a pair of Google Docs. The repository was created that June, and on 2 June 2021 the community announced the first public version of the Bitcoin Design Guide. A major revision covering the Lightning Network followed on 9 February 2022.
The Guide is the substance. It is a free, open-source reference for people building non-custodial Bitcoin products, and it is organised the way a designer actually works: reference designs for a daily spending wallet, a savings wallet, an inheritance wallet and a shared wallet, each broken down into first use, backup and recovery, requesting, sending, fees, activity, privacy and settings. Underneath sit sections on coin selection, private key management, external signers, multi-key setups, payment request formats and accessibility, plus case studies of real products including Blixt Wallet, SeedSigner, WalletScrutiny and the Bitcoin Core App.
The organisation is deliberately light. Discussion happens in an open Discord and on
GitHub, anyone can join, and the community says it aims to be as open and decentralised as
possible. Content is dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 and MIT at the user's option, with
images additionally available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. No legal entity, no
board and no founding individuals are named on the site or in the repository, so
structure is recorded as Undocumented and no people are listed here. Its theme for 2026
is a set of Impact Initiatives, areas where it argues design work would change outcomes for
Bitcoin users.