JavaFX In Action #23 with Craig Raw about the Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet

November 20, 2025

I don’t have any bitcoin myself, but still find the idea of the blockchain and “public shared money” fascinating. And as it turns out, there is a free and open-source bitcoin wallet, created with JavaFX, that wants to help people understand how the Bitcoin system works, and make transactions easy to understand. Thanks to the work of Craig Raw, there is an easy-to-use desktop application to create and manage wallets. And while he explains the app itself, we also learn a lot about the Bitcoin ecosystem, reproducible builds, security, hardware wallets, and more!

About Craig

Craig Raw is the creator of the Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet. He lives in South Africa. Funny fact: in the video, you can hear that he is surrounded by birds who wanted to join the conversation.

Craig loves Java and JavaFX because of how easy it is to create user-friendly interfaces. He also values the security built into Java. Another important aspect for him is the ability to create reproducible builds, a key factor in the security of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

You can find him on:

GitHub
X/Twitter
@craigraw on Nostr

Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet

Sparrow is a Bitcoin wallet for those who value financial self sovereignty. Sparrow’s emphasis is on security, privacy and usability. Sparrow does not hide information from you - on the contrary it attempts to provide as much detail as possible about your transactions and UTXOs, but in a way that is manageable and usable.

Sparrow supports all the features you would expect from a modern Bitcoin wallet, however, it is also unique in that it contains a fully featured transaction editor that also functions as a blockchain explorer. This feature not only allows editing of all transaction’s fields, but also allows you to easily inspect the transaction bytes before broadcasting.