Electrum Developers Apply Fix After Apple Update Bricks Bitcoin Wallets

After the most recent Mac update caused major problems for one of Bitcoin's oldest wallets, its development team has rolled out a fix.

Originally raised as an issue on Github, the Big Sur update is bricking MacOS Electrum clients, a bitcoin software wallet that is a favorite of power users because of its complex tooling and user controls.

The Electrum team announced today that a new release fixes the issue.

"Currently, the latest release of Big Sur has completely broken Electrum. You can't open the app or load any of your wallets," one Electrum user, Nico, told CoinDesk.

The issue was opened on Electrum's Github on Aug. 1, around the time Apple released Big Sur's beta.

While the "Root cause is still unknown," Electrum developer SomberNight said in the Github issue page, it's related to Big Sur's treatment of Python, the coding language in which Electrum is written.

To work around the problem, Electrum users can run the software from source or they can bundle an older version of Python into their software.

The Electrum team's fix incorporates the latter solution.

The snafu is the first case of Apple's latest release disrupting the Bitcoin realm, but it's not the first time the update has caused issues.

Mac users soon discovered the Big Sur update and the error were related.