We are living in a hostile digital environment: zero-day vulnerabilities can allow hackers to take control of your computer or smartphone in the flip of a bit, phishing campaigns are specifically targeting Bitcoin holders and no-one is immune against a technical failure. Even without malicious behavior, how to best ensure that your keys are safe from accidental manipulation?
There are countless examples of users who lost significant amount of crypto for various reasons. To avoid all these risks, it is especially critical to protect your private keys with a dedicated cold storage solution.
With Satochip, your private keys are safely isolated inside a secure element and you have the guarantee that these keys are never exported outside of this secure perimeter. Thanks to the reduced attack surface of the smartcard and the open-source code, it is relatively easy to audit the code to ensure that the chip behaves as expected!
A Satochip has the appearance of a bank card that can be connected to your computer using a smartcard reader. In order to perform any sensitive operation (such as signing a transaction), you have to enter a PIN code to unlock the card. If a wrong PIN in entered several times in a row, the card blocks itself and no operation can be done anymore.
Satochip uses a smartcard to secure the private keys that allow access to your Bitcoin and other crypto-assets. This is the same technology that has been used for years to secure financial transactions, telecommunications and identification (think electronic passport for example).
Smartcards are designed specifically to protect private keys and other sensitive data. At the heart of the smartcard lies a special-purpose processor called the “Secure Element”, which is specifically designed for secure applications. This means that this processor is protected again sophisticated attacks such as side-channel attacks, memory attacks, faults attack… Even if you card is lost or stolen, your funds remain SAFU!
So on the one hand, Satochip uses state-of-the-art technology for the purpose of protecting the private keys. On the other hand, this device uses a very mature technology used by billions of devices around the world for many years!
Mission statement / goal
In 2020/2021, our main challenges will be to increase coin support for Satochip and to increase user awareness and adoption.
Currently, Satochip supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (and SLP tokens), Litecoin, Ethereum (and ERC20 tokens). Satochip cards can be used with the well-known Electrum client (and its fork) and MyCrypto client.
The team is working hard to support more crypto-currencies and to integrate with more wallet clients. Mobile app integration will also allow users to communicate with the card through NFC, for example with a smartphone.
At Satochip, we are committed to keep our code open and to provide the best support for our hardware wallet, notably via our Telegram channel. All the developments are self-funded, which allows us to keep our independence and focus on our users for the long-term.
So if you like this project and find it useful, don’t hesitate to check our shop, to follow us on Twitter, join our Telegram channel and star our projects on Github!
This article is a part of the CoinFestUK Sponsors Blog. CoinFestUK is a free to attend, global crypto gathering with workshops, speakers, exhibitions, activities, bitcoin beer party, bitcoin treasure hunt and much more. The event will take place between April 8th – 11th of 2021 in Manchester, United Kingdom.
Find Hotels CoinFestUK 2021 Manchester
Please consider donating some sats to help us scale
BTC Address: 3Fj22AT7SsiRiC5Zx5N9woQTPnxtpfDyzW
