2020 – The Year of “The Coldest Wallet.” Are You Ready?

The year of breakthroughs in security and user experience, especially if it depends on NGRAVE, “The Coldest Wallet”. NGRAVE is releasing quite an impressive piece of hardware wallet in only a few months from now. Today is the day to still get in early and secure a VIP spot in the subscriber list and the upcoming pre-order campaign. The why Over ten years after the bitcoin paper and entering a new decade in 2020, there are still innumerable significant problems concerning security and customer experience for practically all solutions in the crypto space. Simply said, it remains too difficult and dangerous to hold crypto. Even now, there are only a limited number of options available to keep your crypto safe, and they all require a certain amount of tech-savviness. If it depends on the NGRAVE team, it’s about time to introduce a vast upgrade in security and customer experience. “For us, 2020 is the launch of the NGRAVE product suite. Built-in collaboration with world-class institutions and in co-creation with the end-user, our aim is to perfect the hardware wallet. And that is exactly what we did.”, says NGRAVE’s CEO, Ruben Merre. World-class partnerships In its quest to build a top-tier solution, NGRAVE was incubated by one of the top tech accelerators in the world, imec.istart, which is a subsidiary of world-leading R&D and innovation institute for nano-electronics and chip manufacturing, Imec. NGRAVE not only partnered up with Imec itself for the actual product development but also with COSIC, one of the leading research teams for applied industrial cryptography and hardware security. The COSIC team is worldwide renowned for inventing the Advanced Encryption Standard (“AES” / “Rijndael”) used for protecting top-secret information. It is also competing in the advanced rounds for the NIST post-quantum cryptography standard with no less than 3 different COSIC-developed algorithms. Recently, in September 2019, COSIC also made the news for white hat hacking the Tesla cars. NGRAVE’s greater mission NGRAVE’s goal is to vastly improve on current standards for security and ease-of-use, as well as to foster innovation in the space to ultimately contribute to worldwide blockchain adoption. “Our mission is to enable you to securely and seamlessly own and control your digital assets and cryptocurrencies”, says CTO Xavier Hendrickx, a veteran in the space who witnessed several high-profile cryptocurrency hacks directly from the front lines. Flagship product: The NGRAVE ZERO The NGRAVE ZERO is a hardware wallet that will be released in 2020 and that comes with several remarkable and impressive features: 100% offline: The ZERO has no network capabilities and therefore doesn’t rely on Bluetooth, 4G, NFC, WiFi, or other ways of connecting to an online device. Your keys are generated offline and are never exposed at any point in time. There literally is an offline wall that never allows any remote attacker (e.g. an online hacker) to establish a connection to the ZERO. So how does the device interact with the online realm then? That brings us to the next point. QR-code based communication: The NGRAVE ZERO communicates through one-way QR codes. After your master seed/keys are generated offline on the device, a simple QR code on the touch screen can be scanned by your phone to sync all accounts to the mobile app. Your phone – a connected device – only has access to public information.   QR codes carry a limited amount of data, are one-way only and can easily be verified by other devices. This is why in the blockchain world they generally are already accepted as the most secure way to communicate with an offline device. To receive transactions, you only need to share the public key with your counterparty. To send transactions, the user initiates the transaction on the app, which creates a “transaction signature request” QR code. This QR is then scanned by the ZERO’s camera, which shows the transaction details on its touch screen as a verification step (a crucial step as the app is online and can in theory still be compromised). After verifying on the ZERO that the transaction details remain correct, you can sign the transaction with your PIN-code and fingerprint. The ZERO signs the transaction with the correct private key and generates a transaction signature QR code. Scan the QR code with your app, the latter broadcasting it to the blockchain. Military-grade tamper-proof: In case a physical attacker gets their hands on the device, the ZERO has been military-grade optimized for multiple layers of tamper-proofing. Ultimately, it will notice that it is “under attack” and will wipe the keys from the device. Biometrics: The NGRAVE ZERO has a fingerprint sensor: biometrics are used as an additional salt in the key generation process, as well as for unlocking the device, and for signing transactions. It is recommended to unlock and sign with a combination of PIN code and fingerprint authentication. The first End-to-End solution — “Security doesn’t stop with the hardware wallet”: NGRAVE introduces a new class of key backup: The “NGRAVE GRAPHENE”. This backup solution is a substantial upgrade compared to today’s hardware wallet backup standards, “paper wallets”. Made of two stainless steel plates, the GRAPHENE is fire-, buried-, water- and corrosion-proof. Even in the event that you lose your backup, NGRAVE has an answer. Pre-orders in April 2020 “Pricing will be announced by April 2020, which is also the start of the pre-order campaign. We encourage everyone who is even the slightest bit interested to subscribe on our website now, to ensure the best discounts, as well as an early spot in the queue as initial volumes, will be limited,” says COO Edouard Vanham. Final thoughts NGRAVE has made it clear that they want to contribute to security and user experience in the crypto space. The company has all the right ingredients to become a top tier player, because of — just to name a few — its incredibly strong partnerships, experience in the crypto space, close connection to and co-creation with the end-user, and scrutiny when looking at security and convenience. So what are you waiting for, visit www.ngrave.io and subscribe as an early VIP before it’s too late!