Status.im Hardwallet Devcon4 wrap-up

Highlights of what was achieved and what the Hardwallet Team learned in Prague during the #Cryptolife Hackathon and Devcon4.

Well… where to start when your head is spinning with enthusiasm and new ideas 🙂? This community really rocks and last week in Prague for #Cryptolife and Devcon was a mind blowing  great time for us, and our hardwallet project. The team got tons of interest from developers and other decentralized projects; it’s clear now that this card hits a sweet spot and brings something new to the ecosystem with its two main attributes of being inexpensive and a highly secure hardware plaftorm.

Team work

First off, we had quality time within the team to discuss some of the current open points:

• With regards to the name of this product, we had a long debate, and decided … to organize a vote within the community. This vote will take place between 23/11 and 30/11 right after the OKR vote campaign. Stay tuned.
• Tap-to-download: This is a convenience vs security debate, we have decided to not integrate this feature for now and put security first. See the notes for detailed reasoning.
• User experience and packaging: Huge thanks to Patrick & Dennis for organizing test sessions. We are currently reviewing the sessions and will adapt UI and packaging form factor & text.
• @michele has put together a draft EIP proposal for non-wallet usage of keys derived from a BIP-32 tree, the main example for us being whisper keys. See the proposition here. Your feedback on the ETH Magician forum would be appreciated.
• @andrea has created a library for Go, and a command line tool in Go to install the applet and initialise the card .

Making our API widely available to the ecosystem

Several projects expressed interest in integrating with our card. Cards are already in the hands of Walleth, MakerDAO, imToken, Metamask, Liquidity networks, Dexlabs and we will have discussions in the coming days with Gnosis Safe team, Grid+, and more.

Kudos to Ligi from Walleth that  managed to integrate our card in two days during status' Cryptolife Hackathon with his ETC wallet and for his enthusiasm about the project that spurred a lot of interesting discussions in the community, which expressed a strong need for a standard crypto smartcards API.

We are clearly solving a problem with the work we’ve done; the API is defined, tested, and implemented. It is also currently integrated in several projects (Status, go-eth, walleth for now). We will further document our API, format it the right way (EIP ?), and organize an effort to push it more widely to the ecosystem.

Addressing new use cases that have generated a lot of interest

• Mnemonics are painful. Storing them on paper is arguably the weakest security link today in wallet experiences. We had many discussions on how our card could store the master secret in place of the mnemonic. We will brainstorm this further and come back with suggestions.
• The possibility to bundle the card with crypto currencies or tokens could be huge leverage to facilitate access and adoption in the crypto and dApp landscape. Our card and physical stores could become a very accessible fiat-to-crypto gateway for non tech savvy users, or in developed countries. We still have to work on system solutions to making the cards uniquely identifiable, and how to provision coins/tokens etc.
• What if our API and thus our card could be accessible directly from the desktop browser to sign transactions? This would be great. However we have to solve some issues with regards to the reader driver, or use a browser extension, or rely on a wallet connect mechanism. We are anyway keen on brainstorming on this use case.

Join the discussion about new features and issues on GitHub