An open-source security platform w/ Zach Herbert from Foundation

I had pre ordered batch two and then I just wanted to harass you with my questions. So I had you on last time. I guess I haven't technically pre ordered. We're going to talk through today, but we'll. I, I'll be getting one for. For other reasons. For other reasons.

Announced that back in 2020, started the company a little earlier in 2020 and we've shipped the Passport Founders Edition and then we've been shipping for about two years the second gen Passport, which we called Passport Batch two, now we just call Passport. And alongside that we have a mobile wallet and companion app to Passport called Envoy, which is available on iOS and Android. And I'm really proud of where we've gotten over the last four years.

Passport on some websites is ranked the number one bitcoin hardware wallet and Envoy is five stars on the App Store. And we try to build beautiful products that are really intuitive to use and more approachable for the everyday bitcoiner, especially newer bitcoiners. But we also try to balance that with a lot of power user features and trying to offer really good privacy by default, especially on the mobile app side and then with our customer data and everything like that.

And then the last thing I'd say is we care a lot about open source, you know, proper free and open source software and hardware. We're one of the very few that even publishes all of the circuit board design files, the CAD files, Of course the firmware is always all open source. We prefer to use copy left licenses like GPL or similar on the hardware side. And so that's just ingrained in the company DNA.

So essentially we're building hardware and software and some services, which I'm sure we'll talk about now as well, that tries to lower the barrier to empowering more people to reclaim their freedom and their sovereignty.

With starting out with just a bitcoin hardware wallet, Envoy growing from a companion app to being a just absolutely fantastic bitcoin wallet on its own. And then it was. Was fascinating for me coming into foundation, I had no background on the hardware side. I mean I love the hardware side from like a tech enthusiast perspective, but from like what it means to actually build good open source hardware, like had no idea and it, it blew me away.

The complexity and the, the effort that goes into building a product that you actually love as a company, like a product that you actually want people to use and a product that people are going to love to use and that's something that's just, was really shocking to me and really surprised me when I went into it because coming more from the software background, the hardware side is just so hard.

And so it's really cool to be able to look at the success that foundation has had with previous products and then also to have had the kind of behind the scenes look at what goes into building something that is just a whole new category of product, that is a whole new type of hardware that's never really existed in the bitcoin space.

And there's really multiple years of effort from the hardware and software side coalescing in what you're announcing today when this podcast goes live and what we're going to talk a little bit more about today. So I'll let you intro it. But what really led to the creation and the idea behind Passport Prime? How did foundation get here from a bitcoin only air gapped hardware wallet to wanting to do something like this?

But what I wrote in that draft press release two years ago is basically what we're shipping or announcing now with Passport prime and what we'll be shipping early next year, which is pretty cool. So we had, and I had a pretty solid idea of what we wanted to build when we set out to design and engineer Passport prime two years ago. And some of the features are a little different. We have some, some new features that we initially hadn't thought of, but the concept is exactly there.

And I think it's, it's interesting because when we started the company in 2020, it was inspired partially by myself as a bitcoiner being very frustrated with the hardware wallets that were available. You know, I think I used, I used Trezor and then I made the switch to Cold card and cold card was, you know, had the features that I wanted. I was experimenting with things like multisig. I like the ability to choose my own software wallet.

But I knew that, well, one, for me it was still very frustrating to use and it felt very disjointed. And two, I knew that you can't just give that to a newcomer and expect them to get up and running. And so I, you know, we'd listened to this or I listened to this Stefan Lovera podcast with Michael Flaxman back in 2019 called why Every Hardware Wallet Sucks. And they talked about all the wishlist of features. One of them was an air gap with QR codes, open source, PSBT based and so on.

And so starting the company was as simple as me thinking, well, I think we can build this, I think we can make this. And so we started the company more with a vision to build a specific product, which ended up becoming Passport Founders Edition. And then iterating on that product to build, I think, a better version of it, which became Passport Batch two or Gen two, the current, you know, a device that we're still selling today.

And I don't think we could have just started the company in 2020 and then built Passport Prime. So that's the first thing because something I reflect about a lot, which is this is our third generation device and it's very different from anything else we've built before and also very different from anything else in the market. So I was thinking, you know, is this something we would have even thought of back in 2020 when we were starting the company?

And the answer is definitely no. So a lot of it was informed by, you know, customer feedback and looking at how the customers use Passport, both looking at it from a customer support perspective, getting a lot of feedback, doing in person events like, you know, we do workshops at Pub Key in New York, where we're actually going to be, I guess a day after, on Tuesday, a day after this airs, to do a multisig workshop. They were going to be there Thursday as well, just to hang out in the evening.

And I think there's so many aspects about Passport that are great for bitcoin enthusiasts, but to me there's still a lot of barriers to entry for newcomers, especially on the onboarding side, like the initial setup, you know, how do you set up and backup the device? That hasn't really changed much in hardware wallet land. You know, Passport did a little bit better job with the SD card backup as an option, but it's still not perfect.

You still have to write down a backup code, you still have to figure out where to save that and so on. So that was one area. But then also I think people fundamentally, if they're new to the idea of a hardware wallet, there's a lot of confusion over what you're doing on the hardware wallet versus what you're doing on the software wallet. And if it's air gapped, you know, the idea that the keys are living on the hardware wallet, but you're using your phone typically as the software wallet.

You're going back and forth, you're scanning one thing, you're scanning another thing. It can be difficult to figure out how to stay in sync. And we saw that especially when we would do in person events with complete newcomers. So that was a key aspect of it. But then also it's just my personal experience of as I became more and more of a sovereign individual, it's not just the hardware wallet that you have to use. I had multiple hardware wallets.

I had of course, a Passport, but before that I was using Cold Card, I was using Trezor, but I know a lot of people, a lot of our customers use Passport, but then use other hardware wallets if they want to store other cryptocurrencies like Monero, which is more and more common. And time and time again people would come up to us at the booth at the different conferences and they would say, what coins does Passport support? And the answer, of course is Bitcoin.

And very often we will lose that customer because there's like one other coin that they want to use or they want the optionality of having that. So that's one aspect to all this. But even more than that was using two FA codes, using Yubikeys, using the founders of foundation use hardware encrypted flash drives with keypads on them. So we're juggling all these different devices, the cost of A hardware wallet, two Yubikeys, an encrypted flash drive can easily be over $600 now.

And more importantly, you can't back up a Yubikey. They're notoriously confusing to set up for newcomers. There's no real companion software. And the barriers to becoming more sovereign and have great digital security online feel like they keep increasing instead of decreasing. And I think one of the reasons for that is all this fragmentation, all this different hardware that people have to use.

You start going down the rabbit hole and we, you know, as early, or I would say as ultra early adopters, know a lot about the rabbit hole. And you know, people like you and Q and A are educators, right? You try to guide people to learn how to be more sovereign, be better online privacy, better security. And I just think the barriers to entry are too high.

And I wanted to build something that brings everything into one device and then crucially allows the expansion of features via third party apps so that you're not just getting a single purpose widget that does one thing, you're actually getting more of A platform that can scale and that you can customize to what you want to do in order to better protect your security. So that's why we want to make Passport prime, and crucially as well, I mean, there's.

There's a little bit of competitiveness here where I personally am frustrated that Ledger is the market leader. They probably have over 80% of the market. I don't think of Ledger as being aligned with the principles and ideals of freedom, sovereignty, privacy. And I think that someone needs to come out there and, as I would say, leapfrog them.

Not just compete with them with the same product, but try to create something that actually allows us to leapfrog them and maybe even leapfrog companies like Yubico that have been making the same product for probably over a decade with no changes, no innovation, and really want to try to create a device and software and services that allow us to offer something so much better than what's out there that we can leapfrog them and we can be maybe more principled leadership for the industry

where we actually care about these values that we preach. So that was a pretty long answer, but I hope that explains, you know, why we. Why we wanted to build this. And crucially, as well, we've had a really clear vision for what we've wanted to build for two years.

A lot of, like, what I've done in the past is try to take these complex tools and distill them down for the average person to understand how to actually get started or even just to help them find the tools. But the lower we get that barrier of entry, the more people actually make the jump from awakening to actually taking their own personal privacy, their own financial sovereignty, their own personal security seriously.

Because if that barrier is very low, they're going to take that next step and they're going to fall in love with the benefits that they're actually getting in life. And that's one of the things that I think really excites me about Passport prime is it's not just a bitcoin hardware wallet. I think there is absolutely value to just bitcoin hardware wallets, but it's just one piece of what sovereignty means.

Like, I don't Bitcoin fixes this or this whole like all we need is just to stack sats and the world will fix itself. It's just not, it's not realistic. We need so many other things and we need so many other tools in our tool belt to equip us to push for freedom, to push for individual liberty. And that's one of the things that's really exciting about prime for me.

And you've used this term personal security platform and this idea of like, yes, prime is a hardware wallet for Bitcoin, for Monero, for Ethereum, long term, even though Yalls focus will continue to be the bitcoin side of things. But it's also a lot more because like, I mean people like me, I'm extremely security minded. I love personal privacy. But the idea you mentioned of like you have to have all these different devices to do this. No one's really innovating in this space at all.

Ledger has shipped the same product for, I don't know, a decade. Trezor has done nothing new or interesting for years in the security space. Like you said, Yubikey, all of those options for physical security keys, all they do is just support the latest port for you to be able to plug it into your MacBook or whatever. There's no innovation because they have the market cornered and people have to buy this thing. Oftentimes for work especially there's a requirement to have these kinds of tools.

But bundling these all together is really, really exciting. So maybe you can speak a little bit more to what prime is because I feel like we've kind of been beating around the bush of like the actual product and then like what. Why do you describe it as a personal security platform rather than like a hardware wallet with a few extra features?

So that means, you know, you can do your transactions, you can do multisig, you could still do all the great multisig address verification on device, which is really important. And I think it's one of the most killer features that the Bitcoin wallet functionality has on Passport. You can do temporary seeds, you can do all the stuff that Passport has today. We're also shipping Yubikey or Fido 2 security key, more specifically functionality via NFC and USB.

And so instead of just having one Yubikey or one security key, we are allowing users to create multiple keys and label them, which is really cool. If you want to have, say you need a specific key, a security key for work, specific for personal. Maybe some applications even require two security keys. For example, if you're an iPhone user and you want to enable enhanced data protection on your icloud account to make it end to end encrypted and you want to add hardware keys, they require two.

So now you could just spin up two on Passport prime, you can label them accordingly and it's all there. On device. We also have six digit two FA codes, the TOTP codes that everyone's used to typically Google Authenticator, there's some other apps like Authy, notoriously difficult to back that up. And so we talk about more of the backups as well, which is really interesting how we're approaching it.

But my view on the six digit codes is that the original intent of these two FA codes was to have them on a separate device. And more and more now everyone's phones are their primary computing device. And so in my mind, for your most important accounts, think icloud, Google, crypto, exchanges, social media. There's a lot of stuff that's really important for work as well. You want those ideally on an offline security device, you don't really want those on your phone.

And so the idea is you get your most important six digit two FA codes offline onto Passport Prime. Then we're also shipping with a files app with 50 gigabytes of user available storage. It basically allows you to have the benefits of a hardware encrypted flash drive where you have to actually enter your PIN onto the device in order to access it.

But we even go a step further with a feature that is one of my favorite features on the device called Airlock, where when you plug Passport prime into your computer or phone to use as a flash drive, the computer can only see the files that are in the airlock, so it cannot see the full storage on the device, which we're probably the only device in the world that allows you to do that from a security perspective. And so if you're worried that your computer might be compromised.

You don't want to give your computer full read access to all the files on the device. You don't have to. So it's a really great feature. It's a lot of storage available and it'll allow people to store a lot of important documents, files, maybe keys and other things that they wouldn't necessarily have a place to store right now on a hardware wallet, but they don't want to store it on their computer.

An example could be PGP keys, SSH keys and backup could be for developers, especially for companies that are making devices or software that needs to be signed. Different kinds of signing keys, like for example, we have to secure and backup the signing keys for passports firmware. From a company perspective, that's a great place, you know, to put that, that backup.

And then finally the seed Vault app where not only can you do bip 85 style child seeds, where you can just derive a child seed and you can use that for mobile wallets. Even, you know, outside of Bitcoin, you can use it for, you know, giving friends and family members a seed that they can use with hardware wallets. You can kind of like Uncle Jim functionality as you would call it.

But we're also going to be allowing users to bring in their existing seeds, kind of like a password manager for your seeds, which is amazing because so many people in the space you go to try out a new wallet, you don't really have a seed to give it. You end up generating a seed. Especially mobile wallets or new apps that you're testing noster stuff so many times where people have seeds laying around written on paper and password managers.

So the idea that you can bring those in, you can label them, you can sort them and they can all be stored for you. So it's a pretty killer feature set. It probably covers 80% of what you need to be a sovereign individual and secure online with best practices. So crucially like secure online as in your online accounts and then also your bitcoin. And so that's amazing.

But then for the rest of it, and this is why we're calling it a platform as opposed to like a device is mid next year we're going to be rolling out an SDK for developers and enabling developers to build third party apps. And so that could mean third party cryptocurrency apps. Of course the big news is that the first third party app that is with Cake Wallet and we're working closely with you guys and we're really excited about that.

We could talk more about what that'll look like more specifically. But, you know, as we create this SDK and as we release everything, it's going to be an open developer platform. And I cannot emphasize enough how different this is from anything out there today. Because if you're a developer right now and you're going through it right now, on the cake side, working to add Monero support to Ledger.

The only real way you can support the newest stuff or to build in some hardware wallet integration into your app is to go through Ledger. And the only apps that are on Ledger are coins. And I've heard different things about how you get an app as a new coin onto Ledger, but I believe, and I'm not sure about this, but I've heard that there's payments involved. I know there's really long wait times. They have to review the app, review the code, and then they have to put into Ledger Live.

You're looking at a year or more of effort. And they're not just going to put anything into the Ledger Live app catalog or whatever they call it. It's going to be very different with Passport prime, because, yes, you can work with us. We'll have an app catalog and our Envoy app to make it really easy to install apps. But if developers want to, they're going to be able to distribute their apps directly to users. And so no longer, no longer do you need to go ask for permission.

You can just permissionlessly build an app, integrate whatever you want with your app or service or wallet, and just ship it for Passport Prime. And I think that's going to be huge, both within the crypto space in general, but even within Bitcoin. Right. There's a lot of new capabilities. Like Frost, you don't see any hardware wallet support. You should just be able to go build an app for that.

But then even outside of the Bitcoin or cryptocurrency space as well, you know, maybe you want to build. Someone might build an app with PGP or SSH signing, maybe something more custom to integrate with GitHub for code signing and releases. There's so many things maybe integrating with Bit Warden where you don't have to type in a master password on your computer. You just tap on Passport prime and authorize. These are just things I'm thinking of.

We've recorded Q and A and I recorded a podcast with Max, you know, at Ungovernable, and Q and A just realized, oh my God, you could do a full offline nostr signer where the nostr keys never leave the device, but you're able to enable, enable to you enable yourself to post to nostr from your phone. While basically prime acts as like an HSM style device. So I'm just, we're scratching the surface and I think the comparison that I drew in the keynote is pretty appropriate.

It's the idea of before the iPhone and the App store, there was barely any apps for BlackBerry or, you know, Palm Pilots or, you know, the Palm Trio and those kinds of devices. And then once you had that device that enabled you to have a platform, all of a sudden apps, Right.

And now there's millions and millions of apps, most, most of them kind of crappy, but so many of them offering amazing functionality that if you asked us, you know, over a decade ago, when the iPhone first came out, no one would even expect that all these apps would be there and they didn't really understand the implications of that.

And I hope that we're going to be able to do the same thing on the personal security side and having an offline device to store, store all your most important stuff and then also sign anything. And we as foundation get to focus on building the platform and then we get to focus on empowering all the developers out there to bring whatever they want onto the platform and we can become more of a steward of this platform. And so that's why I'm really excited about it.

And that's what we're calling it, a personal security platform.

And that's a lot of what prime brings that things like Ledger don't. Where you have to just hope that the holy Ledger mothership decides that your coin can get in or that your update that you have to have for this feature can get approved in time for your launch.

There's so much potential for people to build on an open platform that it's not just up to foundation and what you guys can ship, which are always shipping a ton and doing absolutely fantastic work. But you're a limited team.

There are lots of things that people want that either y'all wouldn't think of because obviously they have different backgrounds than maybe y'all do, but also just think of the resources of any open source dev can just grab a Passport prime, work on the SDK when it's out next year and start building whatever their preferred tool is. And I think there's just so much fascinating potential around that.

I think especially on expanding, like you said, the security platform side, the cryptocurrency side is really fascinating because then there's a lot of flexibility in what coins people can get access to. You briefly touched on earlier.

One thing that's going to be really fun is that even though I'm not with foundation anymore and I'm with cake, I'm still going to get to work on Passport prime, because we at CAKE are going to be building the first app for Passport prime even before the SDK is live, initially enabling Monero support with the goal to enable support for all of the cryptocurrencies that are available in CAKE within one app on Passport prime, and just the ability to do that and not have to go through

this crazy, massive company. Well, obviously we'll be working closely with y'all, because you're kind of figuring out the SDK side and building that and improving that while we're working on it, but it's going to allow us to distribute the things that we know our customers, our users desperately want. There's this craving for a good hardware wallet that actually supports all these assets that's not a pain in the *** to use.

And like I think I mentioned on Twitter last week, I've had to use Ledger a lot more than I ever have because that's the best way to get monero support on iOS and Android because it has Bluetooth, Trezza doesn't have Bluetooth, so there's not a way to do iOS specifically.

So we have to use Ledger, even though it's incredibly painful on the dev side, not the best user experience on the customer side, because we have no control over how the Ledger itself responds, over how it communicates with our App, we have no way to influence that. Whereas with prime, we're building the app, we can make the best UX that people have ever seen. Interacting between cakewallet and prime, y'all can do the same thing with Envoy and Prime.

Any wallet developer can do that and build out an applet that specifically fits their needs. So it's going to be really, really cool to see that proliferation of apps, I think, pretty quickly, because I think there's a huge market need for this and a huge desire to have something that's a more open platform, especially in the cryptocurrency space, but also in the security one.

So it's going to be a ton of fun, I think, to get a little bit more technical, do you mind jumping into the details of what's the OS that's going to be running on Prime? What kind of security, open source, that sort of thing can people expect for the things that are actually running there?

Because obviously, when we're talking about like a Bitcoin hardware wallet, a lot of times people get a little nervous if there's anything else on their Bitcoin hardware wallet than just the code to sign Bitcoin transactions with private keys. So maybe jump into a little bit of what the OS is, what kind of security assumptions and guarantees y'all are building into Prime.

And then we're also very familiar, more and more with the frustration from developers, both who are building apps for Ledger, but then also just integrating with the existing Ledger apps, which is basically what Cake is doing, right? Trying to integrate with their SDK, support for the hardware to integrate into your wallet, then also support for the different coins and thinking about the user experience aspect of that.

The idea that if someone is using a Ledger with Cake, they need to open and close different apps on the Ledger. If they want to do Monero, they have to open the Monero app. If they want to do Bitcoin, they have to open the Bitcoin app. I believe you guys support Ethereum, Solana and then other coins as well. And as you support Those coins, the user actually has to first go into Ledger Live and install the apps for those coins one by one.

And their device may run out of memory too, depending on, you know, which model it is. And then all of a sudden you, you can't even have all these apps. You have to uninstall apps and try to manage that. And almost every Ledger user is accustomed to that. The idea that you have to install apps, uninstall apps, you're going to run out of space.

And then if you, even if you're using Cake Wallet and you want to do two transactions, well, you're opening the Monero app, you're closing Monero app, you're opening the Bitcoin app, you're closing the Bitcoin app, you're getting errors all the time. Oh, you have to open, you have to close this app, you have to open this app. And all of that has really informed our approach and architecture with the operating system.

So when Ledger introduced the new Ink devices, Stacks and Flex, I think they missed out on a pretty huge opportunity because I think they had an opportunity to build a new operating system or at least do a major update to their Bolos operating system, which has basically been consistent for a decade. I mean, it's the same operating system that was in the original Ledger Nano S, which is probably a 10 year old product right now.

And they just took the internals of the Nano X and connected it to an E Ink touchscreen. Of course there's an updated ui, but it's essentially the same UI that was on the tiny Nano devices just now. You don't have to scroll sideways on the screen, you can at least see, you know, the address and that kind of stuff. On a larger 3 1/2 inch touchscreen display for Stacks and a little smaller for Flex.

We think that a smart card based os, which is what Bolos is, is while it's the reason for their good security, because the smart card operating systems are probably about 30 years old now, they're used in payment cards and that kind of technology. They're extremely proprietary and closed source. I don't even think Ledger has access to all the code in Bolos is my personal guess.

I think probably a lot of it is just black box stuff that comes from other companies like stm, who they buy the smart card chip from. But I think that the smart card is extremely limiting. It's why there's no memory, it's why the performance is so slow. It's why they cannot do any kind of real graphics or Power any real kind of display. So what we said is we set out to build an operating system that can enable this open developer platform.

And that's so crucial to think about from a tech perspective, because Ledger could never enable an open dev platform. Because every app on Ledger, while the code is open source, as you know, like the Monero app is open source, the Bitcoin app is open source. It all pulls from the same master seed on the device, which is why they have to review every app. Because if there's a malicious app, it could potentially somehow, you know, access that. Well, it can access that seed.

Maybe it can exfill that seed in some way, maybe it could do some kind of damage, sign stuff, you know, in the back end without permission and so on. So in order to enable an open app ecosystem, you need to sandbox every app. You need to put every single app in a sandbox where it cannot, even if it's malicious, it cannot impact other apps. So all of a sudden you need a more modern operating system. You can't do something like Smart Card.

Think about something more like what's in your iPhone or Android, where each app is in its own sandbox and the operating system manages permissions. So, Ken, our CTO and one of my co founders and I have been talking about doing a microkernel based OS since probably late 2020, like the same year we started the company. We thought a microkernel is the way to go because on one hand you have really great resiliency where everything in the operating system at the kernel level is modularized.

It's like everything is its own little app, whether it's a driver for a specific component or it's a user facing like app with a ui or it's like a backend, like Bitcoin signing code. You can modularize everything, so if something crashes, it actually means that the whole system doesn't crash. You can just bring it right back up. And you're probably familiar with Jeremy Saller at System 76. He's been working on Redux, which is one of those Rust microkernel operating systems.

We knew we wanted to do a Rust microkernel operating system and so we found a really cool project by. We didn't think that a Redux was right for us because it was more desktop oriented and we needed something for much lower powered, like embedded security devices running on much lower powered microprocessor. And so we chose to build on this project called Zeus X U S by Bunny and Zobs.

And Bunny is the famous hard Hardware Hacker Bunny, I think, did some of the Bitcoin podcasts a few years ago talking about his crowdfunded project called Be Trusted, which became Precursor. They're building like a. It almost looks like a, like a kind of open source developer style BlackBerry, like Vibe with a QWERTY keyboard and so on. And we were inspired by that device with some aspects of it.

When we made like the first Passport, we used actually a similar memory, LCD memory display, which is exactly what they do on Precursor. But more interestingly, we thought the operating system that they were working on, while very early, very developer focused, didn't have graphics or anything like that. It was just, you know, putting text in black and white on a, on a black and white display and it only would run on RISC V. So we said, okay, there's a lot of work to do.

But we thought this Rust Microkernel was an amazing foundation to build on, especially because the Microkernel also allows us to better sandbox all the apps and it enables us to have all the communication between the apps with something called message passing, where all the different apps on the back end just pass messages to each other so the OS can really lock down and be aware of everything that's going on, all the different communication between the different modular apps in the back end.

So we ported Zeus from RISC V to arm and we just built a ton of stuff, a ton of stuff on top of it, including, you know, modern graphics to power the color touchscreen display, all the drivers for all the different components, all the different apps that I've talked about for the different features. And that's what kios is. And so it's extremely different from anything else on the market. I think it might be the first ever mass consumer device to run a Microkernel os.

Google was actually working on one called Fuchsia, which some people know about, was rumored to be replacing both Android and Chrome OS in the coming years. It seems like they paused that. So this Microkernel stuff has been a pipe dream for many hardcore engineers for a long time. You'll find it in commercial type applications, but you won't find it in any kind of consumer product. And so we're really excited about it. And that's what's powering Passport Prime.

That's what's enabling such great security. We're able to take advantage of a lot of the security features on the processor by Microchip, which is, it's a special security microprocessor. It's different than what we have right now in Passport, it has things like proper memory management, which allows you to completely isolate the apps. It has things like active tamper protection, so we have tamper switches in the device. So if you try to open it, it wipes itself.

A lot of really advanced features that you will not even see on Ledger. I think of it more as like a next gen operating system that will allow us to really scale and onboard all these third party developers and really build this open, permissionless platform and ecosystem. And Ledger is not going to be able to do it. They just fundamentally are not going to be able to do it unless they take the time to reinvent the entire operating system.

And the other wallets that are running micropython or, you know, embedded Linux variants or Android variants or free rtos variants, they're not going to be able to do this either without, you know, massive changes. And so the operating system is actually as much or more of the product here than the hardware itself.

But of course the hardware and the operating system have to be built simultaneously because we have to support every single component on the device, whether it's the main stuff like the chips or even the ambient light sensors to adjust the screen brightness automatically, the haptic motor so you get that haptic feedback as you tap the screen or the home button, the LEDs. Right. There's so many things we had to build from a driver perspective.

So yeah, that's, that's kios and of course it's open source. That's the other great thing. And it's a lot of licenses because that's what happens when you bring in, you know, a lot of different code and a lot of different libraries. But it will be governed by gpl, so it will be, you know, fully copy left. When we put out the first release of kiosk.

The last kind of major feature that I wanted to touch on is because prime is a lot more than a bitcoin hardware wallet now. You have a lot more stuff to figure out how you properly back it up and how you properly restore it. I know that a Lot of thinking has gone into how you do device backups with prime, and I think a lot of that is building on things that they all done at foundation before.

And like many of these things, I already know the answer to this question because I helped you all design a bit of IT work in Q and A a lot, especially to figure out exactly how this is going to work. But I'm also curious if there are any changes since I last talked to your team. But how, how are people actually going to onboard onto Prime? What is that initial backup going to look like?

And how do they make sure that when they have all these secrets on here, they have totp, they have Fido keys, they have Bitcoin keys, they have Monero keys. How in the world do they actually backup and restore all of this stuff without some massive additional headache?

And then the other aspect is backing up all of the settings and metadata and other bits of stuff on the device. So that might be, for example, you do those six digit, two FA codes where all the labels and derivation paths for everything. And as you bring in third party apps, all those apps are going to have data that they need to store as well.

So it becomes much more of a difficult challenge than just a hardware wallet where you back up the seed and then you restore the seed if you lose the device. But already I think Ledger users that are very active probably know that if you lose or wipe your ledger, setting it up again is a total pain in the *** because not only do you have to restore the seed, but you have to get all the apps back on.

There's no like one click, you know, reinstall or like icloud recovery style, you know, restore for ledger devices. So what we're doing with Passport prime firstly is we don't want users to have to write down their seeds when they're onboarding. Of course you can do that if you want to, but for new users, we really wanted to make something where you don't have to write anything down. So we're shipping prime with NFC key cards to back up.

We're shmeering the seed in a two of three, you tap two of the key cards to the device, you just tap it right to the back of Passport prime and it writes two of the shamir shares to the cards. And then if you opt into our backup service, which is called Magic Backups, the third share goes into the Envoy app and is stored in Envoy.

And Envoy, if you opt into the service, backs all that data up automatically and puts some information on icloud keychain or Android's equivalent, which is all end to end encrypted. So even if you lose one of the key cards or if you completely lose your phone and somehow you got locked out, you know, of your icloud account or something, you know, catastrophic happen, you only need two of those three shares to recover.

So for most users, that'll be you tap one card and then it pulls the other share from Envoy, and then, you know, seed is recombined on device, you know, seed never leaves, of course, the device or the key cards and the seed is restored. So you can even do that without opting into the service because we actually, because both of you, Seth and Q and A lobbying for it internally, we do ship three key cards with the device.

So if you want to be fully sovereign, you can do a 2 of 3 all to the key cards and you can store those key cards in different locations. But here's where the fun stuff is, where, as I mentioned, we want to backup everything. So we do something very similar to what we do with Magic backups in Envoy today. On device, on Passport prime, we take a fully encrypted backup and the backup is encrypted by the seed words. So unless you have the seed, you cannot access that backup.

That backup is sent through Envoy to Foundation servers where we store it for you. It's like storing an encrypted blob of data. And crucially, there's no username, there's no email, there's no password. And if you have Tor enabled and Envoy, I mean, we don't even have access to see your IP address, we don't log it anyway. But like, we wouldn't even have access to see, it would just be over Tor.

And then the user ID is a hash of the seed, which is so perfect because we can store a hash of the seed with the encrypted blob. And then once you tap one of your key cards to your new Passport prime, when you're going to recover, it grabs the other share from Envoy, it recreates the seed on device, it takes a hash of the seed, sends it to the server and says, hey, give me my encrypted blob of data back.

And over time you may add other types of 2fa or maybe you will be able to enable power users to add a password. We could probably beef up that, you know, protection even more. But then the server sends back down that encrypted blob to the device where it is decrypted locally.

And this is so cool and so different from Ledger Recover because like Ledger Recover, everyone freaked out, rightfully so, because the seed those Shamir shares literally leave the device and go onto the Internet through Ledger Live where the app could just grab them. There's like no password protection or anything. And I know you dug into that a lot trying to say like, is this really how it works? And the answer unfortunately is yes, it's really how it works.

And then it's just stored with custodians. So like the seed is literally leaving the device and being split up and going to custodians with magic backups. It's not, it's not leaving your Envoy app and it's not leaving the physical NFC key cards that you have in your possession. So we're just doing you a service by storing the encrypted blob of data. So it really is like icloud recovery, but for Passport Prime.

And that means that if you lose it, you literally tap one card and everything comes back onto it automatically exactly like how you had it. And so it's a pretty huge feature we are going to be incorporating into an optional service. Like I mentioned, the service is called Envoy plus we're going to continue to beef it up with other really cool services. It is going to be $5 a month for that. We don't plan on raising the price or anything.

We want to just continue to add features and make that more valuable. But every person who buys a Passport prime will get a free six month trial. Firstly, because we think it's so great, we want everyone to use it. Secondly, because we actually have to spend some time building out the payment infrastructure for that, especially from a privacy perspective, because we don't want to be able to associate a payment with an account or with a backup.

And so I think there's some really cool potentially ZKP stuff we can do where we kind of break the link between the backup ID like the seed hash and the pay the transaction that paid for it and have some kind of proof that that user ID or seed Hash has been paid for, but without being able to correlate it back to the actual specific user email address, payment or anything like that. So that's not what we're focused on right now because we're focused on getting prime out there.

And so once we have the time to do that, it'll morph into A$5 a month optional paid service.

So think of how much longer it would take you to manually reset up all of the things you have, your TOTP tokens, which you can't even necessarily manually reset up. It's going to be a nightmare if you lose those. Like there's so, so many advantages to that. And it's less trusted than iCloud recover as well. It's kind of similar to iCloud with advanced data protection, but even better in some ways. Well, in many ways because it's actually open source code on the front end.

So you actually know that it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing with that added protection of the seed is never leaving the device. Like you said, two shards or two shares are going onto the cards and only one is ever getting sent out. Yeah, I mean it's, it's really powerful.

And that specifically I think will continue to lower that barrier of entry because that's the other side that often comes into play here is when people are talking, I mean this is like the most basic aspect of cryptocurrency adoption is that that terrifying feeling of like, what happens if I screw up? And making that as, as fearless. It's not the right way to use that word, but I'm just going to roll with it.

As like, as little fear inducing as possible is vital to people actually using this technology and actually feeling like they can take personal responsibility because the tools actually help them to take personal responsibility. They don't make it harder, they actually help them and they actually guide them through that process. I think that's going to be really, really fascinating. I think also on the, how you're going to authenticate payments to backup Blobs.

I think it's the exact same problem that I was talking with the founder of Kogi Search on the last episode of Opt out, where they have the same problem where people want to be able to pay for search, but they don't want an account tied to their specific searches. And I think they're going to be going the blinded credentials route, which is kind of the underlying tech of eCash, which would be really fascinating if you all could also pursue that.

That might be something to connect you all about as well, because they're almost done with their integration of it. It'll be out in the next couple of weeks. And I think you would want exactly the same technology for that purpose because all you want to do is prove payment and then never know anything about what specific activity is related to which specific account. Exactly. Really cool fit.

And if you don't want to rely on any service, you can, you know, tap the three cards and you can take a periodic backup to your, to a flash drive. So at least you know, you have that and you can save that back up and it's fully encrypted by the cards. And, you know, you can manage that yourself if you're more of a power user, more of an ultra early adopter.

There's a lot of people like that, of course, that, you know, some may even just want to write down the seed words and not even use the cards and then still do the backups. And so you'll be able to do that. But another huge win here is like, we can help people set up a device in person with this.

And this is such a, such a pain right now with most hardware wallets where you say, okay, you're going to go set up a hardware wallet, you better go somewhere private, you better make sure that there's no cameras or anything like that. Or even if you're setting up like Passport with SD backups, they're still having to pull out a pen, you know, write down the backup code on, on a card, like as a card is in like a piece of paper.

Right. Let me give them. And that is kind of high friction and it isn't an instant thing. It does take a little bit of time to do. So the fact that we're giving all the NFC cards you need in the box and it's all included and if we were to help someone, let's say at Pub Key or an in person event or even a conference or maybe one day in retail stores, right, if we want to help them set up Passport prime, it's just like, okay, take your, take the two NFC cards, tap, tap. Okay, you're done, right?

You've, you've, you download Envoy, you scan a QR code on the device, you tap two key cards and it's done. And then the key cards also come in Faraday sleeves with a little, you can write a little label on the back as well so you don't have to worry if the person puts that, that in their pocket or back the box and takes it home with them.

You're not going to have anyone that could, you know, have some special, you know, giant NFC antenna and scan the contents of the cards, which is, you know, amazing and you're just good to go. And I think that's going to be extremely different from everyone else. And it's really going to help lower the barriers to entry for, for a brand new user that is intimidated by the idea of writing down these seed words, not knowing where to put them and that kind of thing.

And I think it's going to help us a lot from a customer service and support perspective as well. And I just want to emphasize too, like our whole, one of our main product, I guess brand values is including everything you need in the box. There's a lot of, there's, there's other companies in the space that will not even give you the batteries you need, not even give you a USB C cable, not give you the SD card.

And so you end up spending 50 bucks or more on these, you know, things that should have just been included with the purchase. And you know, the fact that you just get this thing, packaging is gorgeous. Kind of looks like almost Apple style packaging. You take it out, it's all there, tap, tap. You're all set up. And you could just focus now on learning how to use it and learning how to secure your entire digital life, which should be the focus, right?

It should be about taking those steps to better security and sovereignty, not trying to spend, you know, a hundred hours figuring out how to set up backup and use your hardware wallet.

Just a great tutorial example that I'm sure we'll do or someone will do is how to lock down your iCloud account with passport Prime. You don't need to now go buy two Yubikeys and learn about them and learn how to use them and set them up and all that. You'll just be able to. Yeah, we'll probably have a five minute video or something like that.

And now all of a sudden you've enabled the end to end encrypted storage for iCloud and you've made someone massively more secure and sovereign without having to go buy new devices. And I hope we can do that for everything, right? Password managers, different keys. I'm sure we'll add support for more and more things over time. I mean I would love to be able to even log into my computers without a password.

I would love to be able to just, you know, tap on the screen or even have Passport prime maybe near me and maybe do some of this automatically. You know, all the different operating systems offer like enterprise style login capabilities that corporations use to bypass the traditional login screen. Do things over like, you know, network authentication, which I'm sure you know a lot about.

And we could probably use those same things in the different mainstream operating systems and do like an Envoy desktop app that would enable that. So really exciting. Huge amount of potential things we can think of and hopefully we will not have to do too much of it ourselves and we'll be able to rely on third party developers to come in and just bring all their best ideas.

So it's a full pre order. But you're going to get some extra things with that in exchange for helping us out a little bit as getting, you know, the first firmware, the first hardware. One is you'll get a free case, like a free bumper case, like a rubber, you know, thin rubber case for it. Two is we're going to give you a free lifetime membership to Envoy Plus. This is the subscription.

So that's awesome because we're going to add more features to Envoy plus as one of the members of the early access program, you're just going to get that lifetime subscription and then we're also going to double the warranty. And so it's going to be a two year hardware warranty.

And if anything goes wrong with the device, you know, in terms of like a factory defect or you know, anything, not of course accidental damage if you throw the thing out the window, but anything that just stops working will replace that device for you, you know, free of charge. And so that's the early access program.

I expect those will sell out pretty fast because between our existing customer base of everyone who owns Passports, then also, you know, just the general space and then of course the cake ecosystem, a lot of ultra early adopters there that want to get their hands on this stuff first. I think it's going to go pretty fast. Then if you want, you could instead if you want to wait for, you know, the general availability, but you want to get in line, you want to get that first.

When we start shipping, we're going to have a reservation you can also place online today. So just a $49 reservation, it'll hold your spot in line. Of course, it's fully refundable. So in terms of where Passport prime is, kios is I would almost say like in an alpha state right now. So there's a lot more work for us to do. But it's mostly there, you know, a lot of finishing up work for the different first party apps and that kind of thing.

But from a perspective of all the drivers, all the backend stuff, you know, we'll have. Actually if you're in New York on Thursday, we're going to have some early devices at Pub Key. We'll be showing them off. There's some basic functionality. So the operating system is where most of the work is on the software side now and where that's going to be over the next three months or so.

On the hardware side, the hardware is done and so we're at the point now where we're releasing to manufacturing and we're going to start the mass production in the very beginning of 2025. So all the hardware has been validated, every component is tested. You know, we're basically ready to go and we wanted to make sure we waited to announce and do any kind of pre order until the hardware was done. And so I'm really excited to say it is.

The only thing we don't know about the hardware is how it's going to do on the waterproof testing because we actually designed the device to be fully waterproof. Gasketed USB C port, gasketed power button and a really cool. We figured this out actually in the, in the last couple months.

We have a machine at the factory that auto dispenses this adhesive on a 3D plane because passport prime has curved glass and so it has to like go around 3D dispensing it and then you just drop the screen on and we put it through an oven and it cures. So it actually is like a dispensed gasket material which should make the thing waterproof. But we'll see how waterproof it is. So we're saying water resistant on the website, certification pending because we're not exactly sure yet.

But the goal is to make it, you know, fully waterproof. Otherwise now I'm really excited. We have a lot of great tech in here, like custom NFC antenna. The Bluetooth was a lot of work. That's actually something we didn't get to talk about.

But to be very quickly summarize that for the listeners, it is Bluetooth but we put the Bluetooth on a different chip and we have a protocol called Quantum Link where we're creating an end to end encrypted tunnel that's using quantum resistant tech through the Bluetooth chip so that you actually establish the connection and exchange encryption keys with a qr with QR codes first. Then everything going through the Bluetooth chip is already encrypted. So that was a lot of work.

A lot of really great tech in here. And the circuit board looks more like something you'd find in your smartphone than something you'd find in a hardware wallet today.

Physical form factor which is going to be also a nice change compared to the stuff that we have in the like the hardware wallet industry especially. But that side of things, I know we didn't get too much into the hardware but that, that's another aspect of this is like the idea especially for me is this going to be an everyday carry like this goes with me everywhere. Passport already does. But it's not that useful because I'm not necessarily signing like a cold storage transaction every day.

But I like to have it. Andy. But prime is going to be the perfect fit for this because it's going to be two factor. It's going to be doing my Bitcoin and Monero where Monero I'm signing things more than I am with Bitcoin. It's going to be doing a lot more. So you want something that you carry every day to be water resistant.

Like you said, that's a key aspect and actually something you enjoy using like that it's not a nightmare to actually interface with the device but like color, touch screen, really small form factor despite having a large screen like all those things go into again lowering that barrier of entry, making it where taking your security, taking your privacy, taking your financial sovereignty seriously is enjoyable and is something that actually is like a good part of your day and

not a terrifying part of your day. It's a really exciting, really exciting future and one that is almost the present, it's almost not the future anymore which is gonna, which is gonna be fun. I can't wait to actually see the finished product even though I've seen the finished hardware and gotten to play with that and I know people are gonna get to see that this week. But any last Things you want to touch on before we wrap up here, Zachary?

It's a very different kind of device, right? For some people, it might even be that you buy a Passport to use just for some of your Bitcoin storage, or maybe you may even want to use for multisig. Then you buy a Passport prime to use also for Bitcoin storage, but then of course to secure your entire digital life and you bring that with you everywhere. And we're still going to be selling Passport alongside Passport prime.

And I'm really curious to see what the breakdown in sales is going to look like between the two because that will inform whether we keep the Bitcoin only hardware wallet going or maybe we make a more stripped down version of Passport prime that has more limited features. Passport is 199. Passport prime will be 299. I think it's a pretty good, you know, price point differentiation, but a lot of this is going to be based on, you know, what the customer demand is going to be.

And then the other thing too, which I don't think is even on the website anywhere or in the keynote that I gave, is that we are going to have some cool accessories to make it easier to take with you. One of them that I think is going to be pretty popular is the Wallet Folio where you have the ability to put a couple credit cards and then you can put like a credit card and a driver's license and then have prime in your pocket.

And then, you know, most people are using something like Apple Pay for, you know, their, their other credit cards on or you know, Android Pay or whatever it's called. And so you don't really need to carry around as much anymore in a wallet. We're also going to have the inside the waistband holster, which the internal company joke is that I'm the only customer for. You know, you have your firearm on one side, you have your Passport prime on the other side.

If so if you want to be a sovereign individual, you can take it with you and you can use it for, you know, kind of all your security related needs. And I think that we're already carrying stuff around. Like you said, you travel, you want to have to bring a passport with you. People have Yubikeys on their keychain. It's going to be really nice, I think, to roll it all up into a single device and I hope people are really excited about it. I don't really have anything else to add, of course.

The website is Foundation XYZ and it is going to be available to either pre order for the early access program or just place a reservation for early 2025.

But there are very few companies that I can say that. I actually personally know all the people who worked on this device and I know that they have the best ethos you could possibly imagine. And it's just an awesome part of this. And it's one of the things that I love about having a platform is I can help you all get the word out when I know that you all are doing this to increase human freedom.

Like this is just a fantastic tool that helps to give power back to the individual, so I'm pumped for that. I will be one of the first people purchasing in the Early Access program. I know that we'll be getting some at Cake as well for us to start working on the dev side to get strong Monero support out there for Passport prime. Hopefully very, very early on after the early Access program launch at the latest. I'm pumped for it, but thank you so much for coming on again.

Zach. Absolute blast as always and looking forward to Prime. Looking forward to chatting more.