I see two big issues on your product:
1- The idea of a ring with a wallet inside sounds good but not secure. As you mentioned on the other thread, you shouldn't put your life savings there. So, you are creating a product to protect small amount of funds.
The problem is that people is not going to know that and they think that a HW is always secure.
2- Correct me if I am wrong. It seems you are creating the classic HW without any open source third-party software wallet compatibility. So, users are forced to trust you and use your closed-source software wallet in a single-sig setup.
[edited out]
Sure, those are very fair questions so let me try and answer them all. Some of it is still not out there because we only recently started publishing things about the company, so we will be slowly phasing out various updates and more information about the product over the next couple of months.
Intiially, the ring will support BTC, SOL, ETH and EVM-compatible blockchains. This means, upon release and delivery of presale orders. Unfortunately, it means we won't have things like Tron or Multivers upon release; however we will be adding all the relevant blockchains in a timely manner. In regards to EVM, we will probably include the large ones directly with the release like BSC, Polygon, Optimism etc. Some of the lesser-known ones we might phase out as well.
Regarding the backup (Ace Cards), their sole and exclusive functionality is to act as a backup. They have a different chip inside of them as compared to the wallet (ring) and they're not meant to be a wallet because we think that would defeat their purpose a bit. Ideally, these are things you set up and then store somewhere securely (i.e hide them somewhere) and never use them unless you need to restore your wallet. If you were asking this in the sense of whether we will also have a card-form hardware wallet like Tangem does, the honest answer is I don't know; it's quite honestly not a focus for us right now. First we want to launch and ship the rings along with the Ace Cards; those will also be the only 2 initial products we will have on our website.
After that, we already have a second product in the pipeline which with a bit of luck we should be able to release & start shipping before end of Q1 next year, but I can tell you it's not a card wallet. It's naturally still a wallet, and it is also a wearable, but we'll release more info about this only after we ship out the initial batch of rings.
Of course, I see that you are mostly just responding to satscraper, yet as a courtesy, it is probably best to keep your responses fairly succinct in threads like this (and maybe OP should have created this one as a self-moderated thread, but did not).. I did see that in the last couple of days you guys have created a
Ringwallet forum thread (also not self-moderated), which also is receiving some pushback and skepticism, and I have not looked at any of that thread in detail (even though it is so far a short thread, and not that I am any kind of a technical expert), yet it might be a bit early in terms of coming to too many conclusions if the product (or products) is not quite in a released stage.. but still good to refer folks to either that thread that you guys created or some other locations that might answer the questions.
I see, sorry for that, I didn't really give it much thought. And yes we have that existing thread which wasn't very well done to be perfectly honest, we will probably make a more professional one a bit later on. And yes we did receive some skepticism which is generally fair and a good exercise, I did my best to answer all the questions there and will continue to do so. The product is not live yet as of now and cannot be ordered, perhaps I'll come back in this thread after there's more things made public. Thanks for the answer nonetheless.
Hey, so let's talk a bit about this.
1. Our initial purpose is indeed to target either a) existing crypto users who don't use a hardware wallet already because they're too complicated b) new entrants in the crypto market and c) experienced users who want to have some amount of money with them on-the-go and have an easy way using it. This, however, is not to say that the security of the ring is bad. It's just our user target, at least initially. Let's break it down a bit.
- There is only a single vector of attack, namely NFC. There is no bluetooth, no internet, no inputs etc.
- The chip itself is certified as EAL6+, just for comparison purposes, Ledger is EAL5+. Furthermore, if somebody tries to say inject malicious code, initiate an unnaproved transaction etc through the only existing vector of attack (NFC), then the chip automatically burns itself if it is a real risk since these are chips used normally in bank cards, that's what they were initially designed for.
- Lastly, in terms of backup we use Shamir's Secret Sharing through the Ace Cards. This is arguably, at this moment, the most advanced and secure form of actually backing up a wallet at this point. Ledger doesn't even have the option for this, the only other one I'm aware of who does have this option is Trezor and even then, you must write them down on multiple pieces of paper; whereas we allow users to store them on Ace Cards, which is easier. Now, considering that even if somebody say steals your ringwallet they cannot use it unless they also simultaneously do the following: a) steal your paired phone, b) have your phone password c) have your app password and perhaps d) unless you go home, restore the wallet and move the money.
That is all to say, sure, that's our target audience. But at the very minimum this respects at least the same levels of security that any other hardware wallet does, if not more.
2. Ok so for the second question I am genuinely not sure if I understood it correctly, so I will try to answer what I understood.
a) If you mean that our software won't be compatible with other wallet like Ledger and Trezor, I believe that is exactly how Trezor and Ledger functions as well, I'm not aware of hardware wallet software that is cross-compatible with other devices.
b) Initially the code is closed-source, yet, but that is because we are waiting on our lawyers for a way to attribute a license to our code that will protect us for say 2 years from people using the code commercially, giving us time to work on a newer version before competitors can just fork our code. That is all to say, our end goal is to make the code open-source, and release new versions as open source constantly, just with a 2 or 3 year limitation against using it for commercial purposes. Either way, just to be clear, Tangem for example has 0 open-source code and as far as I am aware, 0 intention of actually making the code open-source. So even if we were to take that route, which I don't think we will, it's not something never seen before.
