One problem I see in their deal is they are using Taiwanese company UMC and there are a lot of tensions between China and Taiwan that could escalate any moment,
they can't move production to Europe or anywhere else in the world, according to this article, and that can be security risk.
The costs would certainly increase if the chips were produced in Europe and they also mention 3rd party licenses as reasons why the production wont take place in the EU.
It's great news that this is moving in the right direction. Too bad that the article is in Czech and Google translate isn't the perfect way to translate the piece. Anyone speaking Czech on Bitcointalk?
I found a few interesting things in that Czech article.
Tropic Square is preparing a so-called Secure Element (SE) chip, which is to be largely open. This will, among other things, allow it to be audited.
"Largely open" as in mostly open-source? That would match some of their previous posts where similar terminology was used to describe their chip as "
as open-source as possible" if I remembered it correctly. For security reasons, certain parts of the code could stay closed-source. Maybe the firmware like they mention in the following sentence.
There will also be a RISC-V processor on the chip, which will ensure coordination with the internal firmware. We currently anticipate that the firmware will be closed, but the architecture is designed to allow the user to upload in the future.
Not sure if this translated sentence is telling us that the firmware will be closed-source or "closed" means something else in this case.