Today, at NYC Consensus Invest, we announced Evercoin 2, the safest wallet, now with hardware security by YubiKey.

Obviously it’s a significant statement to say that our wallet & exchange are the safest, especially with very powerful wallet options in the market including hardware wallets.

So what makes us assert this?

Because We Introduced Hardware Security

Evercoin today announced the introduction of hardware security by integrating with YubiKey.

Many YubiKey implementations are simple One-Time-Password (OTP) implementations, but not this one. Evercoin uses cryptographic APIs on the YubiKey to encrypt the user’s private key.

But we understand that just introducing hardware security doesn’t make us the safest hardware wallet. In fact, the competition for this is very fierce with excellent leading providers of “hardware wallets” such as Trezor and Ledger. So I have to build my case with my next point:

2. Because We Made it Harder to Lose your Keys

Evercoin has a novel back up and recovery scheme.

The traditional wallet back up scheme is to take a 12 or 24 word passphrase and store it in a safe place. Unfortunately, this procedure is provably prone to user error. According to Fortune magazine, Chainalysis stated that as many as 3.79M bitcoins are likely to be lost forever due to mishandling private keys.

The problem is developing a service that enables a user to back up and restore their private keys (and therefore their wallet and all their assets) but in which the service provider (in this case, Evercoin) never has the private keys.

In this case, this is achieved by splitting the key into two shards — neither of which on their own can restore the private key. One of the shards is stored in a special URL that is generated by the user’s device and sent directly to the user’s email (so Evercoin never sees this shard). The other shard is held by Evercoin. Because of this patent-pending approach, whenever the user loses their phone, their yubikey, their pin, their password they can be helped and they can recover their assets.

We feel that the traditional hardware wallet is very secure… but we assert that it is unsafe, and that user error can cause total loss of funds. Still, because traditional hardware wallets are so secure, we want to further make the case that we are practicing safer crypto.

3. Because it’s Mobile-First, We Can Add Biometrics

Because Evercoin is mobile-first, it means we can benefit from the phone’s in-built security features. This means, unlike traditional hardware wallets, we can benefit from biometric features on the phone to accentuate the security of your wallet. So fingerprint ID or face ID can be used where appropriate as an additional biometric authentication factor.

4. Because The YubiKey by Itself Provides Enhanced Internet Security

Another thing your traditional hardware wallet vendor doesn’t do is protect you from 2FA attacks, Phishing Attacks, Online Identity Theft and a bevy of other attack vectors. Since Evercoin uses an unmodified YubiKey device, that same YubiKey can not only protect your bitcoins, but when properly configured can also protect your phone, laptop, desktop, tablet, lastpass or one password password manager, Facebook login, Twitter login, Bank Account login, Authenticator App, Enterprise authentication system and much more.

So we think that anyone who holds their own crypto should secure the entire online life using a YubiKey and that the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of the YubiKey creates so much peace of mind and real-world security that it is fully worth it. If you benefit from the security of YubiKey, then getting an Evercoin wallet becomes a free app download. If you’re a user of an existing hardware wallet, you should also buy a YubiKey to protect your online identity and device logins with it.

5. Because Mobility Matters

This one may be a bit tricky. But one way users can lose their assets is by missing an opportunity to trade at the right time. Most people carry their phone and keychain and wallet everywhere. Because of this, it means that by attaching their YubiKey to their keychain, they are ready to exchange at a moment’s notice.

How is this safer? Because we know crypto markets are volatile and responsive to market news and influencers. This means that the ability to trade whenever and wherever you are becomes a way of protecting yourself from the volatility in the market.

Imagine you are at a restaurant and you hear some very significant news that makes you want to maybe buy one coin and sell another. Instead of ending your meal and running home and plugging your hardware wallet into your PC, and then uploading your coins onto an exchange, and then making the trade, you simply pop your YubiKey into the phone and trade right then and there.

6. It’s Much Less Prone to User Error

Because the wallet and exchange are integrated, there’s no chance of typing in a wrong address when making an exchange.

The YubiKey Evercoin integration is a crazily intuitive implementation. It operates exactly like a hotel room key. You insert the key (into your phone) to unlock and you remove the key to re-lock. This reduces the chances for user error as people will have a good intuitive understanding of what to expect from the device.

People feel that security is something that comes from James Bond style special devices with fancy cryptographic shennanigans. People think of security as a specialized role like Chief Information Security Officer, and so security is a job for an expert in cryptography. That’s why we want the conversation to shift to the practice of “safe crypto”. We feel that safety is something that everyone deserves and that everyone can identify with.

7. Because it’s Less Conspicuous

We feel like the first-generation hardware security devices all call attention to themselves. Although the ledger’s shape could allow it to be mistaken for a USB thumb drive, the manner of attaching it to the PC with a cable is quite distinctive and if you know what to look for, anyone holding such a device becomes a target for a “wrench attack” (physical attack or kidnapping of the person).

We feel that a very small YubiKey device on a keychain does not draw much attention. Furthermore, since the YubiKey itself is a popular general-purpose security device, owning a YubiKey does not denote that the user owns or even knows about crypto.

8. Because Custodial Exchanges and Custodial “Wallets” are inherently unsafe

This final topic is not about how Evercoin with YubiKey is safer than traditional hardware wallet solutions. It’s about people who leave their coins on exchanges for “safekeeping”.

So far billions of dollars have been hacked from such exchanges and in many cases user funds have been lost. As these services grow larger and larger we feel it is a matter of time before we see more record-breaking spectacular custodial exchange hacks along with inevitable loss of user funds. Furthermore, if the user does not control their keys, they are subjected to myriad abuses including exchanges

commingling user funds

practicing fractional reserve (effectively an off-chain double spend attack)

stealing user airdrops

stealing user staking rewards and benefits

stealing user coins that arise from forks

withdrawal limits

withdrawal fees

users can be blocked from accessing funds for any reason

if the exchange is down, the user loses access

if the exchange goes out of business the user loses everything

So being non-custodial makes Evercoin safer than all custodial options such as Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, OKEx, Kraken, Poloniex and many others.

Since you always have control of your private keys and mnemonic, you can always export your assets out of Evercoin, just in case.

In Conclusion

So for the reasons above we assert that Evercoin with YubiKey is the safest cryptocurrency wallet & exchange. We would like to shift the conversation in the market away from maximizing only the security dimension because we know that so many different factors can result in the loss of user funds including user error, market volatility and indirect attack vectors.

If you already have a mobile compatible YubiKey whether issued by your company or purchased by yourself, we encourage you to download http://evercoin.com Evercoin for free — effectively providing you with a free (or already paid for) hardware wallet.

If you are already an Evercoin user, we strongly encourage you to buy a mobile compatible YubiKey such as the YubiKey 5ci so you can maximally secure your cryptocurrencies.

And if you own any cryptocurrencies at all, whether you use Evercoin or not, we encourage you to buy a YubiKey just to secure your devices and internet accounts.

If you want to learn how to use YubiKey to secure yourself better on the Internet (bitcoins or not), please have a look at the post below.