If you’re the kind of person that likes to have total control over every cryptocurrency you own… boy do we have a product for you.

iMarkett’s IOTA Encrypted USB Wallets

Get yours soon at https://imarkett.com/products/iota-usb-encrypted-wallets

If you have IOTA, you understand the importance of security when it comes to this cryptocurrency. The current wallets don’t have a seed generator feature and people assume that a Google search will help them find out how to generate seeds to use the IOTA wallet.

What is a Seed?

In IOTA a seed is a phrase of characters that consist of letters in the latin alphabet and the number 9 . It can be up to 81 characters long. For security purposes, we suggest you use the 81 characters maximum limit . The seed is in trytes due to IOTA being based off trinary technology.

A seed’s possible characters. Taken from https://iota.readme.io/docs/a-note-on-trinary

Let’s randomly generate a seed from a Mac’s terminal to use it as an example.

Seed: AETBDJMTJLKIGRDUVQUJFUISWBCIIW9GIIEPJTG9EIJUOUZISKMPXADCGYADAYZOBWDRTAOCCNVHPAQVA

If you’re wondering how to make this in your computer, you can use the following scripts on your Linux or Mac terminal.

Scripts to securely generate seeds. From https://iota.readme.io/docs/securely-generating-a-seed

Now, the seed is able to create a set of public and private key pairs in order for you to receive and sign transactions. IOTA is extremely secure because it uses the Winternitz One-Time Signature Scheme. This means that after you sign your transactions, you change your current public/private key pair for a new set of keys according to your seed. (This is why we Attach to Tangle after we send a transaction)

Changing your key pairs. From http://bit.ly/2nXDGd2

It is important to make sure your seed is secure because if someone has access to your seed then they’ll have access to your funds. You wouldn’t tell a stranger your banking login username/password; similarly don’t let anyone have access to your seed.

IOTA Wallets Hacked by Online Seed Generators

An online seed generator, don’t use online seed generators.

IOTA users created seeds using online seed generators. Sure, this makes it easy to generate seeds for those users that are not technically inclined but those that did not take security as an important measure had their funds stolen.

“If its on the Internet it’s sitting on a server that can be attacked”

The online seed generators gave the hackers the seeds that users placed their funds in. It’s similar to asking a stranger to create your banking login information because you don’t know how to create a good username/password. About $4 million of IOTA was stolen from this attack, giving IOTA a lot of FUD to its security.

The IOTA Encrypted USB Wallet

Alternate USB style

At iMarkett Co. we wanted to help solve this issue by giving non-technical users:

A simple user experience. Secure seed storage. Secure offline seed generation. Instructions on using the IOTA wallet.

That is how we designed our IOTA Encrypted USB Wallets to work.

Upon purchase you will be prompted the password that you want to encrypt the USB with. The USB will contain your offline Seed Generator & the Official IOTA Wallet (Currently 2.5.7). This is a simple product that is meant to alleviate security issues.

This product is not as expensive as a Ledger Nano S but it is a great secure alternative that won’t break the bank, similar to OpenDime. There is currently a team developing the Ledger application that will be even more secure than this product. Their progress is phenomenal and we are big fans of them. Check out their progress here.

Due to the recent frenzy with seed generators, we have decided to open source the seed generator for the public to audit. If you would like to audit the code yourself check it out here!

We believe this will bring security and ease of use for those non-technical users. If you want to see our IOTA Encrypted USB Wallets at work check out our demo. As of now the USB’s are ready for Macs running on macOs High Sierra and will be in the ~$10 range. The IOTA Encrypted USB Wallets will released in March 2018.

Alpha Customers Feedback

We did a proof of concept with some of our customers from our Porto Wallet sales and these are some of their feedbacks:

I thought doing this was going to be rocket science, because of my age, but this was easy to use and for me to check my balance. — Diego Marquez I usually keep my IOTA on Binance, but now I can hodl them with my USB Wallet easily. I just have to make sure not to lose it! — Ryan Chong

Security Specs

The USBs are encrypted with Filevault 2 protecting your seed with XTS-AES 128 encryption. You never use your keyboard to generate your seed but you do use it to have access to the USB itself, meaning your seed is safe from keyloggers. Someone will have to physically steal the USB and know your password to have access to the encrypted USB. We suggest you only use the USB in computers you trust. There is always risks when it comes to cryptocurrency and specially with software dedicated to this field.

We have had both positive and negative feedback from the community due to the seed generator but we have talked with some IOTA community developers on Discord and they have audited the code repository. We have also contacted the IOTA Foundation to audit the code as well but we have not heard back from them.

Development Journey

We read the IOTA documentation on how to generate seeds in a Mac terminal and created a bash application using the Platypus Mac OS X developer tool that creates native Mac applications from various scripts.

Platypus makes it easy for developers to share their scripts with people unfamiliar with the command line interface, without any knowledge of the Mac OS X APIs — a few clicks and users will have their own Mac OS X graphical program. This is a great tool to work with the command line seed generation by allowing users to generate seeds by clicking an application.

Parting from Porto Wallets

Our Porto Wallets

We saw an influx of various customers that purchased IOTA with our Porto Wallets. We appreciate our customers that wanted this fiat on ramp to be able to purchase IOTA with dollars and we believe we have proven a concept. We will still provide support services for those that have purchased a Porto Wallet and hold you as a priority for future customers. If you purchased a Porto Wallet from us you will receive a complimentary IOTA Encrypted USB Wallet. We will be using the Porto Wallets for giveaways to and contests but we will no longer be selling IOTA through the Porto Wallets.

With the recent announcement, Bittrex CEO Confirms USD Deposits Are Coming to Its Platform, we believe new IOTA fiat on ramps will be created and it will decouple IOTA from Bitcoin’s price volatility. Recently, Mark Sulavka joined the IOTA Foundation. “Mark is currently leading the growth pivotal Iota eXtension Interface (IXI) Hub module development. This IXI Hub module will make exchange interfacing friction-less and ‘plug and play’ for exchanges, which will open the IOTA ecosystem to the entire global market of cryptocurrency enthusiasts.” This means that you should expect IOTA to be listed on several exchanges this year.

We are currently working on a IOTA Encrypted USB Wallet for Linux computers. If you will like to help contribute for this feel free to contact us at info@imarkett.com

If you have any questions on how it works or anything at all regarding our IOTA USB Encrypted Wallets ask away!

P.S. We are working on something called Metamesh, an IOTA marketplace where users can exchange goods. It will be the beginning of social e-commerce. We have wrapped up our whitepaper and it will go live soon. This is not an ICO.