7 Years of Hardware Wallets: The Success Story of Czech Crypto Enthusiasts Creating a Brand New Industry SatoshiLabs Follow Dec 6, 2018 · 4 min read

Seven years ago, the world’s first cryptocurrency hardware wallet, Trezor, was invented, with the intention of bringing top quality crypto security to the masses. Until now, it has sold hundreds of thousands of devices in more than 150 countries worldwide. Let’s have a look at how it happened and what’s in store for the future.

The Birth of a Security Revolution

It all started in 2011 right after a Bitcoin conference in Prague. This was a time when Bitcoin was still a very young project and secure storing of funds required a good deal of knowledge and IT skills. It was at this time that two programmers and crypto enthusiasts, Pavol “Stick” Rusnák and Marek “Slush” Palatinus, started to think about a solution that would allow anyone to store their bitcoins securely and in a trustless way. The idea that they came up with was a small, single-purpose computer that would keep the private keys protected in an isolated environment. It would be entirely open-source and auditable. In other words, Trezor. Fun fact — the original working title of the project was Piglet.

The first 3D printed prototype of Trezor One - the original hardware wallet

“It started as a hobby project — we wanted to make a couple of hardware wallets for our friends. But soon we realized that we had found a big market gap. Now we are one of the most trusted wallets in the world.” Marek “Slush” Palatinus, CEO of SatoshiLabs

And so they started working on it. The first international announce and crowd-funding happened in 2013, and the rest is history. Everyone was suddenly able to get a hardware wallet that was secure, easy to recover and easy to use — a true revolution in the crypto industry. Trezor was the product that brought seed recovery and passphrase protection (BIP39 and BIP44), now widely used in all hardware wallets and most software wallets. In fact, the Trezor open-source code powers today more than 10 other hardware wallet brands.

SatoshiLabs and the Trezor Legacy

In 2013, the creators of Trezor founded SatoshiLabs. The company has been further developing and marketing Trezor and its related services — Trezor Wallet, Trezor Password Manager, and beyond. As a matter of fact, the company is celebrating its 5th birthday this month as well — but more about that in our next blog post.

Today, Trezor has been sold to hundreds of thousands of customers in more than 150 countries worldwide. The premium Trezor Model T came in 2017 and became a popular high-end alternative to the original Trezor One. Over the years, there have been many attempts to manufacture clones and fakes of the authentic device, but Trezor remains to be the most trusted and leading product in the industry.

“No matter what the future brings, we will continue doing what we are best at — securing and innovating the whole crypto industry while being open about everything we do.” Pavol “Stick” Rusnák, CTO of SatoshiLabs

The Future of Trezor

The history of Trezor is long, and we are nowhere near stopping innovating the security and safety of our users. Our main goal to make the security of cryptocurrencies, even more, user-friendly, streamlined and intuitive. For example, we would like to implement Lightning Network and Liquid support in Trezor. Furthermore, we are working on allowing the usage of SD cards with Trezor Model T to protect your encrypted passwords and files. Further security innovations are coming for those who want more — recovery seed splitting for additional safety of your funds. Hopefully, the next seven years will be just as exciting as the previous ones!