Coinkite’s new Bitcoin hardware wallet looks like a BlackBerry, takes AAA batteries

Canadian crypto hardware maker Coinkite has designed a bitcoin hardware wallet reminiscent of an old-school BlackBerry phone straight out of the 2000s.

But the company says the new design reflects forward-looking thinking about the strictest security measures and user-friendly features gleaned from customer feedback.

The soon-to-be-released device, called the Coldcard Q1, became available for pre-order on February 9 and comes with a full keyboard, an LCD screen and an LED-illuminated QR code scanner.

The waffle-phone-style QWERTY keyboard gives off strong 2002 BlackBerry vibes and is meant to cut down on so-called fat-finger mistakes when entering sensitive passwords, PINs and passphrases.

Coinkite added a battery compartment on the Q1’s back that fits three AAA batteries, so there’s no need for a connected power supply, although a USB-C port is available for customers who prefer to use a power cord.

It is the company’s fifth iteration of a bitcoin hardware wallet, following the introduction of the MK line starting in 2018. The latest model, the Coldcard MK4, was released in February 2022.

The company aims to break into the market-leading ranks of wallet manufacturers, currently dominated by big names including Trezor and Ledger. But the overall market could grow as more crypto investors seek out hardware wallets as an alternative to simply leaving coins on exchanges.

Outsiders may scoff at the Q1’s clunky, repetitive user interface, or UX, but Coinkite says it intentionally came up with the anachronistic design after consultations with users of the smaller, sleeker MK4.

The exact size, weight and price of the Q1 will be confirmed in the near future, but eager users can already reserve the device with a deposit of $199. The retail price is not expected to be much higher than the deposit amount.

“Q1 was built mainly to help less advanced users,” Celia Cherif, a Coinkite business development representative, told CoinDesk in an interview. “We gathered their feedback from MK4 and made everything more UX-friendly for them in Q1.”

Coinkite’s roots in the Bitcoin space go all the way back to 2011, when co-founders Rodolfo

Novak and Peter Gray stumbled upon the Bitcoin white paper and later built a rudimentary bitcoin hardware wallet. The pair eventually incorporated as Coinkite, and the firm now manufactures and sells a suite of hardware and software Bitcoin products, including the MK4, which Cherif says is Coinkite’s best-selling product.

“Coldcard sales have been higher than expected,” Novak wrote in one chirping. CoinKite declined to provide CoinDesk with official sales data.

Last year’s implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange sparked an exodus of customers from centralized exchanges to self-custodians.

A crypto publication reported that two of the biggest players in hardware wallets – Trezor and Ledger – captured a significant share of the panicked customers in November. According to the publication, Trezor reported a 300% increase in week-over-week sales, while Ledger saw a sixfold increase in account creations for Ledger Live, the firm’s wallet management software.

Coinkite also saw an increase in sales, although it is not clear by how much. “Bitcoiners are so determined on bitcoin, and so many are leaving exchanges,” Novak tweeted. “In all my years I have never seen so much activity.”

The Q1’s design is all about convenience and security, specifically “air-gapping,” which means isolating the device from potentially unsecured networks like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Cherif says some less tech-savvy customers reported problems using the MK4. Many customers fumbled with entering sensitive passphrases, struggled to scan QR codes for bitcoin addresses, dealt with the hassle of plugging in power cables and switching back and forth between microSD cards.

With that backdrop, Coinkite designed the Q1 to include two microSD slots to store wallet seed phrases — a series of 12 to 24 random words used to “recover” or recover private keys in the event of accidental loss. The dual microSD slots offer more secure data transfer than traditional USB-A connections (more commonly referred to as just “USB”), which Cherif says are vulnerable to all kinds of sophisticated cyberattacks.

“There are many vulnerabilities with USB data connectivity,” Cherif explained. “A site has been created just to monitor all known vulnerabilities. The list is endless. These are vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited by malicious actors.”

The firm’s engineers included both AAA batteries and the USB-C port as power sources for the Q1. Cherif also emphasized that the Q1’s USB-C port is strictly reserved for power transfer and not data transfer.

“If you choose to connect the USB-C cable to an Internet-connected device, it remains a much safer option than a USB cable because it has no data lines connected, only power,” Cherif said.

Coinkite added a flashlight to the Q1 so users can easily scan Bitcoin QR codes (encoded Bitcoin addresses) in low light.

The wallet has an LED QR code scanner instead of a video camera-based version. Coinkite says the choice was deliberate because cameras, being more technologically complex, are more vulnerable to malicious hacks.

“The idea is that the camera is an attack vector,” Cherif explained.

A few Twitter users reading details of the new device wondered aloud whether the Q1’s large color LCD display is capable of displaying Ordinals, a new type of on-chain Bitcoin non-fungible token (NFT).