Trezor Releases New Safe 5 Hardware Wallet (Bitcoin-Only Included)

Crypto hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor unveiled three new products on June 14th. These are designed to promote self-custody of digital assets by individuals.

The first is the Trezor Safe 5 hardware wallet device that allows users to securely store, manage, stake, and utilize thousands of different cryptocurrencies through Trezor’s desktop and mobile apps.

Key features of this offering include a larger color touchscreen with haptic feedback, a new secure element chip for protecting sensitive data and cryptographic operations, and a 20-word seed backup process.

The second product is a Bitcoin-only version of their hardware wallet, while the third is the “Trezor Expert” onboarding service.

As the name suggests, the Bitcoin-only version option removes non-Bitcoin features and code and solely focuses on a Bitcoin-only experience. Going forward, the company will be offering an unlimited edition of the Bitcoin-only Trezor Safe 3 and Trezor Safe 5 wallets available for general sale by the public.

Meanwhile, Trezor Expert is a personalized one-on-one onboarding services which provides online sessions for users who seek additionally assistance from dedicated Trezor Expert specialists. The end goal is to ensure the proper and secure setup of user’s self-custodial wallet.

Notably, Trezor devices use open-source code, which allows the community to audit and identify bugs and vulnerabilities. However, this openness could potentially make stolen devices easier to crack. Keeping this in mind, the Trezor Safe 5 has an EAL 6+ certification and extensive testing to confirm its ability to withstand sophisticated attacks.

Furthermore, the improved backup process is expected to let users upgrade from a standard single backup to a multi-chare backup using Shamir’s secret sharing. This essentially works by splitting the master private key into multiple unique shares.

In this case, the users decide how many shares to create and how many are needed for wallet recovery. Such a system in place ensures that the wallet can still be accessed even if some shares are lost.