Hedera Ecosystem Twitter Spaces hosted by The HBAR Foundation - Citadel Hardware Wallet X HashPack

As the Hedera ecosystem grows, we are seeing more interest from members of the community to be able to leverage more of the capabilities of the chain in the hardware wallet space. As of right now, Ledger has implemented Hedera support but it doesn’t have all the capabilities like native staking, smart contract 2.0 signing or token association built into it.

Last week, on a weekly Twitter space hosted by the HBAR Foundation, Andy, the Founder of Citadel Wallet spoke about the process of creating a Hedera native hardware wallet and the challenges that come with it.

Transcription

HBAR Foundation - Brandon:
‍With all the mess coming out of FTX there's a renewed focus on crypto custody and we have some custody experts in the Hedera space to take questions and tell us about their solutions. We'll start off with the hardware wallets which are a certainly a huge part of self-custody and we have a long time to their community member Andy also known as a “HBAR to the moon” but I see he's under his citadel icon there today, welcome!

Citadel Wallet – Andy – Founder:
‍Brandon thank you for the welcoming. I'm very happy to be here, great to be on the spaces. Like you mentioned, my name is Andy AKA “HBAR to the moon” I'm the founder of Citadel hardware wallet project which I've been developing with my co-founder Deepak for about 3-4 months really building the wallet but I was doing research even before that planning how I'm going to build it. Hardware wallets are very secure and like you said it's really timely to talk about wallets right now especially non-custodial wallets. Everybody is very aware of security in the crypto space right now, everybody is thinking more about being in charge of their cryptocurrency and because of events like the FTX people start caring about how important it is to be in charge of their accounts. We are building a hardware wallet to bring that extra layer of security and protection to the users of the Hedera ecosystem and that's what we've been focused on building.

HBAR Foundation - Brandon:
‍Thank you, Andy. So the one question that pops into my mind is; how do you bootstrap the most important thing when it comes to a hardware wallet and that's trust in that wallet?

Citadel Wallet – Andy – Founder:
‍In terms of trust that's a very good question because we're developing and building a hardware product, for trust we need to care about two different aspects of this product. First on, the hardware side itself and then the software side. In terms of the hardware, my background is I’m electrical engineering hardware designer so I do have a lot of experience developing, and designing very mission critical embedded systems in avionic, military, and industrial applications. A device like this falls into my expertise very closely. In terms of hardware I have done a lot of research into first of all the hardware wallets in the crypto industry in general, what kind of components these products are using, and so on. Initially I was thinking maybe to utilize some of these hardware architectures that the industry is utilizing or building upon, but I quickly realized these architectures are not really as secure as the companies are promoting them to be. So in terms of hardware we have developed a completely new hardware architecture utilizing the most cutting edge, and secure components, secure element, microprocessor, storage devices, to make sure that on the hardware side we provide the security really not seen before in this ecosystem. Then of course from the software side the way you bring trust to the ecosystem and the community first and foremost, is first of all developing and building the software on this hardware wallet that is going to be very robust and secure but also by just us telling the community that this one is very secure is not good enough to bring that trust to the community. We are going to work with third party auditors to run a lot of penetration tests, and do code auditing on the software that we have developed and written, specifically for this wallet, and provide the results of those audits and penetration tests to the community. Then eventually once we go through this first page of tests and all the things we also want to provide wallets to the community members who are white hackers and provide some bug bounties and incentives to really try to stress test the device and try to hack into it. If anybody from the community at that stage of the development would like to participate in this program, we would love to work with them as well. So we bring trust by first developing the best hardware and the best software and then publicly showing the results of the test and then working with the community to show them that this is actually probably tested and is based on a very innovative and novel architecture.

HBAR Foundation - Brandon:
‍Thank you, Andy. Where are we with development when will people be able to get our hands on these wallets?

Citadel Wallet – Andy – Founder:
‍I hope very soon in terms of developments I would say we are a few months away from getting the MVP devices that are the fully functional hardware wallet devices in our hands so we can start doing the penetration test, and really putting stress on these devices and test it on our side. In terms of going to market, it will take probably another three to four months after that. Right now our goal is to go to market end of summer but of course we're not going to rush. We want to make sure that these wallets are very secure before we go to market, and then another thing that we need to think about and start working on once initial prototypes are already is integrating with software wallet in the industry. That will probably take some time as well to make sure that the users can pair this hardware wallet with their favorite, most often used software wallets, and that will also simplify the process of using this hardware wallet. We don't want to develop our own software wallet we want users to just easily pair it with the software wallet that they like to use to directly connect to the dApps in the ecosystem and start using it with just a few clicks.

HBAR Foundation - Brandon:
‍Thank you, One thing I've seen is even though we have some ecosystem wallets that serve several different platforms, the ones that are native to Hedera often do the best at least in our ecosystem so I'm really impressed with that so good luck with it I’m certainly looking forward to it. May, you had a comment or question?

HashPack - May – Co-founder & CEO:
‍Andy we've had a great chat before about this, and integrating with wallet and I just wanted to give you a chance to soapbox why Citadel wallet will be such a great addition to the Hedera community from security perspective, from a hardware perspective, we had a great chat about the challenges that a hardware wallet might have that is not built specifically for Hedera, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on that again.

Citadel Wallet – Andy – Founder:
‍Great question May. In terms of why is this wallet going to be so special is because we are focused on Hedera ecosystems specifically and if you remember when we were talking about other wallets in the crypto industry just in general, these wallets because they are only focused on supporting as many networks and coins as possible they're really limited in terms of features and functionalities. They can provide supporting other services that this networks provide. The goal of this hardware wallet is really to just receive the transaction from a software wallet sign it and return back to the software wallet itself. That's basically the functionality of the wallet so they're very primitive in that sense, and low power and they don't need to do too many computations and for that reason if you're trying to support too many networks you're taking up a lot of space in terms of what kind of applications can run on the wallet. Us focusing on Hedera network that's specifically and removing all that extra computations needed to support other networks we're really opening up the types of features, and services we can support on Hedera network and I'm happy to say that when we go to market we'll have all the services that are supported on our wallet and I know community is waiting for native stating to be supported, token associations, NFTs and tokens to be supported. There are also so many different types of services on Hedera like smart contracts 2.0 you can use dexes & smart contracts and do the trades without getting your account keys outside of your hardware wallet. Scheduled transactions is another very important service that only Hedera can support and we're going to also provide support for that service as well. So it's going to be fully a featured wallet specifically built for Hedera ecosystem and for that reason optimized to be highly performant, supporting all the services that the community is waiting for.