keepkey premium bitcoin hardware wallet

I’m always interested when a new hardware wallet is announced. Naturally also for the keepkey. In contrast to most competitors, they didn’t take pre-orders. Instead they began to accept orders only when the product was finished and they were ready to ship. When they announced that the devices were finished and could be ordered, I was disappointed to find out that the price was a lot higher than I anticipated. It costs more than twice as much as a trezor. Since it also looks very shiny, I jokingly called it the iKeepKey.

Fast forward a few months, I packaged a new version of the trezor python library for debian. Since I knew that electrum also has a plugin for the keepkey, I figured I could just as well package the keepkey library to make the usage with electrum a bit more convenient for the owners of these devices on debian and its derivatives. The only thing I could verify without a device was that the option for the keepkey appeared when creating a new wallet with hardware support in electrum. Before I committ the package to debian propper, I wanted to be sure everything worked. So I sent an eMail to keepkey, asking if they could test my experimental package. Within hours I had an answer offering to send me a device free of charge. I couldn’t have hoped for so much generosity, but of course I happily agreed.

Today the parcel was delivered. The device is as shiny and good looking as it appears on the photos. It has a big, nicely readable screen that shows effects and animations. To host the bigger screen it naturally has to be signifficantly bigger than a trezor. The premium appearance doesn’t stop at the device itself, but also the woven cable, and the leather sleeve for storing the seed restoration card are very slick. I don’t know how much for the internals, but at least for the protocol, the trezor was used as a starting point. This is surely a very good choice.

There are other hardware wallets that descend from the trezor. But there is a big and important difference. The keepkey seems to be the only one so far that is trustworthy. The chinese clones such as bwallet or ewallet look good at first. But some people or even satoshilabs themselves were quick to point out that they didn’t properly sign their firmwares and did not release their source code. Effectively stealing the previous work and putting users at risk. In contrast to this, keepkey really play by the rules for the benefit of their users.

The card that comes with the keepkey, is about how to use it with a chrome browser plugin. I almost always prefer native applications over web apps. I try not to use chromium after a recent breach of trust. And it is not in the trisquel repositories anyway. So I want to operate it fully from within electrum. The last time I initialized a trezor, I’m pretty sure I had to use the firefox plugin. But in the meantime I noticed that the initialization part was added to the electrum plugin. So to initialize the keepkey in electrum I executed the following steps:

  • File -> New/Restore
  • provide a name for the new wallet
  • Select “Create a new wallet” and “Hardware Wallet”
  • Select “initialize a new or wiped device” and “KeepKey wallet”
  • Select your preferred use of pin and password
  • The keepkey shows some entropy information
  • Enter your new pin twice using the same method as known from trezor
  • Choose the number of words for your restore seed
  • Write down the words for the seed (very important to store securely)
  • And voila .. your keepkey electrum wallet is ready to use

Spending and everything I tested so far worked flawlessly. The operations work effectively the same way as with the trezor. But where appropriate it makes use of the bigger screen to show more information at once. So I guess I can start preparing my package for debian.

Here are some pictures to compare the size with other bitcoin hardware wallets:

HardwareWallets1 HardwareWallets2


Posted

in

, ,

by

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *