Hardware wallets are supposed to reduce trust.

Your keys. Your device. Your crypto. That is the whole point. But there is still one uncomfortable truth.

You have to trust somebody enough to buy the thing from them.

In the case of crypto hardware wallets, you have to trust the people designing the hardware. You have to trust the firmware process. You have to trust how the company responds when researchers find something ugly. And you have to trust that five or ten years from now the people behind the product still believe in the same basic principles that convinced you to buy it.

After researching nearly 20 different hardware wallets (cold and hot), Black Seed Ink Research Labs keeps coming back to one company.

Not one wallet.

One company.

SatoshiLabs.

The Czech technology group behind Trezor and Tropic Square.

And we think SatoshiLabs has earned a title that fits it unusually well.

The renegade of self custody.

Not because nobody in the SatoshiLabs universe takes outside money. That would be wrong.

SatoshiLabs describes itself as self owned and independent, and Trezor says it is completely self funded. But Tropic Square accepted €4 million from Swiss investment company Auzera in 2021 and is openly preparing for possible future investment rounds. SatoshiLabs

So let’s get that out of the way right now. The story is not: Nobody takes investor money.

The story is:

SatoshiLabs keeps looking at the accepted way of doing things and asking whether there is a better way. When the answer is yes, they have a habit of building it themselves.

That is what makes them different.

And frankly, we effing love it.

Before Hardware Wallets, There Was a Problem to Solve

It is easy to forget that hardware wallets now feel obvious because somebody had to make them obvious.

Marek “Slush” Palatinus founded Slush Pool, the world’s first Bitcoin mining pool.

Then in March 2012, cloud provider Linode was compromised.

Attackers stole 3,094 BTC from Palatinus’ hot wallet. Ars Technica confirmed the theft directly with him and reported that he said he would cover the loss for his customers. Ars Technica

Read that again.

3,094 Bitcoin.

No, Bitcoin was nowhere near today’s value at the time. That is not the point. He got robbed. His users could have been left holding the bag. Instead, he effing covered it! Then he and Pavol “Stick” Rusnák kept working on a better way to protect private keys. Where we come from, that's a BALLER move.

They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Well, don’t underestimate what happens when a technically gifted Bitcoin founder with a strong moral compass gets burned by the exact custody problem he is trying to solve.

You think that left a mark?

We do.

And we think you can still see it in the DNA of SatoshiLabs today.

They Did More Than Build Trezor

This is where the story gets good...

Slush and Stick did not just build a hardware wallet and call it a day. They helped shape the standards that wallets all over the industry still use.

Palatinus and Rusnák are two of the four authors of BIP39, the standard behind the familiar recovery word system used by modern crypto wallets. They also authored BIP44, which created a standardized hierarchy for organizing multiple coins, accounts and addresses inside deterministic wallets. 

Then SatoshiLabs engineers played a major role in SLIP39, the Shamir Secret Sharing standard for mnemonic backups. Five of the six listed authors used SatoshiLabs email addresses.

So step back for a second.

Need a hardware wallet?

Build one.

Need a better wallet backup standard?

Help build it.

Need a better structure for multiple coins and accounts?

Build that too.

Need a more sophisticated recovery system?

Yep. Build it.

Come on. This is not normal hardware wallet company behavior. This company is freaking BALLER. Think Stephen Curry, 2024 Olympics, USA vs. France, four threes in the final three minutes, night night kind of baller.

Then SatoshiLabs Did Something Even More Renegade

Secure Elements created a problem for Trezor. Yes, they provide exactly the kind of hardened protection you want inside a hardware wallet. But much of the Secure Element world has historically depended on proprietary designs, restricted documentation and secrecy. That does not fit particularly well with a company built around open source and verification.

So what did SatoshiLabs do? They helped create Tropic Square.

Tropic Square itself says the original motivation was the need for a better chip solution for Trezor because the closed nature of available Secure Elements did not fit what they wanted to build. SatoshiLabs

Think about that.

Most hardware wallet companies need a Secure Element, so they go shopping for one.

SatoshiLabs looked at the available choices and basically said:

Nope. Not good enough.

So they helped build a semiconductor company.

Seriously people!

We effing love this.

You don’t like the black box security model? Fine. Build your own chip company and try to change the model.

That is renegade, folks.

Wild West, Czech Republic style. Swap the Stetson cowboy hat for a black Moravian hat and you get the idea.

Yes, Tropic Square Took Outside Investment

This part matters, so we are not going to dance around it.

Tropic Square received €4 million from Auzera in 2021 to help fund development and testing of its security chip. In May 2026, Tropic Square also said its leadership transition was intended in part to prepare the company for future investment rounds and partnerships. 

So:

SatoshiLabs says it is self owned and independent. Trezor says it is completely self funded. Tropic Square has taken outside investment. All three statements are true.

Would we prefer every company in the ecosystem to be completely self funded? Sure. But building a semiconductor company is also ridiculously expensive. The important question for us is not whether somebody somewhere wrote a check.

The important question is:

Who controls the mission?

So far, Tropic Square is still building around the same idea that made the project interesting in the first place. Open it up. Let people inspect it. Let researchers attack it.

Which brings us to Ledger Donjon.

Then Ledger Broke the Chip

Good.

Seriously.

If you are going to build a chip around the idea that security should be inspectable, then somebody better inspect the hell out of it.

Ledger Donjon did exactly that.

Researchers found a laser fault injection vulnerability in TROPIC01 that could bypass firmware signature verification and achieve arbitrary firmware execution. Tropic Square has since been working on hardened silicon to address the issue. Tropic Square

Did we love the vulnerability? Of course not.

Do we love that one of the best hardware security teams in the world, working for Trezor’s direct competitor no less, could tear into the chip and expose the problem?

Absolutely!

That is the point.

Open source does not mean nothing ever breaks. It means people can actually look for the break.

Then fix it.

But also bring your butt back to reality for a minute. Open source is only as strong as the scrutiny actually applied to it. Publishing the code does not mean every firmware release has been independently rebuilt, compared against the distributed binary, audited line by line, and pounded on by outside researchers before you install it.

Does that happen with every Trezor firmware update? No.

Does it happen with every Trezor Suite update? No.

That matters.

Open source gives us the ability to verify. It does not guarantee that somebody already did.

And that is a distinction every serious self custody user should understand.

Where We Disagreed With Trezor

Now for the part where Trezor does not get a free pass.

And not a little.

Ledger Donjon’s evaluation of the original Trezor Safe 3 showed that some of its supply chain protections could be bypassed because of weaknesses in the older microcontroller architecture.

Trezor acknowledged the finding and specifically noted that the Safe 5 was not affected because it used a newer microcontroller designed to be more resilient to similar attacks. Trezor

Trezor later revised the Safe 3.

Its own engineering documentation now identifies:

T2B1 as Safe 3 Rev. A

T3B1 as Safe 3 Rev. B Trezor Documentation

The newer revision moved to the more resistant STM32U5 architecture.

Great.

Here is where we have a problem.

In March 2026, Trezor developer Jan Matějek said the older T2B1 had been out of production for quite some time, but could still be sitting in inventory. He also said buyers could not necessarily be guaranteed which revision they would receive because Trezor considered the two versions the same product. Trezor Forum

Nope.

This is where we disagreed with Trezor.

And not politely.

Once you have the better microcontroller, cut bait.

Pull the old units. Eat the loss. Move on. You are Trezor. You have spent more than a decade telling us security comes first. This was the moment to prove it.

We do not think they handled that transition the way they should have.

Now, before anybody loses their mind, we are not saying the original Safe 3 suddenly became garbage.

Trezor explained that even if an expert attacker extracted encrypted seed data from the older STM32F4, the attacker still lacked the Secure Element secrets necessary to decrypt it. Trezor Forum

The attack also required sophisticated physical access.

Our issue was simpler.

Once the better architecture existed, customers buying a security product should not have had to wonder which version was inside the box.

Period.

This Is About the Company, Not One Wallet

Let’s make something else clear.

We are not saying every Trezor is automatically the best hardware wallet. That would be nonsense.

OneKey Pro has some fascinating Secure Element architecture.

Keystone 3 Pro has real advantages for people who want QR based workflows.

Other wallets support particular blockchains or features better. Trezor has weaknesses too. We have written about them. But product architecture and company architecture are not the same thing.

You can love a company and dislike one of its products.

You can love a product and distrust where the company behind it is heading.

This article is about SatoshiLabs - and we effing love the company.