Foundation Devices Aims To Build The iPhone Of Bitcoin Hardware

Company Name: Foundation Devices

Founders: Zach Herbert, Ken Carpenter and Jacob Johnston

Date Founded: March 2020

Location of Headquarters: Boston, MA and remote (worldwide)

Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: Foundation holds bitcoin but didn’t disclose the amount

Number of Employees: 24 full-time employees

Website: https://foundation.xyz/

Public or Private? Private

Zach Herbert wants to make bitcoin self-custody accessible to everyone.

This is why the co-founder and CEO of Foundation Devices, a company that makes Bitcoin hardware and software wallets, has spent the last four years building Bitcoin technology that’s not only secure and open-source but also as usable as products made by Apple, a brand that Herbet loves (or at least loved — read on).

What sets apart Foundation’s flagship product, a hardware wallet called the Passport, from the competition is a “combination of design and user experience,” Herbert told Bitcoin Magazine.

He went on to share that Foundation also has “very strong principles we try to uphold around open-source, privacy and freedom.”

Foundation’s strength lies in how it balances staying true to its principles and crafting products that those new to Bitcoin can still use with relative ease.

“I think you just have to have those principles defined from day one and you have to really know why you're doing what you're doing,” said Herbert in regard to how he and his team strike such a balance.

“I don't think it conflicts at all with the idea of wanting to build the best designed devices or products possible,” he added.

Foundation’s Products

Foundation is best known for its hardware wallet, the aforementioned Passport.

The device looks like an upscale version of a feature phone, but with a higher-resolution screen.

One of the Passport’s selling points is that it’s airgapped, which means it never has to be plugged into an internet-connected device, providing extra protection for the user’s private keys.

Regarding the private keys, Foundation has created a simplified way to back them up compared to the traditional method of writing them down. With the Passport, users can save their seed phrase to the industrial grade microSD card that comes with the device.

“We think that not having to go write down those 12 or 24 words helps you get onboarded faster,” said Herbert.

Signing transactions with the Passport is also notably less complicated than it is with most competitor devices. You can do so by simply scanning a QR code, using your Passport and mobile phone.

The Passport works most conveniently when used in conjunction with Foundation’s Envoy mobile app, which also serves as a stand-alone hot wallet.

Again, to make it easier to onboard users, Herbert and the Foundation team created a system that lets users securely start using the app almost instantaneously.

“We created something we call Magic Backups where we actually store the seed to your iCloud keychain or Android equivalent, which is only for the hot wallet on your phone,” explained Herbert.

“What's amazing about Magic Backups is that you're onboarded within 60 seconds of downloading the app for the first time, and so you can always go and import your own seed if you want to, or create and save your own seed instead,” he added.

“We try to obfuscate things that might be complicated, but we do things based on the industry standards.”

He acknowledged that this surely isn’t as secure as recording your seed phrase to a microSD card or writing it down because saving your seed phrase offline is safer than storing it online, and he shared that the hot wallet is only for minimal amounts of funds — the same dollar amounts you’d hold in your physical wallet in cash.

Another feature of Envoy is that you can purchase bitcoin via KYC-free P2P marketplaces like Hodl Hodl and Bisq within the app and then send those purchases directly to hot or cold storage.