For years, Ledger and Trezor have both maintained a firm grasp on the hardware wallet market, becoming household names for anyone who buys cryptocurrencies and follows the market closely.
This is all about to change as Bitfi enters the scene with Knox, the newest hardware wallet to enter the market. Aside from what seems like a fancy LED screen, multi-currency support, and a form factor that looks much like a smartphone, the Bitfi wallet also sets itself apart by receiving the backing of John McAfee himself, who is now a member of the team.
“Of all today’s elaborate and sophisticated methods for making wallets secure and easy to use, surely none is as epic as that of the new Bitfi wallet. Several of my competitors have pioneered innovative methods to provide private keys, but Bitfi pulled out all the stops to ensure that the private key can never be obtained by illicit means. No other hardware wallet has ever been built to this level of sophistication,” said John McAfee.
Bitfi didn’t say what role McAfee will play in its venture, but according to the company, he “acknowledged that Bitfi technology is indeed unhackable.”
Although both Trezor and Ledger hardware wallets both provide the private keys in the form of a 24-word mnemonic phrase for each cryptocurrency, Bitfi’s algorithm lets the user memorize only one phrase for all of them and then proceeds to generate private keys for each wallet using its CPU.
This also means that users might not be able to import their existing wallets into Bitfi, instead needing to transfer their funds from their old wallets, paying the transaction fee for each.
On Bitfi’s website, under “How It Works,” we can see that it supports an “unlimited number of cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets.” It isn’t clear how the wallet’s manufacturer intends on doing this, as even companies with a breadth of experience like Ledger’s struggle to keep up with all the latest coins.
Each coin’s blockchain functions in a different matter, sometimes passing along data sets and variables that have little similarity to what Bitcoin does. It’s quite possible that Bitfi will follow a similar model to Ledger and Trezor, integrating all of the largest coins and doing a lot of R&D to integrate others that are in demand.
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