​1inch community will allocate $2 million to create its hardware wallet

What’s new? The community of the decentralized exchange aggregator (DEX) 1inch voted to allocate $2 million to produce the 1inch Hardware Wallet, designed for cold storage of digital assets. 99% of the participants of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) voted in favor of the proposal. The project’s team announced this on Twitter.

🚨 New @1inch Proposal Voting Alert: [1IP-30] 1inch Hardware Wallet production completion 🗳️ Vote & join the discussion: https://t.co/WUEDdiPXi7 #DAO #DeFi — 1inch DAO (@1inchDAO) June 8, 2023

Hardware wallets are devices isolated from the network. They store the user’s address and private keys and have several layers of security to protect data from various types of attacks. They are used as additional security for manually confirming transactions or for cold storage of cryptocurrencies.

What is known about the device? The 1inch Hardware Wallet is being developed by an independent team working in the 1inch Network ecosystem. The project received a $175 000 grant from the 1inch Foundation in 2022. The expected start date for the wallet is late 2023.

Data will be exchanged on the device using QR codes or Near Field Communication (NFC), a wireless data transmission technology. Users will have a Multi-seed option to create and control multiple sets of wallets with different seed phrases, as well as tools to parse and analyze transactions.

The preliminary estimate is $1,57 million, which will go toward production, salaries, obtaining certifications, legal expenses, and setting up sales and supply channels. The rest of the money will be allocated for operating expenses and marketing. The project team emphasized that all costs will be transparent and every dollar will be “spent towards delivering a top-quality product for the benefit of 1inch DAO and 1inch ecosystem.”

Situation on the hardware wallet market. On May 25, hardware crypto wallet maker Trezor reported a one-week increase in sales of 900%. The surge came after the community harshly criticized the private key recovery feature announced by wallet maker Ledger because of possible data leakage risks. In particular, Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier confirmed that the seed phrases of users using the Ledger Recover access function could theoretically be handed over to governments if there is a corresponding court request.

Earlier, experts at Unciphered discovered an unmatchable hardware vulnerability in the Trezor T model wallet chip that could be used to obtain the seed phrase and pin code to access the assets. The company claims that Trezor knew about the vulnerability, but made no attempt to fix it. Unciphered refused to disclose technical details of the hack, citing user security.

For how to choose a cryptocurrency wallet, read GetBlock Magazine’s article.