PRIME TIME with Zach Herbert

Hello, and welcome to Freedom Tech Friday, a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the ungovernable x, Nosta, YouTube, Rumble, and Twitch feeds. We go live for an hour every Friday at 9AM eastern and 2PM UK time, but you can also catch up later on the Ungovernable podcast feed.

On Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest news, trends, and anything related to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between.

Essentially, if there's a news item, tool, or topic that can help you take back some control in today's digital panopticon, we want to talk about it. My name is Max. I'm the acting chief refreshments officer at the Ungovernable Empire. And as always, I'm joined by my good friends, q and a, the head of customer experience at Foundation,

and Seth, who is COO at CakeWallet. This is a live interactive show, and you can help steer the conversation. You can comment live, presubmit questions or topics on socials, boost the show via podcasting two point o apps, send tips, and share with friends and family.

The top support from last show comes from Kaz Peland who streamed 1,062 sats. Thank you for your support. So before we introduce our guests and dive into the show, Q, Seth, how are we doing? It's going good.

Big week. Big week, especially for for Zach and I. It's feels like it's been a a long time coming. So there's been some Oh, yeah. Some some mini celebrations going on to to finally get this thing out the door. And yeah, it's

it's a big one. Yeah. So excited to excited to chat about it. Likewise. It's a it's weird, because this is, like, partly my baby, but a baby that I abandoned about a year and a half ago. But now seeing the baby growing up and doing so well and real.

So it's it's awesome to see Prime out there. See a lot of things that I had seen and chatted with the team about, and we had thought through so much way back when we started Prime. And then to see it now from the other side as someone who's gonna be building on top of it and

using it regularly and keeping it in my backpack, I am absolutely pumped for Prime to be here and pumped to to grill Zach in q and a, keep him on the hot seat for a little while. Yeah. I think he needs doing.

So today's show is a little bit different. Obviously, we have our special guest, Zach Herbert, joining us today. He's the CEO and cofounder of Foundation Devices. He's here because after years of developing and delays, which we'll get into, some setbacks, and insane amount of engineering work.

Passport Prime is finally shipping to customers. Now what I think makes this story interesting for the Freedom Tech Friday audience isn't just that they have a new hardware wallet. It's the story behind it. It's a small team in The US that decided to build a completely new open source hardware device from scratch.

New operating system, new communication layer, new form factor, and they've manufactured everything domestically in America, especially in this industry where basically everyone just ships from Shenzhen.

It's pretty bold. So today, we're gonna dig into what it's actually like to build something like this, the manufacturing, the supply chain, the engineering decisions, the DEI hire of q and a, and what it means for the broader Freedom Tech space.

So, Zach, welcome to the show. How does it feel to finally have the device in customer's hands? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. It's weird to be a a special guest, by the way. Very special.

It feels I I don't know if I if I feel it yet is the answer to your question. I'm still I know I know Q said that there's some celebrations. I'm still kinda holding my breath. Yes. I can imagine. Well, it's it's been weird because I've sort of seen the whole process,

you know, and and seen snippets and spoken to you behind the scenes and Q and Seth and and and, you know, when was it? A year ago or so where we went into depth of what you guys were doing. And I've kind of been, like, on the inside on the outside mainly, but on the inside. And I know it's been

quite a task getting it here. So I think you can pat yourself on the back at least a little bit and say, we got there. It's getting into hands. Even though not my hands, I feel very jealous. All of you guys have them, not me. When are you getting yours? Did you already get one? You

tell me. You tell me. I I don't know. We should've left out. We should've sent him the virus because if if anybody's gonna break it, it'll be Max. So we should've sent him as the official QA tester.

The tester. Yeah. Exactly. It's okay. It's okay. I'm admiring it from afar. I'm seeing the pictures. It looks beautiful. To be clear, you are. Into it. Yeah. Can I send you one? You are. Okay. You have to come and deliver it to me. I don't think they have postal service where I am. Good deal. Okay.

So, Zach, passport call was obviously your your first baby. It's very well regarded in the space, and it's something that I use pretty much every day. What was it that made you

make this change and put you and the team through all this stress and and build something completely from the ground up? Did you not feel you already had something that's like, okay. This is great. This works. Like, we're done. Yeah. I I, I was

very proud of what we built with Passport Core. And I think if, like, we take a step back and think about, like, when we started the company, the the idea for the whole company started in 2019 when I was using a cold card personally, and I was really annoyed that none of the other hardware wallets supported even, like, Bitcoin multisig

well or at all. Mhmm. And I had, you know, learned about this idea of air gapping and all that kind of stuff, and and I wanted to do something that had the hardcore air gap but had a much better user experience than, you know, Coldcard

and just for something that would be more accessible to more people and really just building for something that I wanted for myself, you know, back then. And so, you know, we did the two generations of of the original Passport, which was Passport Founders Edition, and then, you know, we called it Passport batch two.

We ultimately end up calling it, you know, Passport Core kind of later on retroactively. And I think it's a great device, and I think, you know, it offers some some great security, some great usability. But, you know, when you when you make stuff and when you have a really high bar,

I could probably spend, like, hours complaining about all the things I don't like about it. And so it was it was never the final form. It was something that I think worked well for, like, kind of the more hardcore people, but there's so many, you know, things about it that I think

could have been, you know, much improved. One is, like, you know, building on this MicroPython based firmware, both, you know, pulling in code from CoinKite early on as as some folks know.

And then also from Trezor, you know, like their crypto libraries and some other stuff. It's MicroPython from, like, a hardcore security perspective, it's it's not designed to be, like, a security operating

system. So there that that was one thing that was always in our minds, you know, both myself and then one of our cofounders and our CTO, Ken. You know, we talked so much about how, like, the the actual firmware and what we were using as, like, the foundational firmware,

was just not really designed to be something that was great for security. And so everyone was always talks about, like, the attack surface and wanting to have, like, oh, you don't wanna have any shit coin code in there because, like, the code is on the device and, you know, wanna keep it as minimal as possible.

And it's it's because, you know, these these the software isn't really designed for for having all these different types of of code, you know, kind of side by side in there in case something is untrusted.

So there's, like, the whole the whole software and engineering side of things, but then also, like, the usability side of things. Like, q q knows this well from when, you know, we try to work with customers, like, a lot of a lot of people don't understand, you know,

my phone is showing me this QR code. I'm supposed to scan this QR code from, you know, passport, and then I just have to scan it back.

And, like, we did some events at PubKey, you know, New York, and people had no idea what they were supposed to do. And it's, you know, very illuminating to kind of see how more normal people or even still, like, Bitcoin people, but maybe a little bit newer,

try to interact with it, and it just it didn't really find it to be intuitive at all. And so

that's part of it. And and so, you know, we knew, like, that we wanted a new operating system. We knew we we we knew from very early on we wanted to do it. We waited until this third generation product to do it. We knew we want to solve a lot of the usability type concerns as well.

But then finally, there was the other realization that I'm supposed to, you know, carry all these devices around. I'm supposed to have Yuba keys and

these two FA codes and also the hardware wallet and then all this other stuff. And I'm supposed to go watch Qser Seth's like tutorials and spend hours on their websites, you know, learning how to It's a drag. Yeah. Yeah. Like, who's gonna do that?

Yeah. It's it's not something you wanna do with your life if you can avoid it. Yeah. Exactly. So that's that's that's why we did this. Right? And and we kicked this project off at the 2022, and it took a little bit longer than we expected to get it here.

Okay. And some of that time getting it here and working on a completely new operating system, I assume that comes down to, like, auditing and, like, checking that this thing is obviously secure and works. And when it gets into people's hands, they don't have issues.

Like, how does that work building something completely from scratch? So firstly, the good thing is it wasn't completely from scratch or at least we thought it wouldn't be, but it ended up being mostly from scratch.

So we started with, a really cool open source Rust project called, Zeus OS that was, part of this, like, cool hacker type project from this guy called Bunny, who's pretty famous in, like, the open source hardware world.

And he had this cool Rust operating system for his project, and we said, oh, like, this actually checks off a lot of the boxes for what we wanna build. Let's use that as a starting point, and build on it.

And it had never been actually distributed in, like, mass market consumer products. It was it was part of, like, kind of a crowdfunded project, and I don't think that had even shipped yet when we started.

But we ended up, like, significantly diverging from that this project. So while there's a lot of, core components that come from it, if you look at, like, the effort, it's it's it's you know, vast majority of it was,

was new code. And so I think it's just more of a question of, like, how do you how do you know when you're done, and how do you know how long it's gonna take? And when you're building this new operating system, you know, like, when when do you when do you go, you know, pencils down,

and and how do you build it where you're, like, building the actual core operating system components, but then you're also building, like, the apps and the features on top of it, And then you're trying to kinda converge at the end with, like, a final working product,

and you're building it for a specific hardware that you've also you know, that you're also building the hardware for. And so you control everything, the drivers, the component selection, all that kind of stuff. And then trying to figure out, like, is this is this secure?

And, of course, you know, we did, like, a third party security audit, but, like, we don't really rely on that. That's more like a stamp of approval. And and and then also, like, is this thing robust? You know? Like, if when we release the first firmware updates, you know, will it update?

If something goes wrong and we screw up something, you know, do customers have a way to, like, do a like, recover, you know, recover

the the firmware on the device so that they don't get, like, bricks if we make, you know, make a mistake? So so much of the effort in the last few months has been working on that and making sure that everything is, like, rock solid and stable. So, you know, just this this has been it it's crazy to think that it took, like, probably about

three years of of software development to get to this point. Which is weird because it's normally software that's the easier part and hardware that's the hardest part as far as I can tell from speaking to you and anyone who's in this type of business. So that amount of time is

yeah. It's a lot, but it does a lot of different things compared to your previous device. I think maybe I'll throw this one at UQ because it has been a while since we've talked about the features and how this differs.

Can you talk about the differences between the two devices that you currently offer, the the core and the prime? Like, what what changes and and, like, why did you have to have this new operating system to be able to do the things you can do with Prime?

Yeah. Good question. And to be clear, you said about that we offer both devices. Passport Core is no longer on sale, so you can't actually buy it now unless you go to a a third party reseller that might still have some stock there.

Not available on our website and are very unlikely to ever be again. But in terms of like the the differences, Passport Core was the air gapped lockdown Bitcoin only focused device for, you know, the ultimate in cold storage whilst, you know, we tried to get the the finer balance between that and usability.

I personally think we did a really good job compared to what's what what else is out there. But as Zach kind of alluded to earlier, you with an air gap, a true air gap where you use QR codes or micro SD cards, there's only so much you can do from a user perspective before you just bought up against the architecture.

Like, you have to get some information over that air gap somehow. Obviously, that's generally speaking is via QR codes. And that's where a lot of newcomers fall over and that mental burden of trying to understand

what information is is where, which device do I need to be interact interacting with at which point. Like, the you just cannot fix that because that air gap because of the air gap, essentially.

When we couple that with the fact that, you know, we wanted to produce a device that does much more than that. So like Zach said, you know, prevent people having to carry YubiKeys, have a home for their additional seeds, be able to store their files. Like, we were like, well, we should be able to do all of that in one easy to use device,

and you should be able to choose your own journey. And that's where KeyOS came in and the additional connectivity options that comes with Passport Prime, namely NFC key cards, which we use for magic backups with the provider key cards that we use where we use a two or three backup.

And we can get into that. That's a whole separate conversation for later. Yeah. We also use it for security keys so that you can log in to your Discord account or your any of your online accounts in the same way that you would with the with the YubiKey.

You can do that via USB or via NFC. We've also got the two f a's app, which needs time. It needs a concept of time to be able to do that, so you just can't do that on passport call. So all of these, like, additional kind of features that you need

to make these types of apps functional and usable in a device that is still offline and doesn't have any WiFi or anything like that, you need to make some trade off somewhere, and that comes in the form of connectivity.

The main one that we did is Quantum Link Bluetooth, which as the name suggests is a Bluetooth based protocol that we built on top of with encryption. Just to be specific, it's quantum resistant encryption, which is hence the name.

And that kind of gives us almost like a a live communication between Passport Prime where you're keeping all of your secrets. And at the moment, just Envoy, but we're we're hopeful that other piece of software will adopt that content link standard when they see the benefits of it. And because we've got that live connectivity,

we we're basically, like, bridging that air gap whilst not removing, you know, I'll say 95% of the of the benefits of the air gap. We we kind of, like like the term air gap like security. It's obviously never gonna be a 100% as good because you do have an active connection. But we're taking multiple steps to ensure that it is

as close as it can be to an air gap whilst given that liveness. And that liveness then brings with it, you know, untold amounts of usability improvements. Because whenever you're doing most of your interactions now, be that onboarding or transactions or, like, all of the interactions or most of the interactions

are taken on one single device, there's no longer do you have this headache of, alright. I've got my phone here and I've got this other offline device. Like, which one do I need to look at? Where do I start the interaction?

Like, we've removed most of those headaches and and we are literally just scratching the surface with what's possible. But those are some of the trade offs that we made and why we added in the additional functionality so that we we are, quote, bridging the air gap essentially, but doing so with

caution so we're not just throwing caution to the wind and being like, yeah. Okay. Let's just use, you know, unencrypted Bluetooth to talk to your phone that anybody can eavesdrop on. Like, it's it's very much not that. And I get why people do quickly fall into the rabbit hole of, you know, oh, Bluetooth bad.

I had the exact same knee jerk reaction when when Zach and Ken started talking about the about the protocol and how prime was gonna be architected. But when you actually dig in and we've got an excellent blog blog post on this. When you dig into the technicals, it's really, really very clever. And

I think it's a great set of trade offs so that we can finally get that good balance of, you know, ultimate security whilst making it approachable for 99% of the population. Mhmm. Yeah. Definitely. We we went into massive detail on on this on the show that Zach, you joined, I think it was about a year ago, we went into

exactly how this works and the trade offs and everything. I am conscious that we only have an hour today. So we'll see if we get into the technicals. But I would say maybe for people who are concerned or wanna have a look into it, then maybe we could link that blog post, and I can also link the the other episode for that. I'm

interested, Seth, from you and and your view on this, the fact that it's opened up and that there's this new operating system and application layer. Obviously, you're now with Cake. How are you viewing this and, like, how other companies and other tech can integrate with this?

Yeah. I mean, for me, it's kind of cool because I've I've gotten both sides of it. Like, obviously, I was at Foundation during a lot of the building process, not for the last, like, eighteen months, but for the a lot of the early journey in deciding what it would look like and

what the core functionality would be. So, like, I have a deep understanding of the product, but then now as a user who hasn't been following it as closely over the last year and a half, I'm kinda relearning it, seeing where things ended up, and and seeing especially the form factor in hand,

I think makes it a just an extremely useful thing that you can keep with you all the time. I think, like, for me, I'm gonna treat it a little bit differently than I would maybe a passport core or something like that and probably use this one more for, like, warm

custody, if you will, especially the two FA. Other security aspects of it are something I'm gonna lean a lot more. But when it comes to, like, building on top of it, I I think a lot of that goes with that kind of, to me, slightly different use case. And that I absolutely want

other things to be built on it that are Bitcoin specific, that are are crypto specific. Obviously, Cakewallet, we're gonna build, hopefully, the first app for for Prime,

first to enable Monero support and then down the line to enable the rest of the currencies that we support in Cakewallet because I think there's no there's no hardware wallet out there that will compete with Prime, especially as it just continues to rapidly iterate on the software side.

So I I obviously do want to bring OS. Not quite. Not not the flex, not the stacks. No. There is a as someone who has used everything under the sun, there is nothing that competes with this right now from a user experience, from a a hardware quality perspective.

So I'm I'm really excited for that. But but also just kind of, like, going back to my roots that were pre crypto, I'm just really excited from it for for it from a security perspective, especially things like PGP signing, like 2FA,

like Fido keys, especially Fido keys because I've never done them because they're a pain in the ass, and I hate YubiKeys. But I'm excited to be able to start doing them with Prime, and then to see what we can build out that it's not just Freedom Money centric, but that's Freedom Tech centric.

I think that's one one of the things that's most exciting to me is this is not just a hardware wallet. Like, I think we have to reframe our perspective of what Prime is and not think of it as, like, Passport Core two point o. It's it is not at all. Yes. It can do everything Passport Core can,

and it will look nicer, and it will feel better doing that. But that's that's only the the very tip of the iceberg in what's possible here today already, and then long term, this being an open platform that's much easier to build on than something like a MicroPython Passport Core, etcetera.

I think that's gonna open up a whole a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to this. Yeah. That was our I think one of the things that excited me the most when we first spoke about this device was, like, just how much more capable it is to help someone who cares about their privacy and security

live their life and do the things they need to do. I think that's something that, as you said, because it's an open, protocol and people can build on top, we don't maybe know exactly what's gonna be possible in the future. But the the YubiKey like features and things like that are gonna be,

for someone like me, like, really, really useful to have one device where I can do all these things. Zach, what did you have to think about when doing that in terms of opening this up to, to to development to sit on top of the device that you're building?

Was that a simple decision to say, like, yep. This this can be opened up and everyone can do what they want with it, or, like, was that a concern in any way? Yeah. I mean, couple of things.

One is this was a big reason why we want to build it that I forgot to mention where the struggle for wallet developers just wallet developers, like, not even the other stuff as Seth was mentioning that's more just Freedom Tech and and security related, but, like, the struggle to build stuff for Ledger or more specifically, like,

the idea that the only hardware that allowed you to have any kind of apps restricted the apps to just being, like, coins. Right? Like Mhmm. You have like, there's no cake app for Ledger. Like, if you use Ledger with cake and you wanna use it with Bitcoin and Monero,

you have to install the Bitcoin app on your ledger and the Monero app on your ledger. And then if you wanna be sending stuff in the same, you know, in the same session, let's say, you have to, like, open the Bitcoin app. Have to close the Bitcoin app. You have to open the Monero app. You have to close the Monero app. Like so cake can't

take its user interface and its logo and all the cool stuff they do and put it on a ledger. They can do that for an iPhone. Right? They can do that for Mhmm. An Android phone. They could do that for, like, desktop apps and browser extensions.

But when it comes to the hardware wallet side, right, like the cold storage side, they're stuck with whatever Ledger gives them. They could help with the Monero app, right, if if if Ledger did not support Monero, or they can make contributions to the Monero app, right, because it's a MIT code open source, but they have no control over how

it's presented on, like, the ledger screen. And it's a really crappy user experience for to have to switch between these different coins.

And then people with the old ledgers, like, they ran out of space and, like, you only have room for three apps or whatever. Like, it's a total mess. And so that was a huge impetus for us, like, doing this in the first place.

And we had to do the new operating system because we needed the well, we didn't have to. If we wanted to go the ledger route of of making sure that we review all the code in each of these apps, then we could have done something more conservative because

you're basically having to trust that the apps are not malicious. And so, like, apps are open source on Ledger, but, like, Ledger has to review the code and make sure there's no security vulnerabilities because all apps are accessing the same seed on the device.

So, like, theoretically, if you had a malicious ledger app, it could exfil your seed for the entire device. And so that's why it's so walled garden. And when we realized that, we said, oh, man. Like, if we could build something where you can have apps that

we do not have to like, we as foundation do not have to do a code review for your app, and we make sure that the app is unable to access, like, the master seat on the device and it runs in its own sandbox, like, that opens the door for an entire open app platform where

from a, like, a FreedomTech perspective, developers can go build whatever they want. Right? Like, Cake can go build an app with their own Cake UI and their Cake logo, and maybe we choose to put them in, like, the App Store, but we don't have to review the code or anything like that.

And and if the cake app was malicious, it can't do anything outside of its sandbox. And so that's one of the big reasons why we had to do KeyOS because there was no operating system we coulda used, like, for a device like this that would allow us to do that.

And so, yeah, that was that was, like, a a a huge part of it, but I thought this SDK would take us a lot longer to do, but now we have all the AI tools. And so we're we're gonna be working with Cake even before the SDK is out so that they can be, like, the first app on on the device. But we will have an SDK out in the next

I don't wanna necessarily commit to a timeline because our our our track record with that is is pretty bad at this point. But

in the in the first half of this year, I think I'm I'm very confident that we'll have the SDK out, and it's gonna be so cool. It's it's actually gonna come with the CLI tool, which has become very popular within, like, the AI world where you can, like, one click scaffold an entire KeyOS app,

and everything is just done from CLI commands. So, like, you could even vibe code your own, you know, KeyOS app. And we Ken and I just figured out and finalized, like, how the app store is gonna work, how side loading is gonna work, how all apps in the app store have to be reproducible.

And our CLI tool will automatically make it so they're basically as reproducible as possible from, like without the developers having to do anything. And then we actually are gonna do, like, these attest build attestations on the foundation side so that if you're installing an app,

you know that it is the reproducible open source app from that specific developer's, you know, repo. Mhmm. And so really cool stuff we're gonna be able to do. No one else does it, and I'm really excited about it. And and and I think once we have that SDK out in the coming months,

we're we're just gonna try to onboard as many, you know, developers as possible. And another thing that we have not yet announced, which we can kinda talk about, where it might play into some inside scoop of some manufacturing setbacks, we have over a thousand units that we're gonna be giving away for free to developers

as part of this developer program. Oh, that's cool. That's very cool. Getting them into their hands so they can have a play. Yeah. That's that's developer units. Yep. That's really cool. I wonder, q, as head of Vibes, what do you what do you think of here? Like,

when I think of Vibes coding, I think of you straight away. You you must be spinning your wheels and thinking of a billion different things that you can do now. Do you know what? I haven't taken into the foray yet of of trying to vibe code anything for KeyOS.

I think I fell into the trap that I fell into six months ago with just general vibe code and in that it's probably above my pay grade. But, like, if if the last couple of weeks and some of the side tangential tools that I've built or anything to go by then, maybe it is possible even for a semi luddite like myself.

As the as the show's resident, Nostershell, my first my first foray will probably be into some form of, like, NSEK bunker type thing where you can have your Okay. Your NSEC keys offline. That's the first one that springs to mind, but I'm sure that the world is our oyster

in terms of what is possible. And that's one of the most exciting things for me is that we at Foundation, like, we have some excellent ideas

for for things that, you know, we're gonna be able to do. We've already, you know, started chatting with external teams like Cake and and the Ligos team for, like, DLC lending and things like that. But, like, we we are no longer the the limiting factor for what one of our devices can do, and that makes me incredibly excited.

Because, like, now that this device is out there and KeyOS is open and soon the the kind of app framework will be will be public. It's anybody in the world can build one. And and by anybody, I literally mean anybody now that we like Zach said, we have these AI tools. Like, you can go and build whatever you want.

If you if you want it to come through the official app store, which will be accessible through Envoy, Obviously, there's gonna be some vetting that goes on to make sure that it's secure and not malicious.

But, yeah, I'm just so so excited about what what people are gonna build because, like, we literally have the world as the part of ideas now. Yeah. It's very exciting. Especially now it's like because you're a hardware company. You know? You'd like and then you build this and you build the framework and then you open it up and,

like, the use of this device is gonna be exponentially better than if you just did things in house. That's kind of the whole open source ethos, isn't it? And, yeah, I think that's gonna be really exciting to see. Things like, you know, Stealth who we had on

last week, you know, tools like that and, like, integrations with things like that. There's there's so many different billions of different options that will be interesting to see what happens.

Yeah. I'm very excited. I I a friend of the show, a very close friend of the show actually messaged me this morning for for an idea that's privacy fans will be a big fan of, let's just say. So I hope that comes into fruition And I'll I'll be doing everything in my power to to help them bring that to life.

One one other thing I noticed too is, like, anytime new stuff is being built, I feel like security ends up falling to, like, the wayside because it's like especially in in, like, the Bitcoin or crypto world, like, it was always you had to go build something, and then you had to wait for the hardware wallets to add support.

Yeah. But then even worse now in the general, like, new stuff, security really, like, the AI world. Right? Like, everyone's installing, like, stuff

on their Mac minis and running everything on their given everything access on their desktops, you know, on their computers to just give a plot or whatever full access because, like, I I think I think you wanna be able to experiment

and use all the new things and build all this new stuff. And then, like, years later, you figure out maybe how to make it secure. And if that's in, the crypto side, maybe you get a hardware wallet support, like, years later.

Or if it's a new Bitcoin feature, you get that trickling into hardware wallet support years later. Or with this AI stuff, we'll probably see some ways to better do, like, the secure do security related to, you know, do you give this thing full control of your desktop computer, or do you have something in there to, you know, introduce

just better security? Problem is, like, there's never been a hardware platform where you could actually, like, write apps and just release them to the hardware instantly.

And so you always end up having to, like, wait. You either, like, people I I've even heard rumors. I just wanna say this is a pure rumor, and I don't wanna, you know, get in trouble. But I've heard rumors that, like, Ledger charged money to crypto projects to get, like, their coin supported

in that. I'd not no. I don't think that's even a rumor. I think that's a a known thing, isn't it? Well, I don't know. I don't know. An example of this actually that was interesting to me. They actually went to the Zcash community and asked for, I believe, was a $250,000 grant to just build in shielded Zcash support into Ledger.

Oh my god. Okay. Yeah. So I'm so I'm not gonna get in trouble here. No. It's not it's not a rumor. They've done this publicly. Yep. So why? Like, don't the Zcash guys just wanna go build a cool app for themselves? Why do they need to go beg or or pay someone else to do it for them?

It's crazy. It's antithetical to the the freedom movement. Yeah. It it's like it and then by the way, it barely works, and they have no control over, right, like, what the what what the, UI looks like or the customer experience looks like. And and if and then, you know, some an update gets released to the firmware that breaks support

for everything, which is what's what's happened numerous times even in Bitcoin

related stuff over the last, you know, few years. Like, CASAS tells the customers, you know, don't update your ledger to this firmware. Don't update your Trezor to this firmware because they did something that, like, breaks support for the CASAS app. And, like, what a total mess.

Like, shouldn't they be allowed to make their own app and just manage their own destiny, right, within that? And and so a lot of this comes down to, like, the principles. Right? You you, like if you wanna enable like, you wanna you wanna give everyone the the power to control their own destiny.

And if if if you don't want them to be, like, a slave to another company that is able to, you know,

say we're gonna we're gonna approve your app, you know, we're gonna reject your app, we're gonna build this, we're not gonna build this, we're gonna break your app, right, by releasing an update and not even telling you about it, and then you're scrambling, and and people could even lose money as well.

And so, yeah, that this is, a huge part of all of it, and it's crazy to me because, like, so many of these companies are are using kind of freedom tech oriented marketing. But then you look at, like, the products, and it just it just doesn't match up.

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. And, obviously, you've put a huge amount of effort into this operating system, and then you need the right hardware for it to go on to. You need the right form factor. You need it to be accessible. You need it to be usable for

not just the types of people who read through the guides and spend hours and hours tinkering and messing around, But, like, anyone, I've held one of these in my hands a while back. It felt amazing.

The fact that you have the the screen, the big screen on there makes a big difference. Like, what other things does it open up having that form factor? And and and actually before we go into that, what was it like building this?

Well, I know some of it was a was a fucking headache by the sounds of it. But what was it like building it in America?

Because that's not the norm for people and building it from the ground up. Like, can you talk about the experience? Obviously, we know there's been these delays, and now we're getting them into users' hands, which is awesome. But for anyone who hasn't followed it, like, what what has this been like for you and the team?

Yeah. So firstly, I think, one is it's actually nice to be able to go over to the factory

and, like, be there. So I I think it it's how it it can be very helpful to build things in America from, like, a hands on perspective. You don't have to jump on some plane going to, you know, China or or or whatever. So there's that aspect of it. But I I think it's our approach has changed over

with this being our third generation device. We build this device, and we design this device very differently to optimize for the pros and cons of American manufacturing. So Passport, Founders Edition and Passport Core, they take so much more effort to assemble,

like, so many, like, screws and pieces and all these, like, assembly steps that have to be taken in the factory, and you end up paying a lot higher labor rate, right, in The US. And also, you don't have people that wanna necessarily sit there, like, doing tons of manual operations

as well as opposed to maybe, like, some, you know, Asian country. It's just kind of the norm, right, to be doing tons of manual assembly steps like gluing and screws and all this other stuff.

And so with Passport Prime, we have a very different process where we get all these subassemblies from our actual, like, vendors. And so the process of, like, screwing the circuit board into the device, you just put, like, six screws in.

You connect a couple things, and then you we have an like, a $50,000, $60,000 automatic gluing machine that, like, jets epoxy perfectly onto it. And then you just, like, put the screen on, put it in the oven for, like, fifteen minutes,

comes out, and then you can, you know, move forward with, like, provisioning the software and and packing, you know, doing the pack out. So we have, like, a much more streamlined build process, which we did not have before,

and we're, like, really careful about getting these subassemblies where, like, if you look at our subassembly for, like, the aluminum, the glass, the camera lens, the NFC antenna, like, all of this stuff comes as a single piece,

and it doesn't even use, like, a hardware connector for the NFC antenna. It uses these two little pogo pins that just make contact when you stick the board in. So everything is, like, designed as much as possible to come together quickly, and I think that helps a lot with, like, The US manufacturing.

And if you were, like, going to a normal, like, outsourced engineering firm to design this, they'd probably end up designing it for, like, China manufacturing. So if you if you look at how the Ledger Flex and Stacks were made, they were made that and you they have some videos and stuff up.

It's all assembled at Foxconn in Vietnam. And, like, you can tell that the design and the engineering of this thing was done for assembly, like, at Foxconn. So it's pretty cool to kind of look at, like, the differences and differences in approach to optimize for the domestic manufacturing.

Does that mean then the way that you've thought about manufacturing and the assembly line that if slash when these devices become very popular and it becomes more used by more normal people that you can scale up quickly, or are you always limited by actually getting the materials and, like, will there always be a

slowing down trying to get the materials or have you now got things refined to a stage where We got you know, tomorrow, like, it goes viral and everyone's like, no. This thing's fucking amazing. Like, everyone needs one. You get orders through the roof. Like, can you meet that demand?

Yeah. We can scale up now. Can we get to, like, ledger size immediately right now of, like well, they used to do a million units a year. I don't know if they're still doing that. I don't think we could get to a million units in a year with, like, the current supply chain without, like, scrambling.

But we could get, like, real we can we can get, like, you know, large, large numbers. No problem right now. And I think we have some great, you know, vendors

that we work with to to source, like you know, to to make all, like, the CNC stuff and do these subassemblies. The subassemblies do take place in in China or overseas. So but, like, none of those are security critical stuff. Right? Because the actual circuit boards are assembled here.

All the SOC POS is provisioned on the devices here. So you're just, like, hunks of metal and glass and stuff kinda glued together, right, are coming from overseas.

But we have the process now really nice, but it took a while to get there. So, like, one other thing I can say here is we actually and and Seth doesn't even know this. Like, we had we had to switch manufacturers in November.

So that's one of the reasons why things are really difficult from, like, a, you know, delay process. Not the sole reason. Right? Because, like, it it took a long time to get this to market for numerous reasons, primarily, I think, because of the the effort of, like, the software development.

But we actually did a complete move from our manufacturer that we used for all generations of Passport previously, you know, for for Founders Edition and Core. And we we got out of there, we set up a whole new manufacture you know, a whole new manufacturer, a whole new setup dedicated Passport Prime assembly lines,

automated glue machines, ovens, all this stuff. You know? It's trying to be as automated and streamlined as possible. We did all that. We had we had to do all that in, like, December of like, this past December. So it's been a little crazy, but but I'm I'm glad we made the switch because the new manufacturer is awesome. And,

you know, the the the quality standards are, like, through the roof right now. Nice. We're I don't know how this happens every single week, but we're we're coming close to time now, and I wanna make sure that we get to some of the questions.

I had one more I wanted to jump into because I think it's something that a lot of people are gonna be wondering about. It's one of the major changes. Can you talk about the security with Bluetooth?

Quantum sounds really fucking cool. But, like, outside of that, what would you tell people about the changes? Yeah. And why would you not be so concerned using something like this? What what have you had to address? What have you had to change? Because it's not just, oh, it connects by blue via Bluetooth. It's it's very different.

Yeah. Like, my simple answer would be that there's pros and cons to both, like, the Quantum Link Bluetooth and then the QR air gap. But one really cool thing that we do is we actually establish the initial encryption via an animated QR code scan.

So your the Envoy mobile app scans an animated QR code displayed on passport prime screen, and that's what it uses to create this post quantum encrypted tunnel between the devices. Handshake.

It's exactly. So we do the handshake over QR code. So it's almost like you do the initial handshake in an air gapped way. And then once you do that air gapped handshake, you create an encrypted tunnel. So we're not, like, relying on Bluetooth or wireless comms to do the handshake.

So so the air like, it's an air gapped handshake, which then kicks off this post quantum encrypted tunnel. But then secondly, the Bluetooth chip is literally a different chip on the circuit board inside of Passport Prime, and we the the the main processor running KeyOS controls the firmware on the Bluetooth chip. So every time

KeyOS boots up, it checks the firmware version on the Bluetooth chip. And if KeyOS has a newer one, it literally overwrites the firmware. So it has full control over the firmware of the Bluetooth chip. And we write that. That's also open source firmware, by the way, that's in our GitHub, like the the BLE, Bluetooth low energy firmware.

And so our firmware on the Bluetooth chip, it only sends messages to KeyOS that are already quantum linked. So if KeyOS gets a message from the Bluetooth chip that's not signed and a quantum link message, it just discards it.

And so that's really cool, and it's what's even better than, like, normal Airgap QR codes is that means that Kiosk will only accept cryptographically signed messages that come in from the Bluetooth chip.

Like, when you're doing Airgap QR codes, you can scan anything, and it's not human readable. Right? And and Passport Core, right, will just try to to it'll just try to parse the data and the animated QR code,

and it'll try to figure out if it can do something with it. But with this, it's it's only signed messages. So, yes, I mean, of course, there's potential cons and, you know, risks and everything, but I like this protocol so much because of, like, the initial air gapped handshake and key exchange,

and then the fact that it's only signed messages and that we literally control this separate Bluetooth chip on the circuit board. Mhmm. Very cool. Yeah. Very innovative there. Q, do you have any listener questions that we can jump into?

We do. Yeah. We've got one's pre submitted and a couple have come through in through Nostow, which because it's not linked up to Restream, I can't bring up on screen. But the first pre submitted question came through this morning via Verissimus.

I think I've got that name right. So Zach, have the struggles and delays with Prime put you off the idea of building a sovereign phone? Somebody's been listening to your back catalog of podcasts. Oh, no.

They've I think I'm put off to the idea of a sovereign phone for other reasons. I see someone posted foundations literally cooking. I think Apple's literally cooking right now, and I I don't know how how any company is gonna be able to actually compete, I think, with them.

And graphing is already now working with Motorola. Motorola. Yeah. Motorola, which which won't be for anything for a year, but we'll, you know, we'll see, right, if if it comes something cool comes out of it. So what I think is more interesting for foundation is that companion device because one thing we've talked about a lot internally

is that all of our phones and computers over the next few years are gonna become, like, all AI. Like, we're literally gonna give these AI agents full full control of our of all of our computing devices.

And I think having this, like, dedicated offline companion device that you use for all of your approvals and, like, all of your security is is extremely valuable as all the phones become, like, AI and all your, you know, your computers become AI. So I don't think we're gonna be building a phone anytime soon.

I think that we will be pushing this Passport Prime and KeyOS platform as hard as we can to make it better and better, like, as time goes by. So will we make new devices? Of course. Well, are we interested in making a phone?

Honestly, like, I'm not really that interested right now. Good to know. A couple of more questions. BTC Wrestle is asking, in theory, could you load all seeds for every wallet into this device and could it be used as the signer for all of those wallets?

Maybe it's not recommended, but he's just wondering. For example, say you have 10 wallets, you could put all of the seeds into this device and it could act as a signer for all of them. The TLDR is yes, absolutely. We haven't set an upper limit to my knowledge

on the number of seeds that you can put in the Vault app. Obviously, we we probably haven't tested more than 10 just yet, but yes. That's absolutely possible. You just load each one of those temporarily from the vault app, use it to sign, and then put the seed back in the vault, so to speak.

And, yeah, that's all absolutely possible and kind of Some of those features are missing right now, though, Q, and I think will end up coming in, like, the next main KeyOS update. So, like, right now, the vault app does not have the ability to import existing seeds,

and I believe we also do not have the ability to load a temporary seed from the Vault app. But I did just accelerate a couple issues on our backlog. One of them is being able to import existing seeds because that's, like, such an important feature.

And then another one I just accelerated is, the ability to to scan that QR code export from Google Authenticator to import all your two FA codes onto our two FA app all in one go. Gonna have to you know what we're gonna have to do is a little bit further down the line, do, like, a live demo

with some of these features and magic backups and important keys and all the stuff because I think it's it's hard to until you actually see it, it's it's hard to imagine. So we have to book that in at some point.

Yeah. I can definitely do that. And good call out, Zach. I know we made some last minute changes to to get this thing over the line, but now everything that we've just discussed will be in in the the next release or the one after, hopefully.

Follow-up questions. Zach, why did you choose a lithium ion battery instead of life p zero four battery? Not sure if you know what that is or if that makes sense. I think that's like lithium phosphate or something.

I don't know. I think the the honest answer to that is we probably didn't put enough thought into it at all. For future devices, we'll probably look at doing one of these newer battery chemistries that that has more power density.

But we started designing this device, like, in in the 2020 or we started kind of, like, envisioning at the 2022 and then starting working on the hardware design in early twenty twenty three.

And we made a lot of component selections just back, you know, back then. So if I was doing it again now, I'd probably look at some of these newer battery chemistries that offer up to, you know, like, 50% greater, power density. And we see that Trezor uses a battery like that in the new Trezor Safe seven.

Alright. Nice. Nice. Probably the last one we're gonna have time for, another one from BTC Wrestle says, does Prime only work with Envoy or can it interact with Sparrow or Ashigaru, etcetera?

Yeah. So that's the the short of it is that, every single Bitcoin wallet that is supported by Passport Core via QR codes is or SD card, right, is already supported, on Passport Prime. So you can do QR code signing with Sparrow.

You can, use an SD card or or with with adapter or a USB C flash drive and move the PSPTs back and forth as well with something like Sparrow or others. We do not support, like, native USB.

What is which one is that called? Q? HWI. H w yeah. Exactly. We don't support a hardware wall interface or HWI, but we support doing it with PSBT files, you know, or or QR codes. Of course, as we continue on and we release the SDK

in the coming months, we hope and expect that many of these Bitcoin wallets, especially ones that have more specific, like, user interfaces, like with multisig or other stuff like that, we'll end up building native, KeyOS apps.

But for right now, like, you know, we we support all the PSBT based stuff within our Bitcoin app that ships with the device. Very nice. Q, is that all the questions we've got for today? It is. Yep. Just as we run up on time. K.

Yep. Yeah. Seth, any final thoughts or questions before I wrap it up? I don't think so. I don't know. Don't wanna make us run over. I know. Kew and Zach gotta run as well. But,

no, just super excited to see this actually out there. Obviously, it's early days, but already in a in a fantastic state. So I'm pumped to use it personally. I'm pumped to build on it. It's gonna be, I think, something that's game changing in the the hardware wallet slash freedom tech space. So y'all have killed it. Good job.

You and Zach and the rest of the team. Thanks, Seth. And I I think we're we're about to send a ton of I'm gonna be sending Monday a ton of, like, developer devices to Vic to distribute to you guys as well.

Are gonna get a bunch of stuff next week, I'm really excited to be working with you guys on building the first app for KeyOS. Likewise. It's gonna be a blast. Hopefully, won't have to touch any ledgers or anything like like that moving forward once we get this built out. I'm pumped for that.

Nice. Well, Seth, thanks for joining us. Q and Zach, I know how much work has gone into this behind the scenes, sleepless nights and and working weekends and evenings and everything else to make this happen. So congratulations getting out the door. It's it's really, really cool.

Thanks, Max. We gotta get you yours as well. It'll happen. Keel will come visit He's on the list. Yep. And just just before we sign off, just for the for the listeners, viewers,

I'm gonna be doing a a Freedom Tech Friday over the course of the next couple of weeks at some point to give you a bit more of a visual demo going through the user interface and

showing you what all the different apps look like and all the diff the different features within there. So I know this one this one was more kind of a behind the scenes with Zach, but

stay tuned. I'm gonna be doing a more visual one over the course of the next couple of weeks. And we're a bit of alpha, but we're also gonna be announcing a a six week long office hours style invitation to anybody that's wants to hop into our virtual office where I'm gonna be doing six one hour weekly shows

that are live and interactive to go through in a much more detail for all of these different applications. So stay tuned to the foundation socials and email newsletter to get information on that, which should be being announced very soon.

Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London.

Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet Foundation and my Nim Box for keeping the ungovernable misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and artwork.

Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills. Thanks to expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or

continuing to grow the mesh to Dell. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord Jordan, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes.

We love you all. Stay ungovernable.