Two more decisions from the bench this week — and like everything on PHYLAX, both are about deliberately doing less. We're building the wallet with no battery, and we moved the USB-C port to a place hardware wallets almost never put it: the top.
No battery, on purpose
A lithium cell is the part of any device most likely to fail sitting in a drawer — it degrades, it can swell, and one day it just won't hold a charge. For something you might not touch for five years and then trust with your savings, that's exactly the wrong component to depend on. PHYLAX has no battery. It draws power only from the USB-C cable, the moment you plug it in. Nothing to swell, nothing to replace, and it boots identically whether it's the first day or the fifteenth year.
The port that's always in the wrong place
Here's a small thing that bothered us: almost every hardware wallet puts its USB port on the bottom edge. Plug it into a laptop and the device hangs upside-down, or the cable fights your hand while you're trying to read the screen and press the buttons. It's a detail nobody questions — and it's ergonomically backwards.
So we put it on top
We moved the USB-C connector to the top edge. Plug in and the device sits upright, screen facing you, both buttons falling naturally under your thumbs — the exact position you hold it in while you check and approve a transaction. A small change that makes the wallet feel right in the hand every single time.
A port built to outlast the device
The connector itself matters more than people think — a cheap USB port is usually the first thing to wear out and start failing to connect. So we chose a high-quality USB-C port from GCT: waterproof, and rated for 20,000 mating cycles. If the device is meant to still work in twenty years, the one moving part you touch every time has to be built for it.
That's the whole philosophy in two small parts — remove what fails, and make what's left last. More from the bench soon. If you want to hold it, we'll have the prototype at Bitcoin Thailand Conference 2026.