If we won't put a black-box chip inside, how do we protect the seed? This week we started studying an answer we admire: the virtual secure element.
Why we said no to the black box
Most hardware wallets guard the seed with a dedicated secure element — a small, tamper-resistant chip. It works, but it's a black box: the chip is proprietary and closed, so you can't fully audit what's inside, and you have to trust the manufacturer. That runs against everything PHYLAX stands for. Verify, don't trust. So from day one we decided: no black-box chip inside.
What a virtual secure element is
A virtual secure element aims to give you the protection a secure element provides — an encrypted seed, a PIN gate, and defence against someone guessing that PIN over and over — but built from open, auditable software and cryptography instead of a closed chip. Open-source Bitcoin wallets have already shown this can work in real, shipping hardware. The seed is never left sitting in the clear, and brute-forcing the PIN is made impractical — all without asking you to trust a chip nobody can inspect.
What we're doing now
We're at the very start: studying how to integrate a virtual secure element into the current prototype. There's a lot to work through — how keys are encrypted, how the PIN is checked, how the wired-only design fits in — and we won't rush it. What matters is that this path lets us keep our core promise intact: real protection for your seed, and still no black box inside.
We'll share what we learn as we go — the dead ends as well as the wins. That's the point of building in the open. If you want to talk it through with us in person, we'll have the prototype at Bitcoin Thailand Conference 2026.