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Keyois Capsule

🔍 Last analysed 4th April 2022 . Leaks Keys Not functioning anymore

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Do your own research!

Try out searching for "lost bitcoins", "stole my money" or "scammers" together with the wallet's name, even if you think the wallet is generally trustworthy. For all the bigger wallets you will find accusations. Make sure you understand why they were made and if you are comfortable with the provider's reaction.

If you find something we should include, you can create an issue or edit this analysis yourself and create a merge request for your changes.

The Analysis 

Link to Keyois Capsule’s thread on BitcoinTalk.

You can put funds into it but you need to break it apart to spend the funds. It’s hard to break apart so it’s tamper-resistant and tamper-evident. It won’t burn, rot, rust, melt, or otherwise lose data where so many other types of cold storage would.

According to the post, the main goal behind this product was to have a durable “hardware wallet” that wouldn’t be easily damaged by fire or water.

A backup seed or private key can be printed on paper or stored digitally but these mediums can be damaged by fire, time, water, and much more. Not everyone can have the perfect backup procedure and this is great if you don’t have land or need something to last a long time. To be fair there are cheaper ways to improve your own situation, including: stamping or engraving on a piece of steel and securing that from wandering eyes; but this is super stylish.

The original poster, aolley was last active on the forum and on Reddit in 2018.

r/Keyois, a subreddit linked in the post, has been banned due to being unmoderated. The Keyois site has nothing to do with the wallet and is now full of potentially malicious pop-up ads. With no shop or site, we have to assume that this project is inactive.

Analysis

Your BIP38 encrypted Secret Key (or otherwise encrypted backup seed) in engraved into a titanium ring.
That is set inside another ring that bears the address.
That is then put into a tamper evident and air-tight capsule with a elegant centerpiece of lab-created ruby or sapphire.

and:

You must supply me with an address and a BIP38 encrypted secret key / encrypted seed. Because of this these items are not recommended for novices.

While the keys aren’t “prefilled” the user would have still depended on external devices that aren’t secure and cannot approve or make transactions.

This product is defunct along with the manufacturer in charge of it.

(dg)

Verdict Explained

This product requires sharing private key material!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Leaks Keys!

Does the device hide your keys from other devices?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Leaks Keys".

Some people claim their paper wallet is a hardware wallet. Others use RFID chips with the private keys on them. A very crucial drawback of those systems is that in order to send a transaction, the private key has to be brought onto a different system that doesn’t necessarily share all the desired aspects of a hardware wallet.

Paper wallets need to be printed, exposing the keys to the PC and the printer even before sending funds to it.

Simple RFID based devices can’t sign transactions - they share the keys with whoever asked to use them for whatever they please.

There are even products that are perfectly capable of working in an air-gapped fashion but they still expose the keys to connected devices.

This verdict is reserved for key leakage under normal operation and does not apply to devices where a hack is known to be possible with special hardware.

But we also ask:

Defunct!

Is the product still supported by the still existing provider?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not functioning anymore".

Discontinued products or worse, products of providers that are not active anymore, are problematic, especially if they were not formerly reproducible and well audited to be self-custodial following open standards. If the provider hasn’t answered inquiries for a year but their server is still running or similar circumstances might get this verdict, too.