The Wolf Of All Streets - The Biggest Lie Bitcoin Investors Are Told In 2026 ( Not What You Think) | Matej Zak

Episode Date: March 7, 2026

Matej Zak, CEO of Trezor, joins the show to break down why most Bitcoin holders still don’t truly own their Bitcoin. We dive into the biggest misconceptions around ETFs, exchanges, and “convenience custody,” why centralized platforms remain honeypots for hackers, and how the largest crypto hack last year proves the risk isn’t gone. Matej explains the origin of the seed phrase, the evolution of hardware wallets, post-quantum security, and why AI-powered phishing may be a bigger threat than quantum computing itself. This is a deep conversation on privacy, sovereignty, regulation, and why self-custody isn’t just a feature of Bitcoin... it’s the point.

What if the biggest risk to your Bitcoin isn't the price, but where you're holding it? Everyone's buying ETFs. Everyone's leaving coins on exchanges, and almost no one is asking the real question that we used to always ask. Who actually controls your keys? In this interview, I talked to Trezor CEO, Matei Zak, and we break down self-custody, exchange hacks. The biggest hack and the whole industry happened last year. On an exchange, right? Like the buy-bit hack. You think about self-custody being like completely decentralized, obviously,

because you have the individual owners, you don't know where they are, you don't know who they are, you don't know their setups, etc. So those attacks are at scale are basically impossible. AI powered scans, quantum threats. If quantum comes, the whole world has a problem. Your bank accounts, your credit card, like security of the digital space would be kind of at risk. Besides quantum, I'm worried about AI and the beat of these attacks that can happen, scares me.

And why hardware wallets may be more important now than ever before. And honestly, I think hardware will play a role in this as well, where you can really rely on a device that is like purely built for, it creates the wallet and it signs a transaction. That's it. Like it doesn't do anything else and that's the beauty of it. If you own Bitcoin or crypto or plan to, this conversation could change how you protect it and how you view it moving forward. Let's get into it.

So, Matei, when did you get into Bitcoin? I think seriously only when I joined the company, which is, well, seven years ago. So I owned some before, but then I applied for, you know, for a job with Chesser, I really as a product manager. And then that's where I think things started to get more like serious for me. So it was just a job for you at first? It wasn't that you'd been orange-pilled or you had a deep libertarian values. or was that part of the reason that you took the job?

I came in as a trader and didn't care at all about Bitcoin, by the way, and eventually found my way. I was not one of those early people either. You know, interestingly, I had those values. Obviously, I mean, person doesn't change that much, I think, or at least these deep values didn't change from me. But I didn't know there was a name to it. You know, I didn't know there was like a whole thing.

But then it clicked so well, like when, you know, like I joined the company. I mean, it was tiny team. It was like 30 people. And I had the amazing opportunity to work with the founders directly, right, because it was a small company. So I think they introduced me to basically. They properly orange told me. And that was kind of nice to have that experience from, you know, somebody who set up basically the whole self-custody hardware world industry.

So it was cool. So obviously, self-custody has become. More popular, I would imagine, as the industry has grown. More people buying wallets. But it seems like now there's a lot more competition with self-custody from either institutional custodians or exchanges that have admittedly improved security to some degree from the early days. I remember when you had no security on any exchange, period.

So now it seems like where this interesting place where a lot of people who are coming into Bitcoin coming through ETFs or leave their coins on an exchange and use a UBK or something as the maximum security and maybe they don't even find their way to self-custody. Yeah. So, you know, just maybe a bit of a statistic, but like the biggest hack in the whole industry of the crypto industry happened last year. So on an exchange, right, like the buy-bit hack. So whether the security of the exchange is.

is like improved significantly. Well, it definitely did. But there's still some other problems, such as these institutions are basically honeypots for hackers, right? So it's exactly what we saw with the Bybit hack where I think it was the North Korean hackers. The Lazarus group basically got onto this big exchange. Whereas if you think about self-custody being like completely decentralized, obviously because you have the individual owners,

you don't know where they are, you don't know who they are, you don't know who they are, you don't know their set-ups, etc. So those attacks are at scale are basically impossible, right? So that's what the hardware wallet does in general, and that's why everybody should sort of consider it for themselves as well. And then you also mentioned the ETS. So there, it needs to be said that like this is something, what is called like indirect exposure to Bitcoin.

So you don't actually own the Bitcoin. You only own, when you buy an ETF, you sort of get an access to like a legal contract that says, well, yeah, there's some company. Hopefully they even have the Bitcoin that they claim they have, considering they are not having a little leverage or anything like that. But you don't really get the actual ownership. Now, you know, like as opposed to gold, Bitcoin solves this beautiful because it's a digital, product, right? Like it's a digital

solution. You don't need to have like two kilos of gold hidden somewhere in your place. So the fact that it's digital, the fact that you can own it yourself is obviously beautiful and where I stand, of course, I would

recommend people to consider the proper self-custody, the proper ownership, which, you know, they can start with software wallet, that's fine. The security is not there as robust as with a dedicated hardware device, but it's definitely superior over the EPS or any other solution like that.

So we agree with that, right? We've been here a long time. Self custody is exceptionally important. It's partially the reason we're here, right? You know, don't trust, verify, be your own bank, not your keys, not your coins. We've been saying these things for years. How do, in your mind, you continue to deliver that message and spread it further as these other competitive products and custody solutions, custody solutions come into play.

I'm a huge believer in free markets, and I believe that the superior products and superior experiences will win in terms of security, privacy, but also usability, right? So that's basically actually these three boards are the kind of the pillars of our company specifically that's in our mission statement is really privacy security usability. And so I think we need to compete and we are competing by introducing new products that are really super easy to use, but also that has sort of proven that really are unhackable or that are really secure and that also the company behind it, such as us, really protects, you know, user privacy by not, for example, storing the private data on self-custody of a hardware

wallet, you don't have to do any KYC. So us as a company, we don't really know who the users are. We sell the hardware, but there are no customer accounts that will be connected to whatever you own, right? Whereas in ATF or your exchange, you always need to provide your ID, you need to verify, all those things which simply in self-custody, you don't have to do. Therefore, you have much more anonymity and protection sort of by nature or as a nature of how the product is built. So, yeah, that's probably what I would add to this topic. Yeah, I think we've had a push across the world in some places to more KYC and more AML and less privacy. Obviously, even the Genius Act itself is basically the Bank Secrecy Act built into stable coins, right?

There's full visibility into our transactions, China building a CBDC. It seems that things are trending towards less privacy. Do you have any fears as a company, or do you come against any contentious legislators or regulators in certain jurisdictions that really might ban or attempt to limit the use of self-custody in general? I mean, it feels like it should be a basic freedom that you can buy Bitcoin and hold it yourself. But I've got to imagine that you have some navigating of governments to do when figuring out where and how you can sell your products and what your users can do with them.

Yeah, we are ultimately a freedom technology company. So the main reason why we do those things and these things, these products is to really provide users with the option to freelance act and for the government and companies, et cetera, not to mess with what you should own. and what you truly own. So do we see sort of the regulation getting a bit tougher around the industry in general? Yes, I think that's the case. But we haven't seen any, there is no strong regulation on the self-custry of hardware specifically yet.

Though obviously there is a ton of regulation in the ecosystem. So if you want to buy, sell, you know, of course taxation is another story of that in that whole journey. So luckily there's no like strong regulation on self-custody in its own in a way that, for example, you would need to give IC or hydrovolt. As I said, this is not the case. So that's why it's also superior way of owning Bitcoin and crypto. But does it worry me for future?

Yes, it does. I think it's like a real threat to the freedoms of the individual users. And that's why we are here. You know, we will try to build products that really, like I said, like as an example, we don't really collect any data. And that's a feature, it's not a buck. It makes our job as somewhat more difficult

from product management point of view because you don't really know what to build exactly next because you don't really cannot rely on that ton of data. I've studied companies can, but that's actually, yeah, it's the feature. It's a feature of the whole ecosystem. So privacy, security, usability, right? Those are the three pillars that we discussed.

So I think everybody's in consensus that privacy and security are superior with self-custody. I think a lot of people in the past, at least historically, have struggled with the usability. Right? We kind of go back to the idea of grandma being able to do anything in crypto. Like, it's the joke. Like, can grandma do it? You know, like, is the UXUI simple enough that she can do these tasks the same way she would? with systems that she's familiar with in the past.

How far has usability come? Are there major challenges that you see to getting to the point where it's literally can be used by anyone? Like, do seed phrases need to go? I mean, Trezor, didn't you guys invent the seed phrase? Yes, we did. We did. And I say actually, maybe coming back to the history, I think that was the first or maybe

one of the most significant usability improvements of the, the whole industry. Actually, I digged up some numbers in the past. And if you think about it, like the seed phrase is probably used by hundreds of millions of users. I think I looked up the number. Because if you look, the seed phrase is not used only by the hardware wallet companies, but also the software watts, right?

So the big software will and those have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But also like when I checked the sort of number of what, actual users, it's probably somewhere like 300 million or something like this, right? Like a crazy, crazy amount. And these people are using C-phrases that were invented by the founders of Treasor. And that was one of the biggest, I think, historically impacts on the usability of private keys. Because private keys are, you know, I like to say, I like to explain it as a super long

Wi-Fi password, where if you miss one character or make a mistaken one character, you get a different private key and therefore you don't get access to your assets on the blockchain. So that's where Seedfries came in as a solution to, okay, let's make this like super hard Wi-Fi password into something that's human readable. And now really hundreds of people are using it, which is pretty cool. But I mean, that's been, you know, like many years ago. So I think there's much more that we are doing collectively as a whole industry. We at the hardware level as well, so we launched some new products actually just last year that's like our most premium and most advanced hardware wallet that is like sort of the testament to the usability because it has a bigger display, you know, it has very like premium feel.

And to your question, whether Grantman can use it and anybody, I really think these days yes. I think the argument is no longer rare that that crypto or hardware would be too difficult. use because it's simply like super intuitive. You know, I mean, if you can use smartphone, then you can use Google. Like, it's, that's simply as easy at that. And so is the seed fridge still the future? You know, we've obviously seen a lot of self-custody companies and wallet manufacturers start to use either biometric ID or completely other systems.

Or is the future, I guess, giving the user the option as to which one they want to I mean, how do you view that when you look 10 years down the road and say, how are people going to want to use these things? Actually, I like the second thing you said. I think people should have option. I think there should be also interoperability as an option to move between different providers. So also the cool thing about the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39, which is the CET phrase. It's cool because it's used by not just us, but like basically, like I said, our direct end. in direct competitors.

And if, for example, you buy Chesser and you set it up, you can toss the Chesser and you can move directly to some other solution you would like and it's perfectly fine, right? So the interoperability part is like really important. So the user choice, as you mentioned, I think is really important part of the story. And therefore, my answer would be, yes, in 10 years, I still believe CITRAIS is good and will be probably around because mind you, most of us are also huddlers, right? So it's like a long-term product. It's not like your iPhone that you would like flip it every year or two.

It's like you want to think like a long-term because of a nature of Bitcoin, et cetera. So yeah, I think Cs phrases will be around. But I would also add, but I also believe there are some new format that are coming like an NFC, you know, tags, et cetera, where you can basically digitally store. these phrases and that also has some advantages such as you know protection against fishing etc so so yeah i think these these new formats are good are important they have some benefits they also have some negatives because whenever you have something that is not purely uh let's say analog as a piece of paper uh you know it also brings some let's say um risk of you know the failing

the chip inside of the card could go wrong or whatever. So, yeah, there are some pros and cons, and therefore, yeah, I believe the user should have options to basically do both. It seems incredibly difficult to create a product and then go through the amount of time that it takes to see that product come to fruition and still be ahead of all the threat actors.

Like, there's got to be hackers out there that are just working on this 24-7, 365, trying to find ways to do these. I want to get into quantum in a minute and whether that is worth discussing. But how do you create a product that is going to be viable and relevant by the time that product actually comes out? And then for the foreseeable future from there where people will continue using it. Yeah, it is a super relevant question for a hardware company. Because there is this saying that the hardware is hard.

And it's very much true because exactly, you need to plan. like a hat, you know, like in the software, and especially AI, like we see like how fast it is now these days. Like you can really without, within minutes or hours maximum, you know, build software. It's incredible, right? So even the software development that like the agile software development, you would think of shipping a feature, you know, in a couple of weeks. Now AI, this speeding this up even faster, you know, to maybe hours. and hardware, it's the complete opposite. It's like, it's years of planning.

It's like super waterfall, meaning, you know, you just like build a huge project together in a very sort of predictive way. And if something goes wrong at the beginning, then the whole timeline gets postponed. You know, so it's like kind of nerve-wracking to a certain degree. And then, therefore, you need to like rely on really good partners, you know, like, the suppliers, et cetera. It's like really, really big sort of

project. But I think big part to what you're sort of asking is how you stay like security wise on top of the game. Well, there's this also saying the security is moving target. So I totally agree with when you say

like there's hackers that are once you release something they are instantly trying to get in. You know, and that's perfectly fine. Because it is really a moving target and we need to stay sort of vigilant and always check for when we can improve. But a huge part of this story is the fact that we are open source. And therefore, what this enables us to do is basically thousands of security experts, engineers,

people that know how to break things, that they will try to break things, that will try to break our software and hardware. and by sort of us knowing this because we built in the open and we actually incentivize, you know, these like sort of ethical hackers to tell us when there's vulnerabilities. We even have like a bounty program where we pay these people if they find some problem. That basically help us to stay on top of the game and to always be sort of more secure as we move on, right? So, and it's a huge advantage over some of maybe our close-source competitors or other companies that are in the space because you really never know what's happening under the hood. And it's actually called security by obscurity almost like that by hiding away the information, you are basically introducing some risk because the bad guys maybe know about this.

But you as a company would not allow to spread this information about the certain attacks, and therefore we actually make the products out of less secure. So open source from this perspective is awesome, and that's where we try to be very like sort of bullish on open source. And it's our DNA, basically. So I want to talk about quantum, because it seems to be one of the big narratives that's not only driving FUD about the future of Bitcoin in general, but certainly that's been driving fun about the price of Bitcoin right now.

You have kind of big name media personalities, some who are Bitcoiners going online and saying this is over Bitcoin's going to get hacked. Personally, I think I'm worried about them hacking the nuclear codes before the Bitcoin network, and I think it's a bit of an echo chamber argument. But I would imagine that now one of the big things you have to be concerned about is being quantum proof in the future, at least from a self-custy perspective, because whether quantum is an existential threat to Bitcoin or not, it could definitely be a threat to a wallet, right?

So how do you, I guess, start to consider evolution of quantum and quantum proofing your hardware in the future? You know, exact as you said with the codes. So, you know, if quantum comes, the whole world has a problem. And, you know, like your bank accounts, your credit card. Like, you know, like, you would basically, the security of the digital space

would be kind of at risk. Your email, like whatever on the online internet, whatever digital, like all these things would have have problem because you would have so much computing power to break through the current cryptography that would just, yeah, the whole world would basically collapse. But that being said, well, there is also

post-quantum cryptography. where you basically these sort of security measures are much more harder to break even with

the computing power that the phantom would break and therefore the network I mean Bitcoin and other

cryptocurrencies basically need to get an update and whether I believe they will get an update in in time

well I do I really do believe that they will because there is already so much money and so much

market capitalization that are so much interest in, from all parties, not just like individuals, not just like engineers, not just like retail, not just companies, not governments,

everybody. Basically everybody, it's in everybody's interest, who is in the market to get this fixed or improve strengthened. And I simply believe it will happen as it will with the rest of the world and the rest of the internet.

AI, of course, is a huge part of this as well. So, yeah. So actually, as we said, like security is a movement target. Quantum computing is just yet another one of these sort of possible, how to say, like challenges, and we will fix the security. I'm pretty sure about this.

Specifically in Chesser, with the new model that we released, we added some post-quantum signatures in the device on some hardware level, which basically means that if, these quantum threads would come in coming years. Again, we are talking about the product that is like a very long term, you know, like a Haudel type of customer life cycle. Let's put it this way. And therefore, in future, if you own PS7, which is Treasurer, say, 7, we could actually update this with some post-quantum security

measure so it would not be, you would not be able to extract any any secrets from the device, even with the quantum computer. Yeah, the Treasure 7, Safe 7 is really cool. Maybe I guess talk about the evolution of that device specifically. And what, I mean, obviously you just talked about it being effectively quantum proof or quantum proof signatures down the road. What other huge leaps would you say that this wallet has made from previous iterations that you had before?

So the probably the biggest one is that we edit as open source as possible, I would say we call it auditable secure element, which secure elements are, you know, secure chips that are on your hard robot and they protect the device from any kind of physical attack. So even if some bad guys would get a hold of the device and they would try to extract the private keys from the device, these secure elements are sort of specialized chips that, you know, make it really hard for anybody to extract anything from any data from the device. And historically, these secure elements, they are closed source. So the way it works is basically you reach out to this big manufacturer and you say, okay, give us the documentation. We want to check on our own whether the security of the chip is good or not. And they will tell you, well, we are not going to send you the documentation unless you sign an NDA for like many years.

And by the way, if you find some problem with this chip, you cannot tell anybody. You cannot tell your competitors. You cannot tell anybody. And that's basically what happened to us. So for many years in the past, we didn't have secure elements in our hardware bullets. And our direct competitors were using them. And we realized because we cite the NDA, we just want to try, like, whether maybe one of those secure elements would be viable for us.

And we realized there's some sort of like a buck and we can extract the secrets from it that were used again by the direct competitors. But we couldn't tell anybody because we signed that. NDA already. And the company told us, well, if you tell them or if you tell anybody, you know, people see you, right? And this is like a huge company that like, you know, gives chips to or sell chips to like one of the, like to the huge companies of the world, like Microsoft and you can think of companies like that. So, so we were like, well, this kind of shitty, right? So what are we going to do about it? And then the idea came basically to try to build a open source secure element, like in a very innovative way.

So that's what would have happened. And it's part of the Chesars Day 7. So it's kind of cool. It actually features two secure elements. One is sort of NDA-free. So we didn't have to sign in NDA with this one. But still, it's not open source. And the secure element from Tropic Square, the company that built is,

is actually an auditable secure element that you can check, you know, the GitHub, basically through the code and the way the chip is designed on GitHub, which is kind of, is pretty cool for the security. Would you say at this point that people, the tech is a bigger threat or the network of the tech are a bigger threat to somebody's custody? Or do you think that their own human behavior is a bigger threat to self-custody at this point? Right? We've had this debate, by the way, all the time.

And we had, I remember, I think, CZ in the past got a lot of heat for saying, hey, you know, people are going to lose their keys. They're going to make a mistake. They're going to fall on their head. You're better off having your coins on Binance than on a wallet, right, a hardware wallet. Yeah, so obviously I didn't like the way he put it. I remember the tweet. A while now, but I remember it.

Yeah, it's been a while. It might be like a few years, but yeah, I do remember this. I mean, of course, it's like a bit of a thought creation from his side to basically say, yeah, I come to our big, big centralized. exchange. But like I said, like, you know, like a 15 years old industry and then still the biggest hack happened last year, right? So, so I don't think the exchanges are of the hook like security wise, not at all. But yes, people are still, to a certain degree, threats to themselves. I think you really need to understand what you are doing. But the product will lead you, right?

like you don't have to worry about that he would need like a PhD in engineering and to be able to manage, you know, Bitcoin and and hire a robot, not at all. The product is really like super intuitive. So as long as you care for some basic principles that are like, you know, such as that you would not make a digital copy of your C phrase, as long as you stick to the principles that the product will tell you to obey, then then you're fine. You're, you're, completely safe. So, so yes, and then of course, and there are still, what obviously I don't like, there's a ton of fishing, because we know. So, yeah, that kind of sucks. People have threats to people as well by basically scary behavior. Yeah, I mean, very smart and sophisticated people that I know

personally have been fished, not necessarily on hardware wallet, actually. I mean, I see that going around, but more on the exchanges. You know, like, you know, a fake email from the security at the exchange and a very plausible phone number when you call and here send us your keys so we can, you know, add a security layer. I mean, that stuff seems unstoppable. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I recently heard, again, like AI also plays like it's sort of an accelerating, like a factor

here. Just recently, actually, somebody I know personally got fished by I think it was like a Zoom call where they actually talked with somebody who they thought was like a real person. It was just like an AI. And they prompted them like to download

some malicious malware on their computer and blah, blah. So yeah, it's pretty, it gets very, very sophisticated and yeah, you need to stay vigilant. Yeah, that's the new big one is the actual Zoom call that looks like you're talking to a person. And I've known some very early big quarters, my friend of Doniago, who's like a very early Bitcoiner. He almost got scammed by one of those.

He signed on and then he thought it was fishy and signed up. But it was not only a Zoom call with a Zoom call with somebody he knows, who is a fake version of the person he knows. And they contacted him from a telegram, you know, like. And it's every layer, right? It's the layer of contact where they get you seems. from a familiar person all the way up to the Zoom call. People have to be so incredibly careful. So I guess that said, it's probably a good time to sort of refresh people's memory on those

principles that the wallet might walk you through. I don't want to take for granted that every person who listens to this has tried self-custody or even remembers what it was like when they did it 10 years ago or whether that has changed. So, you know, where do you write down your seed phrase? Where do you store your seed phrase? Should you have multiple copies that are geographically dispersed? Where do you put your wallet after you do all of this? Because like if someone walks in your house and you're standing there next to your wallet,

it's sitting on your desk, you might be in trouble. So like maybe just give us like the beginner's guide to the basic practices of security with us with a hardware wallet. Yeah, of course. So number one, buy the device from like a verified site, right? So for example, in But Treasurer, we always tell you ideally go to Treasurer. which is our official domain. Don't buy it anywhere else go there. We ship globally.

Wherever we are in the world, we will ship to. It's not a problem. So you can also buy a... You might be buying a hacked device or something, right? Somebody already had their hands on the device, device did something to it. And okay, yeah, just... Exactly.

You can also use some, actually, like a trusted network of resellers that we have. We will find it on our website as well, Treasure the Tao is the place to go. and then if you want to buy locally from some reseller, it's okay, you know, even like big brands like Amazon, et cetera, start Best Buy. You can go there as well, but like always check whether those are actually supported by us, but they are official resellers because there were cases in the past where there were some like fake resellers that will try to scan you.

So that's number one. Number two, when you receive the device, the packaging is built in a way, and create it in a way that it will really make sure that the device has not been messed with. Like, it's not as some kind of counterfeit. So, like, check that the packaging is unbroken. There is some seals on the devices as well that kind of will guide you in a way like, yeah, nobody could really mess with this device. And yeah, so that's basically the hardware, let's say, security measures.

And then once you plug it in into your computer or phone and you start creating the onboarding, then the device checks for some authenticity. It checks whether it's never been used before. You need to confirm those things on your display. And the whole onboarding process will basically guide you through it the way that, like, it makes sure it's secure for you. So just follow the screen and it will, yeah, it will. will check for the device of density, et cetera. And then you download the firmware,

and then that's where the whole journey starts. It will prompt you to create a backup. As we discussed before, you can write the backup on a piece of paper, which has some analog qualities to it. As I said, it's not digital. So never take a photo of it, never store it digitally. Don't write it to your computer. Don't write it to your phone.

Because whenever it's digital and somewhere on your hardware, let's say like a device, it can get hacked by, because it's connected to the internet. So that's what you don't want. So you actually want to keep it completely offline. And yeah, and there are also, we also sell solutions such as treasure keep metal, which is not paper.

It's actually a piece of metal, well, as the name suggests. And you can actually sort of pindonel sort of punch the seed phrase into this metal solution, which is like really indestructible, like even if you burn it in like thousand degrees for Celsius or whatever, it will not melt down and et cetera. So we have even these like robust solutions.

And then hide the backup away. Don't show it to anybody. And yeah, that's where your journey starts and you're safe there. As for the device, yes, I would not I think it's not good to boast about like how much Bitcoin you have or something. That's something you would, you should not do online obviously. So self-custody is like a privacy game.

So yeah, don't do those things. And then then you're completely safe. Wasn't there a time when competitors were marketing like a necklace with your hardware wallet on it or something? Yes. I mean, and to this day, we make jokes about the central, to be honest. And sometimes in presentations, then we would joke about this. Because obviously, we don't, we didn't think this was a good idea.

I understand, like, they probably wanted to, like, lure some new audiences, new sort of target personas that would be into this, but, yeah, I don't think it's a good idea. Yeah, I guess how much does that factor into security if you're, a person who owns Bitcoin still. It's become so mainstream, obviously, to own Bitcoin, but there's still a lot of people out there targeting Bitcoin holders. I know specifically in France, obviously we've seen this massive increase in threats and kidnappings, cutting people's fingers off and sending them to their loved ones.

I mean, really crazy stuff from movies. And it seems there's actually been an uptick in that rather than a redoubt. reduction. Really crazy stuff. Yeah, I think people need to be really careful. That's again, that's the reason why not to go publicly about these things, like that you would be boasting about, like, how much Bitcoin you have or something like this. That's something that should not be recommended. Of course, like these stories from specifically from France are very sad. I also read that in general, like the France sort of the kidnapping rate or what you would call it. English is quite high in general as a country. So it's not just specific to crypto, but, but obviously the people in crypto are more sensitive to hearing that was crypto related, obviously. So, so yeah, so yeah, just please stick to your sort of privacy measures. And that's,

that's all I can sort of recommend. And yeah, and it's sad. It's regrettable. Of course, it's, it sucks. Should people have multiple hardware wallets? Or is, Is it effectively safe to put everything on one? I mean, how do you kind of think about people with significant amount of assets and how they should, you know, disperse their assets to some degree? Yeah, yeah, I think it's a fair sort of choice for somebody to consider maybe like diversifying the risk that they would even like, well, it's important to say that like, if you lose the hardware wallet, it's still fine as long as you have the backup.

And by the way, the backup again, like the BIP 39, which is the seed phrase based on the protocol or the standard, is you can actually recover your wallet even, not just with Treasor, but with our competitive, our private direct competitor, which is quite cool with this. So we can actually even lose the hardware vault as long as your backup is safe and as long as you know where it is. But yeah, you can definitely disperse this risk. But interestingly enough, I cannot really give like a very, like a hyper-specific solution because that would basically already lead maybe or indicate where the attackers could look, you know, like if now, like if I told you, okay, put the hardware wallet underneath your pillow, that would actually not work as a security measure because everybody would do it.

The question more is like, should that be something that's in your house or a safety deposit box are somewhere completely random that nobody would even think. Like should it be, you know, a lot of people use multi-sig and they geographically disperse them. I mean, there's all these different ways that you can do it. But it seems like if someone comes in your house and you're there, then you might actually want your wallet somewhere else besides your house that's secure so that you can literally just say, I can't do it, right? Yeah, yeah.

I think it's actually one of the ways how to approach this as well. And it also depends on the usage. whether you, because then you also need the device to sign transactions and interact with, you know, so it, if it's like for you, these cases may be like super long term and just a huddle and you don't have to touch it, then exactly. It doesn't even have to be in your place. But if you want to interact with it more, more often, then you can have the device close to you. But then also you can really diversify by having maybe smaller amounts on you, even like you can carry around the device all the time actually because Cheser State 7 now is you know it has Bluetooth you can connect it to your

iPhone or our Android so you can actually carry in your pocket but then you don't maybe need to have all the savings that you that you own on there right like so so you can diversify really depending on your specific use case yeah it seems like the mental model is that you have one that's your savings account that's very hard to access even for you to make it secure and then you have one that's kind of like your checking account or your credit card that you can walk around with and actually use and, you know, trade with a small amount or whatever activities you're going to actually use crypto for. I think that's always been sort of a push and pull of self-custody is that as we go more mainstream and people actually want to use these things, which we want them to be

able to do, like use crypto every day. Well, there's a challenge to being secure and using it all the time. Yeah, of course, exactly, exactly. But I can tell that from like treasure perspective, even if you have it on your own, on you sort of more often, it's still very, very secure because there's multiple layers or how we would need to break into the device. And there's a pen. You can use passphrase, which is not even recorded anywhere. So nobody can really get there unless like if you are the only person that knows this, then of course, you know, the backup itself can be stored in multiple places because he also supports something called multi-share.

So you can actually split the backup into multiple shares, let's say five. And only three of any of those shares will actually be able to recover the wallet. So as you said, if it's like dispersed in space and locations, then it's like really hard. to. Right, I wasn't aware of that. That's effectively like having multi-sig with one device. True. It is, uh, it is not multi-sig in its nature because it doesn't happen. Three of five, like the idea of the idea is very similar. Yes, yes. The idea is that basically you make this split on the backup level, right? So basically can can disperse sort of the wallet into, into five shares. I think good example is like, I don't know how much our,

familiar with the Harry Potter story. Like it's something how we explain it. You know, where the Voldemort, he has like these, I don't know what was it called in English, but like these part of his souls basically. And that's exactly a similar concept where you have these parts of the wallets and only certain number of them can actually recreate

the wallet for you. Yeah, I wanna talk about the Safe Seven specifically a bit or at least the thesis when you're building it. Do you make a new project thinking about the next billion people that are inevitably coming into crypto, or do you really think about the very security conscious people who already believe in self-custody or are likely to believe in self-custody and focus in on those? And can that be the same thing? That's a good question, because it's something that we obviously is quite important for us as a

company to tackle. And we've been having these discussions. for forever. But I think what we are seeing now is that we are moving more from the like absolutely for everybody, billion people use case or target audience into more, yeah,

let's target some specific groups of people, more targeted personas. Because, well, first, like practical reasons. You mentioned the ETFs. There's exchanges. You know, we can, it's actually you can just go to App Store, click a button, download some whatever exchange, and you can, you know, create the wallet or the software wallet.

You can download the software wallet and start very easily, which is perfectly fine. Like, I would not even as a user, I would say there's no problem with this as long as you understand that you should probably not store much value in these wallets because they are simply not secure enough. So because there is so much competition from this side, this sort of substitute offers that are cheaper, more accessible, more scalable to a certain way, we need to compete. Obviously, we are a security company. So we compete on the premise that we are more secure than any of these solutions.

But we will never be as competitive in terms of, we cannot be for free, right? Like, because some of these software worlds by basically the decks, they're free. And they, the business model is based on maybe some fees, if you make some swaps and staking, whatever. So we're going to do that because the hardware is not cheap. Like, it's not for free, right? So, so, and because it's secure, we really need the hardware part of it with actual display. Because there are also competitors that are, that they call themselves hardware vault,

they don't even have display, which is very problematic because again, the blind signing was part of the story of last year where the biggest hack on Dubai would happen. So you need the hardware wallet. You need the display. And we are now targeting maybe not everybody, but more people that are actually. Specifically with Chester's a sudden we targeted sort of the more, I would say, advanced users in a way that like they already know the space. They know what they are doing a little bit more. they interact with all kind of blockchains more often as well. So more like a more frequent use case.

So, so yeah, that's how we think about it these days. So I think a lot of, it's sort of along the lines of the same question. So you're obviously, you get a lot of new users, but when you come out with a new product, you also want to have your existing users or users of other wallets upgrade to yours. right so like if somebody has a treasurer from 10 years ago seven years ago eight years ago i don't know you know as what's the pitch for them to upgrade to the new one and i guess what risk are they reducing that they probably don't even realize that they had you know like uh what if i'm sitting on a wallet and i'm lazy and you know listen i've been through with every wallet personally

terrifying firmware updates where i thought things were gone or like a light heart attack when i'm I'm going to get dinner if I remember where my C phrases are, even though I know they should be there, right? I mean, we've all had these human moments. You know, so I guess, like, what benefit are you getting by upgrading? What risk are you reducing? And why should you get the new one? Specifically, Treasurer State 7 is a great example. It is really the most secure hardware ball that we have built.

It has two secure elements, those specialized chips that I mentioned. For example, Model 1, like at the first ever hardware wall, that we have ever built, well, the first ever hardware world in the world didn't have secure elements. You can still protect it cryptographically by using passphrase as a concept of, you know, the additional word that only you remember, and that cannot be recovered from anywhere. So that's still safe if you know how to use it. But like objectively, Treasure Safe 7 is the is the most secure way from the hardware perspective. So that's one. Number two, the usability, as I mentioned, it's simply, you know, Chesromata 1 is like this big. It has two buttons, a tiny display that is like black and white. Exactly. Maybe I didn't have the first one, but I definitely was, you know, the two little buttons,

one, two, three, four, five. Yeah, it's brutal. Yeah, so that was the first one. That's actually the first one. And so, so, you know, the usability is definitely, you know, like a, like the, the experience is voice. It's simply the reality. Then, let's say someone is like, it's like really beautiful consumer electronics, you know, piece of hardware. It's really, it's like a nice, very, very nice device. So I think most people appreciate that as well. I mean, look at the success of iPhones because, I mean, they are very usable. They are, they are a beautiful piece of hardware always. So it's the same case here.

So I think those are the reasons to upgrade. additionally ecosystem. So some of the other models don't support all the networks or all the

functionalities, you know, staking, et cetera. So yeah, those are another reasons where the newer hardware

bots will support more use cases for you as well. Are there any threats that keep you up at night that the rest of us haven't even thought of yet?

Everybody seems on to quantum now. Like, is there something out there that's a big secret in the industry that we're all missing? I don't think it's a secret, but I, besides quantum, I'm worried about AI and the, I think, sophistication of the fishing attacks. I think it's quite crazy.

I think exactly the Zoom calls that we mentioned are crazy. The K-Y-C being part of these companies, you know, like having tons of your data, you know, when you combine like this sort of shitty soup, pardon my language, of like a scale, sophistication of AI, the speed of these attacks that can happen. So that I think scares me, you know. And honestly, I think hardware will play a role in this as well as a like a user verification and where you can really rely on a device

that is like purely built for a very few use cases. It just like it creates the wallet and it signs its transaction. That's it. Like it doesn't do anything else. And that's the beauty of it. I've been thinking about this a lot. I think and what you just said aligns with it. I think we're actually very ironically going back to a world of hardware again and of in person and all these things.

Like I think you're going to have meetings with people in person to know that they're human. And I think that people are going to be very skeptical of the cloud or anything that's not contained in a system that they can look at. we see obviously with OpenClaw, everybody's buying the Mac Mini, and they're putting up a firewall, and now running AI instead of in the cloud and an LLM, in their actual device in a secure place. And now you see these pictures of basically server farms of like Mac Minis running AI, but they're secure hardware setups that the world has completely abandoned until now again. So maybe like the hardware device actually becomes the secure like intermediary for, other transactions as well. It just seems like we're going back to a hardware-based future just to

make sure that things are real. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly, it reads my mind. And, you know, maybe even in my personal sort of life, I mean, I used to be, like my background, like, way before I started in fact, like I was a musician. I studied music actually. And now these days I'm thinking, you know, like, like people are now scared, like in the, in the outworld in general, like, you know, now you can create music online also like through, through AI that is just like getting really incredible quality, you know, like it's, but I'm kind of believer in that it will only strengthen also the pure human connection where people will actually want to go to gigs, they will want to see live shows, they will want to do all those things.

which, you know, it's like some pros and cons, of course. Like, yeah, maybe as, I don't know, Spotify or whoever killed the recorded music industry many years ago, it will probably happen similarly with AI as well that like these sort of creators will be heard by this. But then I also believe the live shows will get away much more. So exactly, as you say, people will want to probably meet. person more and on the tech side yeah hardware probably will will have a big story to play here my background is music as well I grew up playing music I went and got an Ivy League degree and then chose to be a DJ after that you know after playing competitive classical piano as a kid and stuff

and I even funny when DJing became less analog I got pissed off and was like the technology I don't want to do it anymore I was like one of those you know so it's that it that resonates very well with kind of my thoughts. I know we only got a couple minutes here, I guess from a very big, big picture. Like your company and you as the CEO, you obviously have a major responsibility to the crypto ecosystem to secure their assets.

But when we look at the AI future and all these things we've discussed, how much responsibility do you think you have for the future of financial sovereignty and human sovereignty and all of these things? because it seems like that's becoming more important than ever. Absolutely. I think the responsibility is huge here, not just for me personally, but also for like the whole company. Like I mentioned before, we are, we like to say we are freedom technology company. That's the main reason why we do it, quite frankly.

It's not that we would be obsessed with, you know, just the crypto on its own. I think we do it mainly because. we give some power and rights to the individual as they should have them, right? So when we launched at S.Safe 7, we built this big event in Prague and invited, you know, guests from all over the world. And I kind of asked myself a question because as a CEO, I had to introduce the product, right, like on this keynote. And I asked myself the question, like, okay, so what am I even going to tell these people?

And then I'm thinking, well, they might be wonderful. How come that like the first hardware company ever is actually from Prague and why is this, why are there so many Bitcoin companies in Prague in like a tiny country, 10 million people, you know, in the middle of Europe. And honestly, I think it's based on the history because long story short, I don't have to maybe tell you the whole story. We might not have time for this. But like basically in 50s, there were some communism and there was some called like, so-called monetary reform and people lost order savings because the government basically came and said, well, what was valued now like a like a hundred bucks, now you only own, you know,

like five bucks or two bucks. It was this drastic. Like people really lost more than 90% of their savings just because of this sort of devaluation of money. And honestly, it's like just a few generations. Like in my family, yeah, my grandparents still remember these times. And I think we like build so much like a distrust with the establishment and with like, yeah, with the government, et cetera. So I think that's why there are this many like freedom tech companies in Czech Republic in general. And now looking in the world, you would think, okay, so well, those things maybe happen in the past and they are not going to repeat. But the reality is like, it's happening. It's happening in like the Ukrainian-Russian war.

It's happening even in Europe for the last four or five years. So yeah, it's all over the world. Like we can, I think, I'll feel it, right? So what's happening in Latin America, like, yeah, Middle East, like all around the world, basically. We have issues like this. And therefore, the self-custody really is important part of this. And we will fight by giving great products and creating great products. That's the way we want to address these issues in the world globally.

I know we're at the end of time here, but is there anything I missed, anything you want to make sure that my audience here is about? If you haven't tried self-custody, please do that. You can start with software wallets. Just make sure that you understand they are not secure and that they get hacked all the time. You don't have to trust me. You can verify it yourself. You can go on your favorite chatbot or Google and just search this information. And then once you're ready, yeah, try hard to vote.

It doesn't even have to be us. Though, of course, I'm biased here. I believe treasure is great. But like there are the competitors that are doing a fantastic job as well. So, yeah, please get into harder robots. Thank you so much. That was really an enlightening conversation. And I don't think we talk about security enough anymore.

I think it's one of those things that people were so. passionate about in the early days and now we just talk about like what Donald Trump is doing or whether we're going to get. Yeah, true. I guess there's something. Yeah, I think it's important to go back to first principles. So I really appreciate you doing that with me. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Scott. They really appreciate it. Thanks so much.