Why the X1 cards are not upgradeable
Upgradability allows Cypherock to improve the overall wallet experience by adding newer features and bug fixes. Cypherock has two major hardware pieces, alongside a companion software application as part of the Cypherock X1 -> the X1 Vault, 4 X1 Cards, and cySync desktop application respectively. At present, the X1 Vault code as well as the cySync desktop application code is open source and available on the Cypherock Github for public verifiability.
Blockchains are increasingly going to be decentralized and trustless over time. But at the end of the day, people still have to trust their wallet provider today to operate in the web3 space. There is a non-zero possibility that there is a malicious engineer working for your favourite web3 wallet that pushed a malicious software update which in turn takes away your private keys from your wallet. Here is a potential instance reported about the same.
As a first step towards making wallets more trustless over time, Cypherock X1 cards have been designed to be unupgradable while ensuring that your Cypherock X1 is able to support new coins and features over time. It is important to recall that the Crypto private keys of the wallet are never stored in a singular place with Cypherock X1. The keys are cryptographically split into 5 Cryptographic parts and stored physically on the X1 Vault and the 4 X1 Cards. This ensures that hypothetically even if there is a malicious developer inside Cypherock, they will never be able to compromise the X1 cards remotely giving users a much stronger security model for their Crypto assets.
Last modified 4mo ago