Case Is An Insanely Secure Hardware Bitcoin Wallet

You shouldn’t trust anyone with your bitcoins, and Case is well aware of that. Over the past few years, Mt. Gox, Bitstamp and countless other centralized services have suffered serious security breaches. But Case is about to put an end to all this, as this startup has built one of the most secure hardware bitcoin wallets in the world. The startup is launching onstage today at Disrupt NY.
‘There’s no easy and secure way to use bitcoin. You’re either getting security, or you’re getting ease of use,’ co-founder and CEO Melanie Shapiro told me. Case wants to provide both – security and ease of use.
Case is a small credit card-shaped device with a tiny screen, a fingerprint sensor, a camera, a built-in GSM chip and a few buttons. Any time you want to make a bitcoin transaction, you press the bitcoin button, scan the QR code with the camera, swipe your finger and you’re done. Everything happens on the device; you don’t have to log in with a complicated password or use a smartphone app. You can even buy and sell bitcoins from this device.
Behind the scenes, Case provides a highly secured multi-signature wallet. You need two signatures to make a transaction. When you first start your Case device, you generate a private key on the device itself, and this key will stay on your device forever. ‘We don’t generate that private key – the device doesn’t come pre-populated with a private key,’ Shapiro said.

This post was published at Tech Crunch on May 5, 2015.