@ferdj

I have a Trezor and a Ledger, and I've used them for a long time — since the Ledger Nano S (a very old model). I went down a rabbit hole today comparing four hardware wallets. Tbh "open source" in crypto is mostly a marketing narrative. It has layers, and almost nobody goes all the way to the bottom. I was looking at Ledger, Trezor Safe 5, Keystone 3 Pro and CrossBar. Everyone talks about screen sizes or coin support, but the important question that really matters is: can you verify the chip? We will look at the layers. Software is layer one. Trezor, Keystone and CrossBar open their firmware. Ledger only goes part-way (their OS is closed). Layer two is board schematics. Trezor, Keystone, and CrossBar publish them. Ledger doesn't. So, Trezor and Keystone look very transparent, right? Not true. Here's the hard truth nobody usually talks about: layer three. The actual silicon chip. The secure element chip in a Ledger is closed. Trezor is closed (they just use an Infineon chip). Keystone heavily brands itself as open source, but uses three different closed third-party chips. Literally, nobody opens the silicon chip… except CrossBar. It's unusual. Their chip design is mostly public on GitHub even now: https://github.com/baochip/baochip-1x. It makes sense when you know the others are wallet companies buying chips, while CrossBar is a real chip company. They also use MPC, so your key is split. No single seed phrase to lose like the other three. It's the only device you can verify down to the silicon level. The chip is manufactured by TSMC on a 22nm process. CrossBar was founded in 2010 and has 50 people today. They have two wallets: the PHSM 6 (a USB-C dongle with a fingerprint sensor — the compact one) and the PHSM 8 (a credit-card-sized wallet with an E-ink touchscreen — the flagship). I held both at Network School, where I met Elaine Wang, CrossBar's Chief Business Officer — she even treated me to an egg roll. I preferred the PHSM 8: real haptic feedback when you tap the screen, glass on both sides, thin and solid — it felt like a finished product. Both are still prototypes — no pre-orders yet, but my guess is soon. CrossBar is the only one finally opening the layer the rest of the industry wants to keep hidden.