Quicknode

September 20, 2024 — 4 min read

Welcome back to Feature Fridays! This week, we’re thrilled to spotlight BC Vault, a pioneering hardware wallet that’s redefining crypto security. Founded by an expert team with over 20 years in IT security, BC Vault was created to address critical vulnerabilities in existing wallet solutions. Unlike traditional wallets, BC Vault eliminates the risks associated with seed words, providing a secure and user-friendly experience. With a focus on innovation and independence, BC Vault is setting new standards in safeguarding digital assets.

Check out BC Vault

Q & A with BC Vault 👇

Could you introduce yourself by sharing your name, prior experience, and current role within your company? Additionally, please briefly explain your company's mission and what it offers to its customers.

BC Vault was born out of frustration with existing hardware crypto wallet offerings in 2017. Our mother company, Real Security, has been active in the field of IT security for more than 20 years, and thus, we have a very strong foundation in topics of cryptography, HSM… Alen Salamun is the CTO and co-owner of the company and holds an MSc in IT Security.

How has your company grown and changed since its inception, and what do you have planned for its future?

BC Vault has proven that there is a market for “think different” devices in the field of hardware crypto wallets, as we do not follow the path of most of the competition. We do not use seed words to derive a tree of wallets as that is one of the most commonly exploited attack vectors against the users. The BC Vault project was started inside the main company and we used our own money to “put money where our mouth is”. After a couple of years we did manage to move BC Vault to a separate entity and we are still completely independent from any external influence and follow the rule of “what is good for the actual user”. The current main focus is to bring the existing users secure functionality with Android and iOS mobile devices.

What inspired you to develop BC Vault, and how did you conceive?

After the year 2017, when we envisioned the BC Vault hardware crypto wallet, I am very happy to say that we correctly identified the main security issues and solutions to them. As crypto became more and more “mainstream” and more and more money flowed into it, it was just logical that criminals followed. One of the main attack vectors was and still is the lack of crypto knowledge. Users are attacked on all possible fronts such as phishing, social engineering, malware, project rug pulls etc.

One of the most common attack vectors are the seed words that tie together all present and future crypto wallets of a user in a single “tree of wallets”. Attackers try to lure the user into revealing those seed words to them and then they can just wait for the right moment in the future, when the crypto wallets will hold enough money to be worth stealing. The user will forget about the moment when the seed words were fraudulently exposed and have a false sense of security as he/she will use a new wallet in the future. But this wallet will also be visible to the hackers and when they strike in something like 6 months, the user will be completely baffled as to how/what just happened. In many cases they claim a service/wallet provider was surely hacked, but that was not the case.

It took an amazing team of capable people to think everything through and I am happy to say we have not had any security incident up to today as everyone can check for themselves. On every single BC Vault we ship, there is a bounty wallet with more than 1 BTC. If you can hack it, it is yours!

Can you provide insight into BC Vault’s progress by sharing any metrics or milestones indicating its traction?

BC Vault is used all over the world and we are happy to say our users rate us a couple of times higher than our main competitor on TrustPilot.

How does your company utilize Quicknode, and what benefits does it bring to your business operations?

Processing huge amounts of data that is needed to do even the simplest transaction on the blockchain is becoming a huge burden. Services such as Quicknode are there to take this pain away from the blockchain developers that have to focus on other aspects of the blockchain, but the historic data itself. Users usually do not know that calculating the balance of a single Bitcoin wallet takes Terabytes of data (whole BTC blockchain)!