We're So Back 💨
Our monthly newsletter is back in action with February's edition - ready for you to dive straight into!
Catch up and subscribe here 👇🏼
https://foundationdevices.com/2024/03/foundation-updates-february-2024/
GM, 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐰𝐚𝐤𝐞-𝐮𝐩 𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥! ☕️
Bitcoin surged & Cₒᵢₙbₐₛₑ cᵣₐₛₕₑd (shocker), while folks saw a big fat 0 in their Bitcoin balance.😱
Time to embrace #SelfCustody. 👊
Take control. Remember, every Satoshi counts!
Key Manager 🤝 nostr:npub18m76awca3y37hkvuneavuw6pjj4525fw90necxmadrvjg0sdy6qsngq955
Create a new Nostr key entirely offline with Passport's Key Manager extension and then sign into Damus with a single QR scan.
Creating a Nostr key securely + signing in has never been easier! 🤯
https://v.nostr.build/dABv.mp4
Get the full details on how Key Manager simplifies your Bitcoin wallets and Nostr keys from our blog post:
https://foundationdevices.com/2023/05/all-your-wallets-one-backup/
Satoshi's vision for Bitcoin: FREE and open source (FOSS).
Free and open source is different than just being "source viewable." As shown here, Bitcoin was and is built on FOSS, just like every Bitcoin-centric project should be.
Stay true out there!
Taproot 🤝 Passport
Today we’ve released Passport firmware v2.3.0, with a massive set of new features and improvements. Is it our biggest release ever? 🤔
You be the judge.
**Full Taproot support is here 🥕**
Passport now has full support for sending and receiving using Taproot, making the combination of Envoy and Passport a powerful way to leverage the latest and greatest tech that Bitcoin has to offer.
**Verifying addresses just got way easier 📥**
We’ve improved address display based on the Bitcoin Design guidelines, making it easier than ever to verify addresses on Passport! Shout-out to @bitcoin_design for the excellent work on this standard!
Check it out 📷
**Passport now has full support for verifying and displaying OP_RETURN messages directly on-screen 💬**
Want to send a snarky message to your friends or enshrine a headline directly in Bitcoin? Now you can do it (and verify it offline) with passport!
**We’ve enabled SeedQR exports of the master seed 📷**
While this feature should be used with caution, SeedQR is a rapidly growing standard that Bitcoiners are using to backup and restore their seed phrases. Now you can more easily do so on Passport!
**Passport now has a brand new address explorer ✉️**
Ever wanted to browse the addresses of one of your Passport accounts on-device? Now you can! We’ve worked hard to make it as easy as possible to navigate and find addresses for verification directly on Passport.
**12-word seed phrases are here 🌱**
Passport now allows the creation of 12 word seed phrases, and defaults to 12 word seed phrases during onboarding.
Want to learn more about why 12-word seed phrases are more than secure enough? 👇
**Calculate a manual seed phrase checksum directly on Passport 📝**
If you’re an advanced user who wants to generate a seed phrase offline, now you can have Passport automatically generate the final word for you when you import it.
**It’s time to name your Passport! 🔠**
Now you can set a name for your Passport that gets synced to Envoy when you pair it, and lets you easily distinguish between different family member’s Passports or your unnecessarily large Passport collection 👀
And much, much more. To get the full list of what we’ve added, improved, or fixed, read the full release notes below.
https://foundationdevices.com/2024/02/passport-version-2-3-0-is-now-live/
Thanks for joining us on this journey as we build and improve Passport, and we hope you enjoy this latest release!
Are you in it for the Tech?
Bitcoiners are building some awesome things. What's the most exciting Bitcoin development you've seen lately? Share your projects, ideas, and innovations—let's inspire and support 👇🏼
Multi-signature wallets can be the most secure way to store your bitcoin… But they’re not for everyone!
Learn the pros and cons so you can choose for yourself 🫵
Multi-signature wallets (often just called ”multisig”) are one of the most powerful breakthroughs that came with Bitcoin, as we don’t have to rely on a lawyer to escrow funds anymore between multiple entities.
All we need is cryptography and we can cut out another middle-man 😎
Multisig at its core functions similarly to a standard Bitcoin wallet — only the right signature can allow funds to be sent to a different address.
However, instead of just needing one signature, now multiple signatures are required to make a valid transaction. This greatly increases the potential security of a wallet, but also comes with some big trade-offs.
So what are the pros and cons of multisig for Bitcoiners today? 🤔
Pro - Powerful custody for organizations
What once used to require lawyers, complex bank accounts, and legal headaches, now can be achieved through simple cryptography.
Organizations can share custody of funds safely and securely with no middle-men or custodians.
Pro - Losing a single key doesn’t mean lost funds (usually)
For any proper multisig quorum (threshold of signatures needed) losing a single key - or even multiple! - doesn’t lead to lost funds. For instance, a 3-of-5 quorum could lose two keys and still access their Bitcoin.
Pro - Harder to spend funds
While this may not sound like a pro, the main benefit for individuals who use multisig is that a single key or seed being compromised doesn’t lead to theft (or loss) of funds.
In certain threat models this can be a powerful step up in security.
Cons - Harder to spend funds
Yes, this is both a pro and a con 🤔
While it can sometimes be a good thing to make it harder to spend funds, this added complexity or geographical distance when accessing funds can be problematic for individual users!
If you use a multisig with just one person and spread the keys out geographically, things like government lockdowns or tightened border crossings can make it impossible to actually access your bitcoin.
Cons - More complex backups
While backing up even a standard wallet can be daunting, multisig ratchets up the complexity even more.
Not only do you need to properly secure multiple seed phrases, but also additional metadata about the wallet 😱
Even though multisig can help prevent loss of funds, this backup complexity can actually increase the risk of losing your precious sats if you’re not 100% sure how to properly handle multisig backups ❗
Cons - Harder for loved ones to recover
An aspect of every Bitcoiner’s setup that often gets overlooked is what happens if you pass away or are incapacitated? Can your spouse/parents/kids access your Bitcoin to actually pass on your generational wealth?
Multisig can make it drastically harder to actually recover funds in this worst-case scenario, so it’s vital that you be sure that those you love actually test your recovery process and can recover without any help from you.
What’s right for YOU 🫵
While multisig has a lot of pros and cons, deciding if it helps your specific self-custody setup is a personal choice. For more advanced users the added complexity might not be a problem, so the cons are worth the greater security against theft/loss.
On the flip-side, many users have improperly backed up their multisig and ended up losing funds they otherwise would have been able to recover.
For all the reasons mentioned here we normally recommend single users use single-sig - K.I.S.S. 😉
Want to learn more?
This threads already getting long, so keep an eye out for next week’s thread where we’ll cover the ins and outs of actually using multisig, what backups look like, and how a hardware wallet like Passport can help simplify backups.
In the meantime, you can read through this fantastic resource by nostr:npub15c88nc8d44gsp4658dnfu5fahswzzu8gaxm5lkuwjud068swdqfspxssvx to better understand multisig wallets 🔗
https://bitcoiner.guide/multisig/
Want to see multisig in action?
We’ve built out a detailed tutorial for using Passport with Bitcoin Keeper on YouTube, where you can see the process of setting up a new multisig wallet from start to finish 📺
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGSRMoGZn-w
That’s it! Thanks so much for reading, and we hope this helped better explain the pros and cons of multisig, letting you make a well-informed decision on what setup is right for you.
For more like this, follow us or visit our website @ foundationdevices.com 🫡
Hello Monday - Have a great week guys 🧡
Monday Bitcoin Weekly Reminder:
Bitcoin's strength lies in our collective effort. Let's keep building, supporting, and shaping the future together 💪
Not at the moment, but there is a community fork of the firmware that is working on adding Monero support:
We're thrilled to get Passport v2.2.0 in your hands today 🎊
With this latest version, you can:
📷 Seamlessly switch back and forth between signing via QR and microSD
🌱 Restore from SeedQR
We've also improved the user interface on Founder’s Edition and added many quality of life improvements across the board. With the number of new features we included in 2.1.0, we took this release to focus on refining our unified firmware between Founder’s Edition and Batch 2, as well as paving the way for full Taproot support in 2.3.0.
Update today directly from Envoy, our mobile app in just a few taps, and read the full changelog in our release notes blog post below:
https://foundationdevices.com/2024/01/passport-version-2-2-0-is-now-live/
If this is your first time updating Passport or you'd like a refresher, we have docs and videos that walk you through every step of the process:
It's time to kick the new year off in style starting with Envoy v1.5 📲
This version of Envoy brings:
🥕 Full Taproot Support
🪙 A Refined Coin Control Experience
🇪🇸 Initial Spanish Translation
Plus many quality of life improvements and 🐛 fixes!
For all of the details on what we've shipped in Envoy v1.5, dive into the release notes blog post below in the post below:
https://foundationdevices.com/2024/01/envoy-version-1-5-0-is-now-live/
If you haven't tried Envoy yet, there's never been a better time to experience Bitcoin, simplified.
Learn more at foundationdevices.com/envoy and see how you can go from zero to self-custody in <60s 📺
https://v.nostr.build/zynz.mp4
Are you a Passport user? Keep your eyes peeled on our socials for a big release coming later today 😉
Let us know how you like it 🫡
LEAK: The Foundation Secret Master Plan 👀
We believe technology is progressing in the wrong direction. Rather than offering freedom, technology is used to surveil and control.
It’s time to help usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity with freedom tech.
🧵👇
There was a time when Apple shipped the schematics alongside the computer, a time when they encouraged us to “think different.”
There was a time when Google lived by the guiding principle of “don’t be evil.”
No longer.
Cryptocurrency companies like Ledger are collecting your data, Google wants to know everything about you, and your TV monitors what you watch and sells it all to the highest bidder.
Even our cars are black boxes that spy on us and give ultimate control to the manufacturer.
Technological progress in the physical world has slowed. An overwhelming majority of hardware and manufacturing innovations are closed source and proprietary.
Open source software propelled us to the Internet, to Bitcoin – but open source hardware is a rarity.
At Foundation we believe that technology can be used as a tool to empower the individual with freedom, with sovereignty, with privacy.
We believe that building superior open source hardware and software is the key to unlocking an era of prosperity and permissionless innovation.
As in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, we’ve asked ourselves – what can we do to help navigate this period of chaos and usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity?
This brought us to our beginning. To Bitcoin.
It all started with Bitcoin. It is our strong belief that a transition to Bitcoin as the global monetary standard will re-align society and fix our most important problems.
In short, we believe that “Bitcoin fixes this!” So this is where we’ve chosen to begin our journey.
Foundation believes that Bitcoin itself is at a crossroads.
On one side are ETFs, exchanges, custodians, intense and crushing regulations. On the other is custody, decentralization, permissionless innovation, financial privacy, and even an end to central banking as we know it.
This is why our first product was Passport, the best-in-class Bitcoin hardware wallet.
The most fundamental aspect of Bitcoin is to hold your own keys, to control your own money and your own destiny. Passport makes that possible for more people than ever before.
But Bitcoin needs more than “just” approachable self-custody tools, so during the 2024-2028 epoch, Foundation will build a cohesive ecosystem of Bitcoin devices, tied together by our Envoy mobile app.
But we aren’t stopping at Bitcoin.
As the world achieves global Bitcoin adoption during the 2028-2032 epoch, Foundation will broaden our approach and focus on expanding our freedom tech ecosystem to more platforms.
Smartphones and computers running a next-gen, ultra-secure, privacy-preserving operating system.
Self-hosted smart home products with integrated AI.
Maybe even a car 🚗
Our master plan is straight-forward:
1. 2020-2024: Build a hardware wallet and mobile app.
2. 2024-2028: Use that money to build an ecosystem of Bitcoin devices.
3. 2028-2032: Use that money to build a freedom-tech computing ecosystem.
While doing all of the above, release everything as fully open source, vertically integrate manufacturing, and – most importantly – continue to hold true to our principles.
P.S. - Don’t tell anyone.
If you see the need for approachable self-custody and freedom tech, follow us nostr:npub1s0vtkgej33n7ec4d7ycxmwt78up8hpfa30d0yfksrshq7t82mchqynpq6j for more content like this and to be the first to know as we roll out our next wave of Bitcoin devices 😎
Are you referring to Envoy or Passport?
Envoy is our mobile wallet and companion app, Passport is our hardware wallet.
Of course! Generate the seed outside of Envoy and import at your own convenience.
Effortless Transactions. Instant Satisfaction.
Master the art of simplicity: Send your Bitcoin in 4 easy steps directly from your mobile wallet and take self-custody, because why settle for anything less?
https://v.nostr.build/8J7W.mp4
1️⃣ Open the Envoy account to be spent from and tap Send.
2️⃣ Populate the recipient's address by pasting or scanning a QR code, enter the amount to be sent, and then tap Confirm.
3️⃣ Select the fee based on your required transaction priority and then tap Confirm.
4️⃣ Review the transaction details, then tap Send transaction. 💥
Welcome to Bitcoin, Simplified with Envoy! Download today:
Go from 0 to self-custody in <60 seconds! 😱
Experience Bitcoin, simplified with Magic Backups — Create and back up your mobile wallet in under 60 seconds, and restore in three taps.
Just how easy is it to get started on Envoy with Magic Backups?🧵👇
https://v.nostr.build/zynz.mp4
✨ Once you have downloaded Envoy, simply choose Enable Magic Backups.
Envoy will then:
1. Create your seed
2. Store it in your phone’s secure element
3. Encrypt your seed
4. Back up your seed and metadata automatically
Simple and quick to set up. Let’s dive into the details!
✨ Envoy generates a seed and stores it on your phone’s secure element while your envoy settings, accounts, and labels are encrypted using your private key.
The encrypted seed is uploaded to your iCloud or Android Auto Backup account in a fully end-to-end encrypted manner.
NO data can be read by Foundation, Apple, or Google at any time. Gain more context by watching our explainer video here:
https://v.nostr.build/oyjR.mp4
✨Envoy then creates an "Envoy Backup" file containing your app settings, account labels, and other non-sensitive app data so that Envoy can be restored to its exact previous state.
This folder is end-to-end encrypted with your seed so that we can never see the contents.
✨The fully encrypted Envoy Backup is uploaded to Foundation’s servers, alongside a hash of the seed (a cryptographic representation of the seed that proves your knowledge of the seed, not the seed itself!) so that we can ensure no one else can attempt to download your backup.
✨There is no Foundation user account, no email, no password – all you need is access to your iCloud or Google account to access your backup.
Check out our blog post for a thorough exploration of how this innovative feature operates:
https://foundationdevices.com/2023/05/announcing-envoy-wallet-bitcoin-simplified/
Already have a seed phrase you want to use or simply want to back up your seed manually?
Both of those fully self-sovereign paths have first-class support, with a secure, easy, and intuitive seed phrase entry flow or the ability to let Envoy generate a new seed for you.
✨Now that you know how Magic Backups work, you're ready to take charge of your Bitcoin self-custody journey. No more barriers — empower yourself to secure your Bitcoin the right way.
Download Envoy now and experience Bitcoin simplified:
It’s been extremely effective for us, and much better overall than the original client.
We’ve implemented it as a library for Flutter here:
🧡
Coin control, simplified 🪙
Often reserved for only the most technical Bitcoiners, with Envoy 1.4 we’ve brought coin control to everyone with the most intuitive approach to date.
🏷️ Quickly tag coins
✅ Spend from an entire tag OR
🪙 Get specific and pick individual coins
🧵 👇
https://v.nostr.build/BJqZ.mp4
Coin control gives you the power to reveal exactly what you want when you spend Bitcoin by including (or excluding) precisely the coins you want.
Want to learn more? Check out our educational thread on coin control from earlier this week:
https://nitter.net/FOUNDATIONdvcs/status/1731372754073485449?s=20
In Envoy, we've approached coin control with the goal of lowering the barrier of entry - coin control for everyone, even grandma 👵
In order to use coin control, you simply need to start applying "tags" to coins in your wallet as you go.
Acquire some no-KYC sats? Tag as "noKYC."
Keep a separate stash for conferences? Tag as "conferences."
Your coins, your control.
To tag coins, simply:
1. Enter an account
2. Tap the tag icon
3. Enter a tag (like "Untagged")
4. Select coins to tag
5. Tap "Tag Selected"
6. Name the tag
And you're done! Once you've created a tag for the first time, tagging new coins only gets easier from there.
Easily manage your tags, delete them, rename them, or move coins between tags with just a few taps.
But coin control doesn't stop there, as it's vital that you can easily exclude specific tags or coins from being spent!
To do this, we give you the ability to easily lock entire tags or individual coins, preventing them from being spent by Envoy until you unlock them.
Simply tap the🔓icon on any tag to lock all the coins in a tag, or tap the🔓icon on an individual coin to lock just that coin.
Once you've locked the coins you don't want to be spent, you can continue to use Envoy as normal but trust that it won't select any locked coins.
Locking coins + simply spending from Envoy is a great place for everyone to start with Envoy.
In addition to tags, you can also easily add notes to a coin or transaction to give additional context.
Notes can be far longer than tags, allowing you be more specific with where you got those coins from, what a transaction was, and much more.
So how do you spend from tags? 🤔
There are three ways to spend when using coin control:
1. Spend from an entire tag and let Envoy choose what coins from that tag to spend
2. Select specific coins to spend
3. Edit a transaction before sending to tweak what coins are used
Spending from one or more tags is as easy as entering an account, tapping the tag icon, and toggling on any tags you want to spend from.
Once you've done that and ensured that there are enough sats selected, simply hit Send Selected and spend as usual!
Spending from coins functions the exact same way, but you simply enter any tags you want to spend coins from and individually toggle on coins that you want to use.
Pick enough coins to cover the sats necessary, hit send, and enjoy total control 🫡
You can also just begin creating a transaction as normal and select "Edit Transaction" before hitting send to see what coins Envoy automatically selected and edit them as you see fit.
Just be sure you include enough sats in the coins you select and hit Send when you're done!
Want to learn more about how to use coin control in Envoy? Check out our full documentation on our site, or watch the video below:
https://docs.foundationdevices.com/en/envoy/tags
Freedom money deserves freedom tech, and that includes giving you the freedom to spend your Bitcoin *exactly* as you want to.
Download Envoy today to experience coin control, simplified: