PRIME TIME with Zach Herbert | FREEDOM TECH FRIDAY 34

Hello and welcome to Freedom Tech Friday, a weekly live and interactive show hosted

on the Ungovernable X, Noster, YouTube, Rumble and Twitch feeds.

We go live for an hour every Friday at 9am, Eastern and 2pm UK time, but you can also catch

up later on the Ungovernable Podcast feed.

On Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest news, trends and anything related

to Freedom Technologies.

That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools and

everything in between.

Essentially, if there's a news item, tool or topic that can help you take back some

control in today's digital penopticon, we want to talk about it.

My name is Max, I'm the Acting Chief Refreshments Officer at the Ungovernable Empire, and

as always, I'm joined by my good friend Q&A, the head of customer experience at Foundation,

and Seth, who is COO at Cakewallet.

This is a live interactive show, and you can help steer the conversation.

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The top support from last show comes from Kaz Peeland, who streamed 1062 sets.

Thank you for your support.

Before we introduce our guests and dive into the show, Q, Seth, how are we doing?

Going good.

Big week, especially for Zach and I.

It feels like it's been a long time coming, so there's been some many celebrations going

on to finally get this thing out of the door, and yeah, it's a big one, so excited to chat

about it.

Likewise, it's weird, because this is partly my baby, but a baby that I abandoned about

a year and a half ago, but now seeing the baby growing up and doing so well and real.

It's awesome to see Prime out there, see a lot of things that I had seen and chat

with the team about, and we had thought through so much way back when we started Prime,

and then to see it now.

From the other side, as someone who's going to be building on top of it and using it regularly

and keeping it in my backpack, I am absolutely pumped for Prime to be here and pumped to grill

Zach and Q and A. Keep them on the hot seat for a little while.

Yeah, I think he needs doing.

So today shows a little bit different, obviously we have our special guest, Zach Herbert, joining

us today.

He's the CEO and co-founder of Foundation Devices.

He's here because after years of developing and delays, which we're getting to, some setbacks,

and insane amount of engineering work, and passport prime is finally shipping to customers.

Now, what I think makes this story interesting for the Freedentech Friday audience isn't

just that they have a new hardware wallet.

It's the story behind it.

It's a small team in the U.S. that decided to build a completely new open source hardware

device from scratch, new operating system, new communication layer, new form factor, and

they've manufactured everything domestically in America, especially in this industry where

basically everyone just shipped from Shenzhen, it's pretty bold.

So today we're going to dig into what it's actually like to build something like this,

the manufacturing, the supply chain, the engineering decisions, the DEI higher of Q&A,

and what it means for the broader Freedentech space.

So Zach, welcome to the show.

How does it feel to finally have the device in customer's hands?

Hey, guys, thanks for having me.

It's weird to be a special guest, by the way, very special.

It feels, I don't know if I feel it yet, is the answer to your question, I know Q said

that there's some celebrations, I'm still kind of holding my breath.

Yes, I can imagine.

Well, it's been weird because I've sort of seen the whole process and seen snippets

and spoken to you behind the scenes and Q and Seth, and you know, when was it a year

ago or so where we went into depth of what you guys were doing, and I've kind of been

like on the inside, mainly outside mainly, but on the inside, and I know it's been quite

a task getting it here.

So I think you can pat yourself on the back at least a little bit and say, we got there.

It's getting into hands.

Even though not my hands, I feel very jealous, all of you guys have them, not me.

When are you getting here?

Did you already get off the scene?

You tell me, you tell me, I don't know.

We should have sent him off down.

We should have sent him off because if anybody's going to break it, it'll be Max.

So we should have sent him as the official Q8 tester.

The tester, yeah, exactly.

It's okay, it's okay.

I'm admiring it from afar.

I'm seeing the pictures.

It looks beautiful.

So let's get into it.

I can send you one.

You are.

Okay.

I don't think they have postal service right now.

The deal.

Okay.

So Zach, passport call was obviously your first baby.

It's very well regarded in the space and it's something that I use pretty much every day.

What was it that made you make this change and put you and the team through this stress

and build something completely from the ground up?

Did you not feel you already had something that's like, okay, this is great.

This works.

We're done.

Yeah.

I was very proud of what we built with passport core.

I think if we take a step back and think about when we started the company, the idea for

the whole company started in 2019 when I was using a cold card personally and I was really

annoyed that none of the other hardware wallets supported even Bitcoin multi-sig well or

at all and I had learned about this idea of air gaping and all that kind of stuff and

I wanted to do something that had the hard core air gap but had a much better user experience

than cold card and just something that would be more accessible to more people and really

just building for something that I wanted for myself back then.

We did the two generations of the original passport, which was passport founders edition

and then we called it passport batch two.

We ultimately ended up calling it passport core later on retroactively and I think it's

a great device and I think it offers some great securities and great usability but when

you make stuff and when you have a really high bar, I could probably spend hours complaining

about all the things I don't like about it.

It was never the final form.

It was something that I think worked well for the more hardcore people but there's so

many things about it that I think could have been much improved.

One is building on this micro python based firmware, both pulling in code from CoinKite

early on as some folks know.

Also from Trezer, their crypto libraries and some other stuff, it's micro python from

a hardcore security perspective.

It's not designed to be a security operating system.

That was one thing that was always in our minds, both myself and then one of our co-founders

in our CTO Ken.

We talked so much about how the actual firmware and what we were using as the foundational

firmware was just not really designed to be something that was great for security and

so everyone always talks about the attack surface and wanting to have like, you don't want

to have any shit coin code in there because the code is on the device and you want to keep

it as minimal as possible because the software isn't really designed for having all these

different types of code side by side in there in case something is untrusted.

There's the whole software and engineering side of things, but then also the usability side

of things.

Q knows this well from when we try to work with customers.

A lot of people don't understand, my phone is showing me this QR code.

I'm supposed to scan this QR code from passport and then I have to scan it back.

We did some events at pubkey in New York and people had no idea what they were supposed

to do and it was very illuminating to kind of see how more normal people or even still

like Bitcoin people, but maybe a little bit newer, try to interact with it and it just didn't

really find it to be intuitive at all and so that's part of it and so we knew like that

we wanted a new operating system.

We knew from very early on we wanted to do it.

We waited until this third generation product to do it.

We knew we wanted to solve a lot of the usability type concerns as well.

But then finally there was the other realization that I'm supposed to carry all these devices

around.

I'm supposed to have ubiquies and it's two FA codes and also the hardware wallet and

then all this other stuff and I'm supposed to go watch cues or sets like tutorials and

spend hours on their websites learning how to do like, yeah, who's going to do that?

Yeah, it's not something you want to do with your life if you can avoid it.

Yeah, exactly.

So that's why we did this, right?

And we kicked this project off at the end of 2022 and it took a little bit longer than

we expected to get it here.

Okay.

And some of that time getting it here and working on a completely new operating system

assume that comes down to like auditing and like checking that this thing is obviously

secure and works and when it gets into people's hands, they don't have issues.

Like how does that work building something completely from scratch?

So firstly the good thing is it wasn't completely from scratch or at least be thought it wouldn't

be, but it ended up being mostly from scratch.

So we started with a really cool open source Rust project called Zeus OS.

That was a part of this like cool hacker type project from this guy called Bunny who's

pretty famous in like the open source hardware world.

And he had this cool Rust operating system for his project and we said, oh, like this

actually checks off a lot of the boxes, what we want to build.

Let's use that as a starting point and build on it.

It had never been actually distributed in like mass market consumer products.

It was part of like kind of a crowdfunded project and I don't think that had even shipped

yet when we started, but we ended up like significantly diverging from that this project.

So while there's a lot of core components that come from it, if you look at like the

effort, it's just you know vast majority of it was was new code.

And so I think it's just more of a question of like, how do you know when you're done

and how do you know how long it's going to take?

And when you're building this new operating system, you know, like when do you go, you

know, pencils down and how do you build it where you're like building the actual core operating

system components, but then you're also building like the apps and the features on top

of it.

And then you're trying to kind of converge at the end with like a final working product.

You're building it for a specific hardware that you've also, you know, that you're also

building the hardware for.

And so you control everything, the drivers, the component selection, all that kind of stuff.

And then trying to figure out like, is this is this secure and of course, you know, we

did like a third party security audit, but like we don't really rely on that.

That's more like a stamp of approval.

And, and then also like, is this thing robust, you know, like when we release the first

firmware updates, you know, will it update if something goes wrong and we screw up something,

you know, do customers have a way to like do like recover, you know, recover the firmware

on the device so that they don't get like bricks if we make, you know, make a mistake.

So so much of the effort in the last few months has been working on that and making sure

that everything is like rock solid and stable.

So, you know, just this, this has been, it's crazy to think that it took like, probably

about three years of, of software development to get to this point, which is weird because

it's normally software that's the easier part and hardware that's the hardest part as

far as I can tell from speaking to you and anyone who's in this type of business.

So that amount of time is, yeah, it's a lot, but it does a lot of different things compared

to your previous device.

I think maybe I'll throw this one at UQ because it has been a while since we've talked about

the features and how this differs.

Can you talk about the differences between the two devices that you currently offer, the

core and the prime, like what, what changes and, and like, why did you have to have this

new operating system to be able to do the things you can do with prime?

Yeah, good question.

And to be clear, you said about that we offer both devices.

Passport core is no longer on sale, so you can't actually buy it now unless you go to

a third party reseller that might still have some stock there.

Not available on our website and are very unlikely to ever be again.

But in terms of like the, the differences, Passport core was the gaped lock down Bitcoin

only focused device for, you know, the ultimate and cold storage whilst, you know, we tried

to get the, the finer balance between that and usability.

I personally think we did a really good job compared to what, what else is out there.

But Azak kind of alluded to earlier, you, with an air gap, a true air gap where you use

QR codes on micro SD cards, so many so much you can do from a user perspective before

you just bought up against the architecture.

Like you have to get some information over that egg at somehow, obviously that's generally

speaking is by QR codes and that's where a lot of newcomers fall over and that's mental

burden of trying to understand what information is, is where, which device do I need to be

interacting with at which point, like you just cannot fix that because that air gap, because

of the air gap, essentially.

When we coupled that with the fact that, you know, we wanted to produce a device that

does much more than that.

So like Zack said, you know, prevent people having to carry ubiquies, have a home for their

additional seeds, be able to store their files like we were like, well, we should be able

to do all of that in one easy to use device and you should be able to choose your own journey.

And that's where KOS came in and the additional connectivity options that comes with Passbook

Prime, namely NFC key cards, which we use for magic backups with the provided key cards

that we use where we use a two or three backup and we can get into that later, a whole separate

conversation for later.

We also use it for security keys so that you can log into your Discord account or any

of your online accounts in the same way that you would with the UBK.

You can do that via USB or via NFC.

We've also got the two a phase out, which needs time.

It needs a concept of time to be able to do that, so you just can't do that on Passbook

Core.

So all of these like additional kind of features that you need to make these types of

apps functional and usable in a device that is still offline and doesn't have any Wi-Fi

or anything like that.

You need to make some trade off somewhere and that comes in the form of connectivity.

The main one that we did is Quantum Link Bluetooth, which is the name suggests is a Bluetooth

based protocol that we built on top of with encryption, just to be specific, it's quantum

resistant encryption, which is hence the name.

And that kind of gives us almost like a live communication between Passbook Prime where

you're keeping all of your secrets and at the moment just envoy, but we're hopeful that

the piece of software will adopt that Quantum Link standard when they see the benefits of

it.

And because we've got that live connectivity, we're basically bridging that air gap whilst

not removing, I'll say 95% of the benefits of the air gap, we kind of like the term air

gap like security.

It's obviously never going to be 100% as good because you do have an active connection,

but we're taking multiple steps to ensure that it is as close as it can be to an air gap

whilst giving that liveness.

And that liveness then brings with it, you know, untold amounts of usability improvements

because whenever you're doing most of your interactions now be that onboarding or transactions

or like all of the interactions or most of the interactions are taken on one single device.

There's no longer do you have this headache of, oh right, I've got my phone here and I've

got this other offline device, like, which one do I need to look at, where do I start

the interaction, like we've removed most of those headaches and we are literally just

scratching the surface with what's possible, but those are some of the trade-offs that

we made and why we added in the additional functionality so that we are quote bridging

the air gap essentially, we're doing so with portions that we're not just throwing

portions of the wind and being like, yeah, okay, let's just use, you know, unencrypted

Bluetooth to talk to your phone that anybody can eavesdrop on, like it's very much not

that.

And I get why people do quickly fall into the rabbit hole of, oh, Bluetooth bad.

I had the exact same knee-jerk reaction when Zack and Ken started talking about the

protocol and how prime was going to be architected, but when you actually dig in and we've got

an excellent blog post on this, and when you dig into the technicals, it's really, really

very clever.

And I think it's a great set of trade-offs so that we can finally get that good balance

of, you know, ultimate security whilst making it approachable for 99% of the population.

Yeah, definitely.

We went into massive detail on this, on the show, that Zack you joined, I think it was

about a year ago, we went into exactly how this works and the trade-offs and everything.

I am conscious that we only have an hour today, so we'll see if we get into the technicals,

but I would say maybe for people who are concerned or want to have a look into it, then maybe

we could link that blog post and I can also link the other episode for that.

I'm interested, Seth, from you and your view on this, the fact that it's opened up and

that there's this new operating system and application layer, obviously you're now

with Kake, how are you viewing this and how other companies and other tech can integrate

with this?

Yeah, I mean, for me, it's kind of cool because I've gotten both sides of it.

Like I obviously, I was at foundation during a lot of the building process, not for the

last 18 months, but for a lot of the early journey and deciding what it would look like

and what the core functionality would be.

So I have a deep understanding of the product, but the now as a user who hasn't been following

it as closely over the last year and a half, I'm kind of relearning it, seeing more

things in it up and seeing, especially the form factor in hand, I think makes it just

an extremely useful thing that you could keep with you all the time.

I think like for me, I'm going to treat it a little bit differently than I would, maybe

a passport core or something like that and probably use this one more for like warm

custody, if you will, especially the 2FA, other security aspects of it, or something

I'm going to leave a lot more, but when it comes to like building on top of it, I

think a lot of that goes with that kind of, to me, slightly different use case.

And that I absolutely want other things to be built on it that are Bitcoin specific,

that are our crypto specific, obviously, cake wallet, we're going to build, hopefully

the first app for, for prime, first to enable the air of support and then down the line

to enable the rest of the currencies that we support in cake wallet, because I think

there's no hardware wallet out there that will compete with prime, especially as it

just continues to rapidly iterate on the software side.

So I obviously do want to bring out OS, not quite, not the flex, not the stacks, no, there

is a, as someone who has used everything under the sun, there is nothing that competes

with this right now from a user experience, from a hardware quality perspective.

So I'm, I'm really excited for that, but, but also just kind of like going back to my

roots that were pre crypto, I'm just really excited from it for, for it from a security

perspective, especially things like PGP signing, like 2FA, like phyto keys, especially

phyto keys, because I've never done them because they're a pain in the ass and I hate ubiquies.

But I'm excited to be able to start doing them with prime, and then to see what we can

build out that it's not just phyto money centric, but that's phyto tech centric.

I think that's one of the things that's most exciting to me is this is not just a hardware

wallet.

Like I think we have to reframe our perspective of what prime is and not think of it as

like passport core 2.0, it's, it is not at all.

Yes, it can do everything passport core again, and it will look nicer and it will feel

better doing that.

But that's, that's only the, the very tip of the iceberg in what's possible here today

already.

Long term, this being an open platform that's much easier to build on than something like

a microphone, passport core, etc.

I think that's going to open up a whole, a whole new world of possibilities when it comes

to this.

Yeah, that was, I think one of the things that excited me the most when we first spoke

about this device was like just how much more capable it is to help someone who cares

about their privacy and security, live their life and do the things they need to do.

I think that's something that as you said, because it's an open protocol and people can

build on top, we don't maybe know exactly what's going to be possible in the future.

But the, the UB key like features and things like that are going to be for someone like

me, like really, really useful to have one device where I can do all these things, Zach,

what did you have to think about when doing that in terms of opening this up to, to, to

development to sit on top of the device that you're building?

Was that a simple decision to say like, yeah, this, this can be opened up and everyone

can do what they want with it or like, was that a concern in any way?

Yeah, I mean, a couple of things.

One is, this was a big reason why we wanted to build it that I forgot to mention where

the struggle for wallet developers, just wallet developers, like not even the other stuff

as Seth was mentioning that's more just freedom, tech and security related.

Like the struggle to build stuff for leisure or more specifically like the idea that the

only hardware that allowed you to have any kind of apps restricted the apps to just being

like coins, right?

Like you have, like there's no cake app for leisure.

Like if you use a leisure with cake and you want to use it with Bitcoin and Monero, you

have to install the Bitcoin app on your ledger and the Monero app on your ledger.

And then if you want to be sending stuff in the same, you know, in the same session, let's

say, you have to like open the Bitcoin app, you have to close the Bitcoin app, you have

to open the Monero app, you have to close the Monero app.

Like, so cake can't take its user interface and its logo and all the cool stuff they do

and put it on a ledger.

They can do that for an iPhone, right?

They can do that for an Android phone.

They can do that for like desktop apps and browser extensions.

But when it comes to the hardware wallet side, right, like the cold storage side, they're

stuck with whatever a ledger gives them.

They could help with the Monero app, right, if if ledger did not support Monero or they

can make contributions to the Monero app, right, because it's a MIT code open source.

But they have no control over how it's presented on like the ledger screen.

And it's a really crappy user experience for it to have to switch between these different

coins.

And then people with old ledgers, like they ran out of space and like you only have room

for three apps or like a total mess.

And so that was a huge impetus for us like doing this in the first place.

And we had to do the new operating system because we needed the, well, we didn't have

to.

So I wanted to go the ledger route of making sure that we review all the code in each of

these apps, then we could have done something more conservative because you're basically having

to trust that the apps are not malicious.

And so like apps are open source on ledger, but like ledger has to review the code and

make sure there's no security vulnerabilities because all apps are accessing the same seed

on the device.

So like theoretically, if you had a malicious ledger app, it could expel your seed for the

entire device.

And so that's why it's so well, it's garden.

And when we realized that we said, oh, man, like if we could build something where you

can have apps that we do not have to review, like we as foundation do not have to do a code

review for your app.

And we make sure that the app is unable to access like the master seed on the device.

And it runs in its own sandbox.

Like that opens the door for an entire open app platform where from a, like a freedom

tech perspective, developers can go build whatever they want, right?

Like cake can go build an app with their own cake UI and their cake logo.

And maybe we choose to put them in like the app store, but we don't have to review the

code or anything like that.

And if the cake app was malicious, it can't do anything outside of its sandbox.

And so that's one of the big reasons why we had to do KOS because there was no operating

system we could have used like for a device like this that would allow us to do that.

And so yeah, that was, that was like a huge part of it.

But I thought this SDK would take us a lot longer to do.

But now we have all the AI tools.

And so we're going to be working with cake even before the SDK is out so that they can

be like the first app on the device.

But we will have an SDK out in the next, I don't want to necessarily commit to a timeline

because our track record with that is pretty bad at this point.

But in the, in the first half of this year, I think I'm very confident that we'll have

the SDK out.

And it's going to be so cool.

It's actually going to come with a CLI tool, which has become very popular within the

AI world where you can like one click scaffold an entire KOS app.

And everything is just done from CLI command.

So like you could even buy code your own, you know, KOS app.

And we can and I just figured out and finalized like how the app store is going to work, how

side loading is going to work, how all apps in the app store have to be reproducible.

And our CLI tool will automatically make it.

So they're basically as reproducible as possible from like without the developers are going

to do anything.

And then we actually are going to do like these at test build at test stations on the foundation

side so that if you're installing an app, you know that it is the reproducible open source

app from that specific developers, you know, repo.

And so really cool stuff we're going to be able to do, no one else does it.

And I'm really excited about it.

And I think once we have that SDK out in the coming months, we're just going to try to

onboard as many, you know, developers as possible.

And another thing that we have not yet announced, which we can kind of talk about where might

play into some inside scoop of some manufacturing setbacks.

We have over 1,000 units that we're going to be giving away for free to developers as

part of this developer program.

Oh, that's cool.

That's very cool.

Getting them into the hands so they can have a play.

Yeah, that's the developer units, yep.

That's really cool.

I wonder Q as head of vibes, what do you think of when I think of vibe coding, I think

of you straight away, you must be spinning your wheels and thinking of a billion different

things that you can do now.

Do you know what I haven't taken into the forer yet of trying to vibe code anything for

Qs?

I think I fell into the trap that I fell into six months ago with just general vibe

coding in that it's probably above my pay grade.

But like, if they'll ask a couple of weeks and some of the side tangential tools that

I've built or anything to go by, then maybe it is possible even for a semi-load out like

myself.

As the show's resident, NosterShill, my first forer will probably be into some form of like

insect bunker type thing where you can have your insect keys offline.

That's the first one that springs to mind, but I'm sure the world is our oyster in terms

of what is possible.

And that's one of the most exciting things for me is that we at foundation, like we have

some excellent ideas for things that we're going to be able to do.

We've already started chatting with external teams like cake and the LIGOS team for like

DLC lending and things like that, but like, we are no longer the limiting factor for

what one of our devices can do and that makes me incredibly excited.

There's like now that this device is out there and KOS is open and soon the kind of app

framework will be public.

It's anybody in the world can build one and by anybody, I literally mean anybody now

that we like, exactly, we have these AI tools like you can go and build whatever you want.

If you want it to come through the official app store, which will be accessible through

Envoy, obviously there's going to be some vetting that goes on to make sure that it's secure

and not malicious, but yeah, I'm just so, so excited about what people are going to

build because like we literally have the world as the part of ideas now.

Yeah, it's very exciting, especially now it's like, because you're a hardware company,

you know, you've like, and then you build this and you build the framework and then you

open it up and like the use of this device is going to be exponentially better than if

you've just did things in-house.

That's kind of the whole open source ethos isn't it?

And yeah, I think that's going to be really exciting to see things like, you know, stealth

who we had on last week, you know, tools like that and like integrations with things like

that.

There's so many different billions of different options that will be interesting to see

what happens.

Yeah, I'm very excited.

I, a friend of the show, a very close friend of the show actually messaged me this morning

for it for an idea that's privacy fans will be a big fan of, let's just say.

So I hope that comes into fruition, I'll be doing everything in my power to help bring

that to life.

One other thing I noticed too is like anytime new stuff has been built, I feel like security

ends up falling to like the wayside because it's like, especially in like the Bitcoin or

crypto world, like it was always you had to go build something and then you had to wait

for the hardware wallets to add support.

But then even worse now in the general like new stuff, security really like in the AI

world, right?

Like everyone's installing like stuff on their Mac minis and running everything on their

given everything access on their desktops, you know, on their computers to just give

a plot or whatever full access because like I think I think you want to be able to experiment

and use all the new things and build all this new stuff.

And then like years later, you figure out maybe how to make it secure and if that's

in like the crypto side, maybe you get a hardware wallet support like years later.

Or if it's a new Bitcoin feature, you get that trickling into hardware wallet support

years later.

Or with this AI stuff, we'll probably see some ways to better do like the security related

to, you know, do you give this thing full control of your desktop computer or do you have

something in there to, you know, introduce just better security problem is like there's

never been a hardware platform where you could actually like write apps and just release

them to the hardware instantly.

And so you always end up having to like wait you either like people I've even heard rumors

that I just want to say this is a pure rumor and I don't want to, you know, get in trouble.

But I've heard rumors that like ledger charge money to crypto projects to get like their

coin supported.

I don't think that's even a rumor.

I think that's a known thing, isn't it?

I don't know.

I don't know.

An example of this actually that was interesting to me.

They actually went to the Zcash community and asked for, I believe it was a $250,000 grant

to just build in Gilded Zcash support into ledger.

Oh my God.

Okay.

So I'm not going to get in trouble here.

No, it's not a rumor.

They've done this publicly.

Yep.

So why don't the Zcash guys just want to go build a cool app for themselves?

Why do they need to go beg or pay someone else to do it for them?

It's crazy.

It's antithetical to the freedom movement.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then by the way, it barely works and they have no control over, right?

Like what the UI looks like or the customer experience looks like.

And then an update gets released to the firmware that breaks support for everything,

which is what's happened numerous times even in Bitcoin related stuff over the last few

years.

Cossest has the customers, don't update your ledger to this firmware, don't update your

treasurer to this firmware because they did something that breaks support for the

Cosa app.

And like what a total mess, like shouldn't they be allowed to make their own app and just

manage their own destiny, right, within that.

And so a lot of this comes down to like the principles, right?

If you want to enable, like you want to you want to give everyone the power to control

their own destiny.

And if you don't want them to be like a slave to another company that is able to, you

know, say we're going to, we're going to approve your app, you know, we're going to reject

your app.

We're going to build this.

We're not going to build this.

We're going to break your app, right?

By releasing an update and not even telling you about it.

And then you're scrambling and people could even lose money as well.

And so yeah, that this is like a huge part of all of it.

And it's crazy to me because like so many of these companies are using kind of freedom

tech oriented marketing, but then you look at like the products and it just doesn't match

up.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And obviously you put a huge amount of effort into this operating system and then you

need the right hardware for it to go on to, you need the right form factor, you need

it to be accessible, you need it to be usable for not just the types of people who read

through the guides and spend hours and hours tinkering and messing around, but like anyone.

I've held one of these in my hands a while back.

It felt amazing.

The fact that you have the, the screen on there makes a big difference.

Like what are the things?

Does it open up having that form factor and actually before we go into that?

What was it like?

Building this?

Well, I know some of it was a, was a fucking headache by the sounds of it, but what was

it like building it in America?

Because that's not the norm for people and building it from the ground up.

Like, can you talk about the experience?

Obviously we know there's been these delays and now we're getting them into users hands,

which is awesome.

But for anyone who hasn't followed it, like what, what has this been like for you and the

team?

Yes.

So firstly, I think one is it's actually nice to be able to go over to the factory and

like be there.

So I think it can be very helpful to build things in America from like a hands-on perspective.

You don't have to jump on some plane going to, you know, China or whatever.

So there's that aspect of it.

But I think it's, our approach has changed over this being our third generation device.

We build this device and we design this device very differently to optimize for the pros

and cons of American manufacturing.

So passport, founder's addition and passport core, they take so much more effort to assemble.

Like so many like screws and pieces and all these like assembly steps that have to be

taken in the factory.

And you end up paying a lot higher labor rate in the U.S. and also you don't have people

that want to necessarily sit there like doing tons of manual operations as well as opposed

to maybe like some Asian country, it's just kind of the norm to be doing tons of manual

assembly steps like gluing and screws and all this other stuff.

And so with passport prime, we have a very different process where we get all these sub

assemblies from our actual like vendors and so the process of like screwing the circuit

board into the device, you just put like six screws in, you connect a couple things and

then you, we have an like a $50,000 or $60,000 automatic gluing machine that like jets

epoxy perfectly onto it.

And then you just like put the screen on, put it in the oven for like 15 minutes, comes

out and then you can you know move forward with like provisioning the software and packing

you know doing the pack out.

So we have like a much more streamlined build process, which we did not have before.

And we're like really careful about getting these sub assemblies where like if you look

at our sub assembly for like the aluminum, the glass, the camera lens, the NFC antenna,

like all of this stuff comes as a single piece.

And it doesn't even use like a hardware connector for the NFC antenna, it uses these

two little Pogo pins that just make contact when you stick the board in.

So everything is like designed as much as possible to come together quickly.

And I think that helps a lot with like the US manufacturing.

And if you were like going to a normal like outsourced engineering firm to design this,

they'd probably end up designing it for like China manufacturing.

So if you if you look at how the ledger flex and stacks were made, they were made that

and you they have some videos and stuff up, it's all assembled at Foxconn and Vietnam.

And like you can tell that the design and the engineering of this thing was done for assembly

like at Foxconn.

So it's pretty cool to kind of look at the differences and differences in approach

to optimize for the domestic manufacturing.

Does that mean then the way that you've thought about manufacturing and the assembly line

that if slash when these devices become very popular and it becomes more used by more normal

people that you can scale up quickly or are you always limited by actually getting the

materials and like will there always be a slowing down trying to get the materials

or if you now got things refined to a stage where you know tomorrow like it goes viral

then everyone's like that this thing's fucking amazing like everyone needs one you get

all just through the roof like can you meet that demand.

Yeah, we can scale up now.

Can we get to like ledger size immediately right now of like well they used to do a million

units a year I don't know if they're still doing that.

I don't think we could get to a million units in a year with like the current supply chain

without like scrambling but we could get like real we can get like you know large large numbers

no problem right now and I think we have some great you know vendors that we work with

to source like you know to to make all like the CNC stuff and do these subassemblies and

the subassemblies do take place in China or overseas so but like none of those are security

critical stuff right because the actual circuit boards are assembled here all the stock

KOS is provisioned on the devices here so you're just like hunks of metal and glass and stuff

kind of glued together right are coming from overseas but we have the process now really nice

but it took a while to get there so like one other thing I can say here is we actually

and set those you know this like we had to switch manufacturers in November of last year

so that's one of the reasons why things are really difficult from like you know delay process

not the sole reason right because like it took a long time to get this to market for numerous

reasons primarily I think because of the effort of like the software development but we actually

did a complete move from our manufacturer that we used for all generations of passport previously

you know for for founders mission and core and we we got out of there and we set up a whole new

manufacturer you know a whole new manufacturer a whole new setup dedicated passport prime assembly

lines automated blue machines ovens all this stuff you know it's tried to be as automated and

streamlined as possible we did all that we had to do all that in like December of like this

past December so it's been a little crazy but I'm glad we made this switch because the new

manufacturer is awesome and you know that the quality standards are like through the roof right now

nice we're I don't know how this happens every single week but we're coming close to time now

and I want to make sure that we get to some of the questions I had one more I wanted to jump into

because I think it's something that a lot of people are going to be wondering about is one of the

major changes and can you talk about the security with Bluetooth quantum sounds really fucking cool

but like outside of that what would you tell people about the changes and why would you not be so

concerned using something like this what what have you had to address what have you had to change

because it's not just oh it connects via Bluetooth it's it's very different

yeah like my simple answer would be that there's pros and cons to both like the quantum link Bluetooth

and then the QR air gap but one really cool thing that we do is we actually establish the initial

encryption via an animated QR code scan so you're the envoy mobile app scans an animated QR code

displayed on passport prime screen and that's what it uses to create this post quantum encrypted tunnel

between the devices it's exactly so we do the handshake over QR code so it's almost like you do

the initial handshake in an air gaped way and then once you do that air gaped handshake you create

an encrypted tunnel so we're not like relying on Bluetooth or wireless comms to do the handshake

so so the air like it's an air gaped handshake which then kicks off this post quantum encrypted

tunnel but then secondly the Bluetooth chip is literally a different chip on the circuit board

inside of passport prime and we the the main processor running kos controls the firmware

on the Bluetooth chip so every time kos boots up it checks the firmware version on the Bluetooth

chip and if kos has a newer one it literally overrides the firmware so it has full control over

the firmware of the Bluetooth chip and we write that that's also open source firmware by the way

that's in our github like the the BLE Bluetooth low energy firmware and so our firmware on the

Bluetooth chip it only sends messages to kos that are already quantum linked so if kos gets a

message from the Bluetooth chip that's not signed and a quantum like message it just discards it

and so that's really cool and it's even better than like a normal air gap QR codes is that

means that kos will only accept cryptographically signed messages that come in from the Bluetooth

chip like when you're doing air gap QR codes you can scan anything and it's not human readable

right and passport core right we'll just try to to it'll just try to parse the data in the

animated QR code and it'll try to figure out if it can do something with it but with this it's

only it's only signed messages so yes I mean of course there's potential cons and you know

in risks and everything but I like this protocol so much because of like the initial air gap

handshake and key exchange and then the fact that it's only signed messages and that we literally

control this separate Bluetooth chip on the circuit for it very cool yeah very innovative that

q do you have any listener questions that we can jump into we do yeah we've got one's

pre-submitted and a couple have come through it in through nostril which because it's not linked

up to reach you I can't bring up on screen but the first pre-submitted question came through

this morning via very seamless I think I've got that name right so Zach have the struggles and

delays with prime put you off the idea of building a sovereign phone somebody's been listening to

your back catalogue of podcasts oh no they've I think I'm put off to the idea of a sovereign phone

for other reasons I see someone posted foundations literally cooking I think apples literally

cooking right now and I I don't know how how any company is going to be able to actually compete I

think with them and graphing is already now working with yeah Motorola which which won't be for

anything for a year but we'll you know we'll see right if it comes something cool comes out of it

so what I think is more interesting for foundation is that companion device because one thing we've

talked about a lot internally it is that all of our phones and computers over the next few years

are going to become like all AI like we're literally going to give these AI agents full control

of our of all of our computing devices and I think having this like dedicated offline companion

device that you use for all of your approvals and like all of your security is extremely valuable

as all the phones become like AI and all your you know your computer has become AI so I don't

think we're going to be building a phone anytime soon I think that we will be pushing this passport

prime and kios platform as hard as we can to make it better and better like as time goes by

so will we make new devices of course well are we interested in making a phone honestly like

I'm not really that interested right now good to know a couple of more questions BTC

wrestle is asking in theory could you load all seeds for every wallet into this device and could

it be used as the signer for all of those wallets maybe it's not recommended but you're just wondering

for example so you have 10 wallets you could put all of the seeds into this device and it could

act as a signer for all of them the TLDR is yes absolutely we haven't set an upper limit to my

knowledge on the number of seeds that you can put in the vault app obviously we probably haven't

tested more than 10 just yet but yes that's absolutely possible you just load each one of those

temporarily from the vault app use it to sign and then put the seed back in the vault so to speak

and yeah that's all absolutely possible and some of those features are missing right now the Q

and I think we'll end up coming in like the next main QOS update so like right now the vault app

does not have the ability to import existing seeds and I believe we also do not have the ability

to load a temporary seed from the vault app but I did just accelerate a couple issues on our

backlog one of them is being able to import existing seeds because that's like such an important

feature and then another one I just accelerated is the ability to to scan that QR code export from

Google Authenticator to import all your 2FA codes onto our 2FA app all in one go we're going to have to

you know what we're going to have to do is a little bit further down the line do like a live demo

with some of these features and magic backups and importing keys and all the stuff because I think

it's hard to until you actually see it it's hard to imagine so we have to book that in at some point

yeah I can definitely do that and good call out Zach kind of we made some last-minute changes to

get this thing over the line but everything that we just discussed will be in the next release

or the one after hopefully follow up questions Zach why did you choose a lithium ion battery instead

of life P04 battery I'm not sure if you know what that is or if that makes sense I think that's

like lithium phosphate or something I don't know I think the honest answer to that is we probably

didn't put enough thought into it at all for future devices we'll probably look at doing one of

these newer battery chemistries that that has more power density but we started designing this

device like in the end of 2020 or we started kind of like envisioning at the end of 2022 and then

starting working on the hardware design in early 2023 and we made a lot of component selections

just back you know back then so if I was doing it again now I'd probably look at some of these

newer battery chemistries that offer up to like 50% greater power density and we see that treasure

uses a battery like that of the new treasure save 7 all right nice nice probably the last one we're

going to have time for another one from BTC wrestle says does prime only work with envoy or can it

interact with sparrow or ashigaru etc yes so that's the short of it is that every single bitcoin wallet

that is supported by passport core via QR codes is or SD card right is already supported on

passport prime so you can do QR code signing with sparrow you can use an SD card with adapter or a

USB-C fast drive and move the psbt's back and forth as well with something like sparrow or others

we do not support like native usb what is which one is that called q hwi hwi exactly we don't

support a hardware wallet interface or hwi but we support doing it with psbt files you know

or or QR codes of course as we continue on and we've released sdk in the coming months we hope

and expect that many of these bitcoin wallets especially ones that have more specific like user

interfaces like with multi-sig or other stuff like that we'll end up building native qs apps

but for right now like you know we support all the psbt based stuff with an hour bitcoin app that

ships with a device very nice q is that all the questions we've got for today it is yeah just

as we run up on site yeah um yeah um Seth any final thoughts or questions before I wrap it up

I don't think so don't want to make us run over I know q and zack are run as well um but no

just super excited to see this actually out there obviously it's early days but already in a

in a fantastic state so I'm pumped to use it virtually I'm pumped to build on it it's going to be

I think something that's game-changing in the the hardware wallet slash freedom tech space so

you all have killed it good job q and zack and rest of the team thanks Seth and I absolutely think

we're we're about to send a ton of I'm going to be sending Monday a ton of like developer devices

to a vick to distribute to you guys as well so you guys are going to get a bunch of stuff next week

and I'm really excited to be working with you guys on building the first app for kos likewise

it's going to be a blast hopefully I won't have to touch any ledgers or anything like that uh

moving forward once we get this built out and pumped for that nice well uh Seth thanks for joining

us q and zack I know how much work has gotten to this behind the scenes um sleepless nights and

working weekends and evenings and everything else to make this happen so uh congratulations

getting out of the door it's it's really really cool thanks Max we got to get you yours as well

they'll happen cool come to me he's on the list and just uh just before we sign off uh just

for the listeners viewers um I'm going to be doing a freedom tech Friday over the course of the next

couple of weeks at some point to give you a bit more of a visual demo going through the user interface

and uh showing you what all the different apps look like and all the the different features

within there so I know this one this one was more kind of a behind the scenes with zack but um

stay tuned I'm going to be doing a more visual one over the course of the next couple weeks and

very a bit of alpha but we're also going to be announcing a six week long office hours um style

uh invitation to anybody that's uh wants to hop into our virtual office where I'm going to be doing

six one hour weekly shows um that are live and interactive to go through in a much more detail

for uh all of these different applications so uh stay tuned to uh the foundation socials and

email newsletter to get information on that which should be being announced very soon

thank you for listening to freedom tech Friday to everyone who boosted

ask questions and participated in the show we appreciate you all

make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9am

ESD and 2pm London thanks to Seth Max and Q for keeping it ungovernable

and thank you to cake wallet foundation and my nimbox for keeping the ungovernable misfits going

make sure to check out ungovernable missfits.com to see mr crowns incredible skills and artwork

listen to the other shows in the feed to hear kareem's world class editing skills

thanks to x patriotic for keeping us up to date with boosts xmr chats and sending in topics

john great name and great guy never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news

or continuing to grow the mesh to dell finally a big thanks to the unsung hero our Canadian overlord

short for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the

scenes we love you all stay ungovernable