SatoshiLabs produces the Trezor One — the first hardware wallet ever shipped

NOV 01 2013 · 12:00

Video: Bitcoin Trezor Crowdfunding Video Date: 2013-01-01 · Type: primitive · Hub: prague · Tags: prague, hardware-wallet, trezor, satoshilabs, self-custody, bitcoin, brmlab, open-source The question of how to hold bitcoin without trusting anyone was solved, for the first time, in a Prague hackerspace. Marek "Slush" Palatinus had already built the first Bitcoin mining pool — Slush Pool, launched in late 2010, the model that every subsequent pooled-mining operation would follow. Pavol "Stick" Rusnak had arrived at brmlab, Prague's foundational hackerspace at Bubenská 1 in Holešovice, through the Czech hacker scene. The two met at brmlab in 2011 and began prototyping a dedicated hardware device for storing private keys offline — a cold-storage solution that didn't require trusting a software wallet, an exchange, or a custodian. The prototype ran through 2012. **SatoshiLabs** was formally founded in Prague in 2013 by Palatinus, Rusnak, and Alena Vránová. The **Trezor One** — a small, button-equipped device that could sign Bitcoin transactions without the private key ever touching an internet-connected computer — shipped in 2014, making it the first commercially produced hardware wallet. The design philosophy was security through minimalism and transparency: the firmware is open source, the cryptographic operations are simple enough to audit, and the adversarial model is a compromised computer rather than a compromised device. The Trezor One's arrival coincided almost exactly with the Mt. Gox collapse in February 2014, which illustrated, catastrophically, what happened when you trusted an exchange with your keys. The hardware wallet market that Trezor created — soon joined by Ledger (Paris, 2014) and later by Coldcard (Toronto), Foundation Devices (Boston), and others — is now the primary self-custody infrastructure for retail Bitcoin and Ethereum holders. The fact that it was built in Prague, at brmlab, by people who were part of the same social network as the ztohoven collective and the founders of Paralelní Polis, is not coincidental. The hardware wallet is applied cryptoanarchism: a device that makes 'not your keys, not your coins' into something a non-technical person can actually do. Facts • Marek 'Slush' Palatinus launched Slush Pool (first Bitcoin mining pool) in late 2010 • Palatinus and Rusnak met at brmlab hackerspace, Bubenská 1, Praha 7 • SatoshiLabs founded Prague 2013; Trezor One shipped 2014 • First commercially produced hardware wallet in history • Firmware is open source; Trezor Suite software also open source • General Bytes, also Prague-based, became one of the largest Bitcoin ATM manufacturers globally Primary Documents • SatoshiLabs / Trezor official site — https://trezor.io/