1. What are we trying to solve?
The birth and flourish of Bitcoin have opened up a new world with high transparency, fluidity and immense imagination of new orders. Based on incomplete statistics, there are over 40 million active users exchanging values throughout the blockchain every day. Yet this is merely less than 1% of the total 4 billion internet users. To empower a greater future of blockchain ecosystem, adoption becomes the key.
When we look around, there are still many problems hindering normal people from entering the crypto world. One of the biggest obstacles lies in crypto custody:
1) Fragile asset security
According to conservative research, the cumulative lost in crypto hack has exceeded $1 billion. Crypto users have gradually lost their trust in centralized exchanges or platforms and started to look for other options.
2) Terrible user experience
Among all the solutions, cold storage has gained growing attention and popularity. But, nonetheless, there are only a few available options on the market. Most of the existing solutions are cumbersome to use and even cause more confusions among crypto beginners.
3) Expensive price point
Most of the existing cold storage solutions are costly, with retail price more than $70, some even up to $700! Many crypto users have to think twice in front of the price tag.
With these problems, crypto users are facing the dilemma between “the simple-to-use but not secure enough hot storage” and “the difficult-to-learn yet secure cold storage”. This is ridiculous because users should not compromise between security and easiness. This situation needs to be changed.
2. What is our mission?
Being an active advocate of blockchain technologies, SafePal aims to provide the most secure and user-friendly crypto custody solution for the masses.
| A strong team behind SafePal
SafePal is built by a group of experts with over 15 years of experiences in hardware, software, and security.
The core team members used to work in leading tech & financial giants including Tencent, Samsung, Huawei, and China Merchant Bank, with a profound understanding of how to build a reliable solution of strong security and smooth user experience. We used to build a successful hardware solution that serves nearly one million users global wide.
| Our product philosophy
– Security is our lifeline. It is the 1 before many zeroes. It should take up the major part of our energy into building the highest security standard.
– Users, nevertheless, should not compromise between security and easiness. It is our job to make the product secure to trust in, and easy to operate at the same time.
– The entering price point of the product should be lower, enabling more users to access the blockchain ecosystem in an easier way.
These philosophies lead to the final launch of SafePal S1, our first hardware wallet.
3. Why $39? Is the SafePal S1 wallet really secure?
Honestly, this is the most frequently asked question we received from the crypto community, hence I think it is worth mentioning here.
The key answer to this question is that a lower price doesn’t necessarily mean weaker security. If you think of Amazon Echo Dot selling at $24.99 and Google Home Mini at $25, you will soon find out that the stereotype of always relating product quality with the price isn’t 100% true.
In this article, we are happy to share our thoughts about the pricing strategy and the long-term vision behind it.
| With the $39 price point, we are not compromising any product security.
SafePal S1 hardware wallet is built by a specialized team, with the cutting-edge technologies, including the design, development, and production of the hardware, software, and security defense system (You can learn more about the SafePal S1 security features here.).
Among the SafePal team, we have:
– Security experts who were the key members of building the anti-cyber-attack system of Huawei mobile devices, and the senior security architect of Tencent.
– Sophisticated developer who used to be the leading architect of QQ Space, a Tencent social product with MAU over 532 million
– An experienced operational team who has been working on massively adopted platform like QQ and Wechat for 7 years
– Hardware leader who has been working on hardware design and development for over a decade, and successfully launched a hardware product that is now serving nearly one million users across the continents
– QA expert who used to lead the quality control team in Samsung Smartphone Business Group.
| With a more reasonable price point, we are looking to empower a wider adoption of the blockchain ecosystem
We won’t deny that SafePal is a business entity and needs healthy sustainability from its business model, but we value something else more in the long term. Being firm believers of blockchain technologies, we contribute all our energy into building a more secure, transparent and accessible product that enables the majority to access our services and blockchain ecosystem. Meanwhile, a reasonable and affordable price point is one of the key factors realizing this potential, thus enabling wider adoption of blockchain technologies in the long run. This is also one of the reasons why Binance Labs chose us to become the first hardware wallet portfolio in Binance ecosystem(Learn more about it here).
SafePal the company was founded in January 2018, and SafePal S1 the product was launched in late May 2019. Meanwhile, we spent a whole year crafting, improving and iterating every detail of the product.
More importantly, we have gone way beyond that. We value every feedback from our community. To always keep updated with changing user needs, we have built multiple tunnels enabling the community to share their voices with us, including the currency support application, product feature request mechanism, and a SafePal changelog. Welcome to share yours with us anytime!
