Today I read this from
@zachxbt: (from
t.me/investigations/355)
"All hardware wallets are complete garbage and I do not advise using them for important tasks like signing transactions or storing funds. Much better to have a separate iPhone with its only purpose being to use as your hardware wallet."
I'd agree - if there were actually a mobile app with BIP39 passphrase support.
Hardware wallets, all of them:
🟢
@Trezor
🟢
@Ledger
🟢
@COLDCARDwallet — most thorough implementation out there
🟢
@KeystoneWallet
🟢
@BitBoxSwiss
Mobile:
🔴
@MetaMask - people asked since 2021. Asked again this past December. Still nothing.
🔴
@TrustWallet
🔴
@Rabby_io - only has it on desktop. Not on mobile.
🟢
@AirGap_it Vault — small Swiss team. Underfunded.
That's the list.
That's the whole problem with the spare-iPhone plan. The thing that makes a hardware wallet actually worth carrying isn't the chip. It's the passphrase. And the moment you swap the hardware for a phone, you lose it.
Here's what everyone's missing.
Your seed phrase is 12 or 24 words. You wrote them down. They're in a safe, or a drawer, or taped behind a painting because you watched a movie once.
But the standard those words come from lets you add one more thing: any word or sentence you want. It's not a password on top of your wallet. It makes a different wallet. Same 24 words, different extra word, completely different money.
So if someone finds your paper, they get nothing. They type in your 24 words, they see an empty account, and they have no way to know there's another one behind it. Not "access denied." Not a locked vault they can lean on you to open. Just nothing there. Nothing to demand, because they can't tell there's anything to demand.
That's the whole point. Everyone worries about hackers. The thing that actually gets you is someone in your house.
You've made that spare phone invisible to the internet. You haven't made it invisible to a person standing in your bedroom. The Ledger you threw out was doing that part.
The code is already in these wallets. The field is right there. They just leave it blank.
Yes, if you forget your extra word your money is gone. That's real. So bury it in advanced settings and make people type it twice. That's an argument for a warning label, not for pretending the feature doesn't exist.
So - mobile wallet providers: please implement BIP39 passphrase support, so people can easily turn our old iPhones and Androids into real crypto wallets. Add air-gapped signing while you're at it, so we never have to connect them to a network at all.
@zachxbt's got the right idea. There's just nothing on mobile to actually do it with.