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The Belgian startup Satochip has launched a new product: Satodime, a smart card that can hold bitcoin. The card is of the same size as an ordinary credit card and can be used to gift bitcoin to anyone.
Satodime can store bitcoin physically which makes the concept of bitcoin more relatable. It’s a bearer instrument, as the card can easily be handed from one person to another.
“My mother didn’t understand bitcoin because she couldn’t touch them” – explains Bastien Taquet, CBO of Satochip. “So we designed a smart card to store bitcoin in a highly secure and very easy to use way.”
The card can be passed from hand to hand and the cardholder can easily check the balance on the card as well as its status: locked or unlocked.
“When the card holder wants to retrieve the bitcoin stored on it, all he needs is a simple action to unlock the vault,” the Satochip team added.
Like your bank card, the Satodime card allows you to create virtual safes (or accounts). Each safe is associated with a bitcoin wallet.
The public information, such as the wallet address, is visible and accessible to the cardholder which allows users to load the gift card with BTC themselves.
Sensitive information, such as the private key to retrieve funds, is hidden from the user and protected within the smart card.
How Satodime works
The satodime card gets connected with your phone via NFC or by using a standard card reader. Then you can seal, load and verify which means:
- seal – create a new security vault
- load – top up bitcoin in the new vault
- verify – see the balance and the status of your vault
- Sealed – meaning no one knows the private key
- Unsealed – meaning the private key has been revealed to someone
To retrieve the funds on the card, users will need to unseal the vault to be able to send a transaction. Once the vault is created, sealed and loaded, it’s a fairly secure way to keep bitcoin but should not be used for larger sums or life savings.
Other than comparable single use bearer devices such as Opendime, the Satodime tool allows to retrieve the private key of the wallet on your Satodime. It is possible to have a backup of the private keys and thereby recover funds in case the card gets lost.
A great way to gift Bitcoin
The Satodime has many different applications and offers a variety of ways to make use of its features
You can use it to exchange bitcoin physically, hand to hand, for example in a situation where you don’t have any internet connection, or access to your normal phone wallet. If you lost your purse with all your credit cards, perhaps your Satodime in your backpack could easily be traded for cash to get you home safely.
Since the Satodime works like any other wallet (it’s unhosted and non-custodial just like your purse in your pocket) it would allow KYC-free transfer of funds during a trade. This means the Satodime brings full privacy protection with it and you don’t have to upload your passport to another guy’s computer to use it.
It also makes bitcoin even more accessible which is very helpful to onboard beginners. Many new bitcoin users struggle to open an exchange account or install a wallet or cold storage setup. Even though some of these skills might be seen as unavoidable to obtain, the Satodime is a great entry to make bitcoin ownership not just simple but also easy.
The card can also be used as cold storage device although you might want to keep sums rather small until more peer review by security experts and whitehackers has been conducted.
The best way to make use of Satodime is most likely the option to use it as a gift. Offer bitcoin to friends and family to start educating them about the power of bitcoin. Or give it to a nephew, niece, first-borns, etc., for their birthday. Or how about a wedding gift or company gift? Think about the impact you leave when you send a cool looking bitcoin card to your new client.
There are many interesting ways you can utilize the Satodime and it’s up to the users to find out how they like to use it.
Make Your Own Satodime
Satodime offers a wide range of branded cards and special editions such as “Pepedime” featuring a rare Pepe design to honor the first ever NFT created on the bitcoin blockchain, or the Ben Arc release with the head of Ben Arc, a virtuous Lighting open source developer and maker.
Gift bitcoin to your family, friends or yourself and customize it as you like. Users can let their imagination run wild to create unique cards.
Open Source and Community Driven
A great feature of Satodime as well as the complete range of products created by Satochip is the fact that all their code is open source. This allows users to verify if the code executes as promised and let other experts peer review the code. This adds safety as bugs or possible attack vectors can be discovered before it’s too late.
On top of that, the open source movement is a fantastic driver of innovation which allows the Satochip community to constantly find new innovative ways to improve their products and use the creativity and intelligence of the crowd to create awesome features.
More information on the official website of the project: https://satodime.io
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