Satochip’s Bastien Taquet: no screen, no battery, no KYC

I asked a man who sells hardware wallets how his company stays credible, and his answer, in effect, was that I do not have to buy one from him. Bastien Taquet co-founded Satochip, the Belgian company behind a smartcard wallet that costs 25 euros and has neither a battery nor a screen. Buy a blank Java card anywhere, he told me, in cash if you like, and load the open-source code yourself. It is the least salesy pitch I have heard at a crypto event this year, and it made me check every other claim he made.

The full conversation runs eleven minutes.

Why Bastien Taquet of Satochip says open source is the only credible kind

The event he flew in for that morning is a privacy conference, so I opened with the question a privacy audience would ask a hardware vendor: how do you prove you are not the weak link? His answer started with the code.

we choose the open source way to be credible because in security, there is no way to hide things to people

Bastien Taquet, co-founder, Satochip

if you want to store your secrets, to store your seeds into a secure element, it has to be open source. Otherwise, you don’t know how the hardware works.

Bastien Taquet

The wallet applet sits on GitHub under the name SatochipApplet, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, and it describes itself as a Java Card applet implementing a cryptocurrency hardware wallet with full BIP32 and BIP39 support. The same repository lists the software it plugs into: Satochip builds of Electrum for Bitcoin and Litecoin, Electron Cash, a MetaMask fork called Satomask, and a MyEtherWallet fork. Sparrow Wallet features in the company’s own tutorial. None of that proves the chip is flawless. It does mean the part you are trusting can be read by anyone who cares to, which is the narrower version of his claim, and the one that survives.

Then he said the thing that made the interview worth publishing. The hardware is a commodity, and the commodity is the point.

if you want to be completely anonymous, completely clean when dealing with the purchase of your devices, you can do that. You buy a blank Java card online, you don’t have to do a KYC, you can buy even in cash, and then you can load the code yourself, because everything we are doing is open source.

Bastien Taquet

Think about what that does to the usual hardware wallet purchase. Every mainstream device is bought from a vendor or a reseller who ships to a name and an address, and that record is a target: Ledger’s 2020 e-commerce database leak put roughly 270,000 customer names and home addresses online, without touching a single wallet, and the phishing that followed continued for years. Taquet’s version removes the vendor from the chain. Satochip itself lists a blank Java card for do-it-yourself projects at 25 euros, the same list price as the finished product, and the loading tools are in the same public repositories. Two honest qualifications. No hardware wallet vendor asks for identity checks at the till, so the point is not that Satochip skips a rule others follow; it is that a compatible card from any third party, loaded with public code, leaves no record with the wallet maker at all. And I would not call the result completely anonymous, since a card ordered online still has a delivery address and a payment trail; a cash purchase from a third party, plus the command-line work of loading the applet, is the only route that earns the word. But the route exists, the company documents it, and it is the opposite of a lock-in.

Self-custody is not for everyone, and he says so

I put it to him that most people still believe an exchange is where crypto lives. I expected the standard lecture. He gave me a concession instead.

you don’t have to force people to be self-custody if they don’t want to or if they don’t need to, because self-custody is also a matter of thinking: if I want to own my money, if I want to be sovereign about what I’m holding, it’s important to be self-custody

Bastien Taquet

people that just want to interact with cryptocurrencies from time to time, exchange might be a solution, even if I don’t recommend it

Bastien Taquet

That is a hardware wallet co-founder telling a camera that some of his potential customers should not bother. The qualification at the end is where he stops selling and starts describing, and it is the most useful minute of the conversation for a reader deciding what to do with a few hundred euros of coins. Self-custody is a responsibility before it is a product. If you are not going to do the homework, an account at a regulated venue with real recourse may lose you less than a seed phrase written on a napkin.

His talk on stage that afternoon was about exactly that homework, and he was frank about how much of it there is.

being able to be self-custody requires you to have a lot of common sense, because you need to deal with a lot of important stuff, including the PIN code of the device, including the seed phrase

Bastien Taquet

Lose the seed phrase and the coins are gone, whichever vendor’s card or stick you bought. That has been true since the first hardware wallets shipped, and no form factor changes it. What Satochip changes is the shape of the thing you have to keep alive.

A wallet that looks like a bank card

Asked what his company is doing about the onboarding problem, he answered with a design brief rather than a feature list.

if you give to someone a geeky hardware that needs to be powered, paired with Bluetooth, paired with a mobile application, you lose half of your audience

Bastien Taquet

we choose a smart card. It just look like a bank card, it’s NFC capable, so it’s really easy to use for newcomers.

Bastien Taquet

“Half of your audience” is a figure of speech, not a measurement, and I am quoting it as one. The design claim behind it is real enough. The card has no battery to charge and no firmware update prompt to click through; you hold it against an NFC phone or slot it into a 19.99 euro reader, enter a PIN of four to sixteen characters, and the card signs. Satochip’s product page says the card locks after several wrong PIN attempts and that it supports more than a thousand coins and tokens, which in practice means Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and the EVM chains through the wallets listed above.

Twenty-five euros is the number that will move people. At the time of writing, Ledger’s Nano S Plus and Trezor’s Safe 3 both list at about 79 euros, so the card is roughly a third of the entry price for the best known screened devices, and it lowers the cost of a first honest attempt at self-custody to the price of a round of drinks. Whether it lowers it enough is the adoption question he took to the stage, and neither of us had a number for the answer.

No battery, no screen

I asked how a company this small stays ahead of the threats a privacy audience worries about, and I named quantum computing and AI. His answer was that Satochip stays ahead by carrying less: the code on the card is deliberately limited, with what he called no fancy functionality, and he explained why.

we saw recently that with a powerful AI model we can break any kind of codes, so to avoid any rush on patching the codes we keep it minimal

Bastien Taquet

The same discipline is his case against the hardware everyone else ships.

the more you put the more weak is the device. If you have a battery, for example, it’s not long-lasting. In five years, your device might not work at all. If you put a screen, you also might have a problem.

Bastien Taquet

Here is the argument he did not have to answer on camera, because I did not press it hard enough, and the reader should. A screen on a hardware wallet exists so that you can read the destination address and the amount on a device your laptop cannot alter. Take the screen away and you are reading them on the laptop or the phone, which is exactly the machine an attacker targets, whether with malware or with a swapped address on a phishing page. Satochip’s answer, according to its own product page, is an optional second-factor app that asks you to confirm the transaction on your mobile, so a compromised computer would also need a compromised phone. That is a reasonable design for a 25 euro card, and whether that app shows you the full destination address and amount before you approve is the question to settle before you rely on it. It is not the same guarantee a screen gives you, and anyone moving serious money should understand the difference before choosing on price.

Learn it the way your parents learned online banking

I closed by asking for the one thing a person should take away before buying any hardware wallet. He did not name his product.

they should learn how Bitcoin works. They should learn how the technology works.

Bastien Taquet

the bank system asked our parents to use internet to make bank transactions and they were like I don’t like to go online to do a bank transaction, now we are paying with our phone

Bastien Taquet

The analogy is loose on dates, since online banking in the Low Countries is a good deal older than the decade he gave it, and it is right about the shape of the curve. Every payment technology that is now invisible was once a chore people resented, and the chore was learning what the thing did. His job, as he describes it, is to shrink that chore rather than to abolish it.

The mechanism to watch is whether the card form factor wins the next wave of first-time buyers, in Europe and in the United States, where Satochip announced a bridge round to build a local presence, according to Bitcoin Magazine’s report of 14 April 2026. The amount was not disclosed, the money came from existing shareholders and new business angels, and Taquet’s quote in that announcement called the American market critical for the future of digital asset security. A company that sells a 25 euro card and tells you how to avoid buying it has an unusual business model, and the next year will show whether it scales.

Frequently asked questions

Is a hardware wallet without a screen safe?

It is safe against a different set of attacks. The private key never leaves the card’s secure element and the card signs only after a PIN, so malware cannot copy the key. What a screenless card cannot do is show you the address and amount independently of your computer. Satochip offers an optional second-factor app on your phone to confirm each transaction; a device with a screen lets you verify on the device itself. For small holdings the card is a sensible trade. For large ones, understand that difference before you decide.

Can you buy a hardware wallet without KYC?

Taquet’s point is that Satochip runs on standard Java Card smartcards and publishes its code, so a blank card bought from any seller, including for cash, can be loaded with the wallet applet. Satochip’s own shop lists blank cards for do-it-yourself use at 25 euros. Buying the finished card from the company or a reseller still involves a delivery address and a payment, like any online order.

What does a Satochip cost and what do you need to use it?

The card was 25 euros in Satochip’s shop on 4 September 2026, as were the Satodime bearer card and the Seedkeeper backup card. You need an NFC-capable phone or a chip card reader, which the shop sells for 19.99 euros, plus one of the supported wallets such as Sparrow or the Satochip build of Electrum. There is no battery to charge.

Is self-custody the right choice for everyone?

Not according to the man selling the wallets. Taquet said on camera that people who only touch crypto occasionally may be better served by an exchange, even though he does not recommend it, because holding your own keys means managing a PIN and a seed phrase with no one to call if you lose them. The honest test is whether you will do that homework. If not, the cheaper card does not help you.

Read next

• Casey Ford of Nym on why your free VPN behaves like malware, recorded in the same studio a few hours earlier.
• Our preview of Common S3nse 2026, for what the two days in De Hallen were built to argue.
• The Common S3nse speaker line-up, where Taquet appears alongside the other privacy builders on stage.
• The SatochipApplet repository on GitHub, the AGPL v3 code he was describing, with the list of compatible wallets.
• Satochip’s product page, the source for the PIN behaviour, the second-factor app and the secure element claim.
• Satochip’s shop, where the 25 euro prices and the blank do-it-yourself card were checked on 4 September 2026.
• Bitcoin Magazine on Satochip’s April 2026 bridge round, with Taquet’s quote on the American market.

Recorded at Common S3nse 2026, De Hallen Studio’s, Amsterdam, on 4 September 2026, during Cypherpunk Week. Quotes are verbatim from the recording with filler removed. Cryptofocus is a media partner of Common S3nse. Nothing here is financial advice.