Your Old Game Boy Can Now Be Turned Into a Bitcoin and Ethereum Hardware Wallet

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Craving both 90s nostalgia and icy crypto storage? A small team of developers at crypto startup Keyp revamps the original Nintendo Game Boy handheld consoles and optimizes them for storing cryptocurrency offline, turning the once-popular handheld into a crypto hardware wallet called Game Wallet. .

But the Game Wallet isn’t just a state-of-the-art hardware wallet with a Game Boy console shell. In fact, the Game Wallet is far from a gimmick, an all-new Game Boy game cartridge that actually uses gamification to generate user seed phrases through random quests and interactions with unnamed characters. playables (NPCs).

Once configured, the gaming wallet will be able to store any cryptocurrency using BIP-32 seed phrases, which means it can store coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum at launch. Its software will also be open source and accessible to everyone to create their own implementation, if desired.

Keyp founder Joseph Schiarizzi told Decrypt that the wallets gaming experience will be like Pokémon.

Our main goal at Keyp is to make Web3 accessible and safe for everyone with tools like social logins and additional security layers for wallets,” Schiarizzi said. “Game Wallet is a fun project. [and] extension of it. »

While the Game Wallet has been in development since January, Keyp’s nine-person team believes the recent controversy surrounding Ledgers’ new recovery service means a truly offline storage solution is needed. Game Wallet advertises itself as an offline storage option that promises no firmware updates.

With all the drama surrounding the recent update to the Ledger hardware wallet, we realized the need for truly offline cold storage that minimizes trust, Keyp co-founder Sascha Mombartz wrote on a page. of Game Wallet product.

What started as a fun idea now seems like a really big product,” added Mombartz. “Trusting the supply chain for new security devices can be scary because we don’t know who messed up a device, but I know exactly where the Game Boy has been on my shelf for 20 years.”

The Game Wallet doesn’t yet have an official release date, but Schiarizzi told Decrypt that the company plans to open preorders soon and is aiming for a summer rollout, with the exception of supply chain and/or technical obstacles.

This isn’t the first time crypto enthusiasts have encrypted the Game Boy, however. Two years ago, a pseudonymous computer security researcher turned the handheld into a bitcoin mining device, albeit a very slow one.

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