Pioneering hardware wallet brings enhanced staking to cold storage

Twelve months ago, the total value of cryptocurrency locked in staking programs was barely more than $1 billion. Today, there is $58 billion locked in decentralized finance, or DeFi.

The adoption of DeFi has been a sea change that‘s helped push the crypto industry into the mainstream, but it’s hardly the only one.

Mainstream institutions including MicroStrategy and Tesla have poured billions of dollars into Bitcoin — and some have been buying the dip — while nonfungible tokens have evolved from CryptoKitties and CypherPunks to an artistic medium pulling in millions in bids for a new generation of digital artists like Beeple at famed auction houses like Christie‘s and Sotheby’s.

With a dramatic further disruption of existing industries like music, sports and property starting to take shape, NFTs look to be set for substantial continued growth in years to come.

More broadly, the blockchain industry grew 639% year over year, according to DappRadar‘s Dapp Industry Report for the first quarter of 2021. It’s now reaching 458,000 daily unique active wallets, the report found. With new users and investors come new risks, as the more than $100 million stolen from crypto users during Q1 2021 — mostly in the area of decentralized finance (DeFi) — shows.

With all those changes and all those wallets, the technology cannot stand still, particularly when it comes to wallet security and functionality.

Staking security

Between those factors and a growing number of requests from its community, CoolBitX has unveiled a new and upgraded version of its CoolWallet, which first introduced Bluetooth technology in a hardware crypto wallet in 2016 and followed it up with its multi-asset supporting CoolWallet S in 2018.

CoolWallet Pro adds more supported coins (including Polkadot, Cosmos and Tron) and advances in military-grade security to not only offer a more secure hardware wallet but also to allow more advanced users greater flexibility and options in how they put their stored assets to work — generating passive income in the form of straightforward coin staking as well as more risky endeavors such as DeFi staking and liquidity mining, which could potentially yield exponentially higher returns.

The latest addition to the CoolWallet line adds an upgraded CC EAL 6+ military-grade hardware security chip (up from 5+ in the model S) that permanently locks away the wallets private key. It offers a number of authentication mechanisms, including biometric identity verification, in addition to PIN code and physical offline verification steps.

But the real story is the CoolWallet Pros addition of substantial staking support features, CoolBitX CEO Michael Ou said.

Pointing to “the proliferation of innovative financial products and services such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS), DeFi and DApps that are creating compelling new use cases for cryptocurrency ownership and redefining the way we view digital assets,” Ou explained that advanced industry participants needed more than an update.

“Our CoolWallet community has demanded a bridge to participate in this new economy, that matches and even improves the security and convenience they are used to with CoolWallet S.”

To make the CoolWallet Pro a reality during a “historic period of digital asset adoption” meant working with a number of partners, most notably staking infrastructure firm Staked, “to allow users to spend, lend, borrow, and invest their tokens at their leisure anytime, anywhere, thus maximizing the value of their crypto assets,” Ou added.

DeFi built in

Still credit card-sized like the HODLer-focused CoolWallet S, the CoolWallet Pro is waterproof and uses patented compression technology to remain tamper-proof. It uses encrypted Bluetooth (military-grade AES-256 standard) to connect to the CoolBitX App.

From there, CoolWallet Pro users can connect to the app to buy, sell, and trade Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Ripple, Stellar, Binance Coin, Tether, and all ERC-20 tokens. It adds three new cryptocurrencies for staking: Cosmos, Polkadot and Tron — with Binance Smart Chain, Kusama, Eth2 and Cardano to come.

The staking process is simple. Choose a cryptocurrency to stake, then select an address and delegated proof-of-stake validator. An estimated reward will appear if available, and if its satisfactory, verify the transaction with your CoolWallet Pro card. You can manage the stake by either claiming rewards or unstaking your coins.

Another option is X-Saving, which deposits Tether stablecoins and then distributes it to DeFi and CeFi options. Separate KYC identity confirmation is required.

The app will add integrated DeFi, DApp, and NFT support in Q3. Down the line, in-app Web 3.0 WebView integration, and layer-two scaling support are also planned.

Regarding NFT support, CoolWallet plans to integrate the leading current decentralized NFT marketplaces in the app to allow its users to trade, bid and enjoy their NFTs within the app. Users will even be able to create new NFTs with CoolWallet by utilizing an integrated NFT minting DApp.

For DeFi, CoolWallet Pro won't just merely connect users to the vast ecosystem of DeFi projects, but establish a much deeper integration with DeFi aggregators. This will help CoolWallet Pro users to earn passive income from complex DeFi protocols with ease, and without the need for technical knowledge.