The estimated 25,000 Bitcoin 2022 conference attendees will receive a custom non-custodial bitcoin storage card from Arculus, the company said in a Wednesday statement.
The cryptocurrency firm owned by CompoSecure, a leading provider of premium financial payment cards, has partnered with Bitcoin 2022 to bring a user-friendly security solution for BTC storage to all who attend the world’s biggest Bitcoin conference in Miami, Florida, in April next year. The card will be co-branded by Bitcoin 2022 and Arculus, and Whale Pass attendees will receive an exclusive, limited-edition Whale Key card.
“The Arculus Card is a new cold storage product that we are excited to get in the hands of everyone attending the largest Bitcoin event in the world,” David Bailey, CEO of Bitcoin 2022 organizer BTC Media, said in a statement. “BTC works hard to educate our audience on the very best innovation on the market to protect their digital assets, and allow for easier use for the largest community.”
CompoSecure chose to step into the cryptocurrency custody industry with a more familiar approach to both the company’s business model and people’s experience in the financial services industry. The provider of payments cards to household banks and financial institutions adapted its offering into an NFC-enabled bitcoin hardware wallet. The Arculus Key Card allows its users to store their bitcoin holdings in a beginner-friendly card format, which needs to be tapped to the back of the user’s phone to authenticate and authorize a transaction with the private key.
“The Arculus Key Card and Arculus Wallet App work together with a one-of-a-kind 3-factor authentication security solution to make it simple, safe and secure to store, buy, swap, send and receive cryptocurrency,” per the statement.
Private keys are stored encrypted in the Arculus Card’s secure element, and transactions require three steps to authenticate and enable the usage of the private keys for signing a transaction. The app uses the mobile phone’s biometric authentication mechanisms and asks for a user-defined 6-digit PIN, after which the card is ready to be tapped into the phone and complete the transaction.
Contrary to more popular Bitcoin hardware wallets in the industry, however, Arculus has not open-sourced the code of its card or app.