NFC export for third-party apps?

Developers
1

Dear Foundation team,

first of all, a big thank you and congratulations.
The Prime deserves its name - Design, size, sturdiness, build quality - top notch! Really

Following the channel discussion in topic 1196, a question about NFC.

I want to build a bridge from QR to NFC. The Prime already exports plenty as QR codes; I want to tap that same data onto an NFC target instead of pointing a camera at the screen.

Target: the SeedHammer II.
A Prime that could write NDEF would turn “export to steel” into one tap.

And this goes well beyond seeds. Once the Prime can push arbitrary bytes over NFC, the same tap could back up to metal: nsec keys, passphrases and 25th words, child seeds, WIF and gift-card keys, OTP/2FA recovery codes, password entries, plain notes. Anything the device can already show as a QR could go to steel the same way.

QR scanning is the only outbound channel for third-party apps today, so the ask, two ways it could land:

  1. Open NFC (write) to apps
  2. Or make it OS-level: an “export over NFC” option beside the existing QR export (show QR)

Either solves it.
Mostly I want to ask whether NFC export is on the roadmap in some form or off the table, so I can plan around it.

Thanks again for all your efforts.
Goodspeed

Thanks,
snick

2

Hey @SeedHammer I’m gonna tag in @Georges to provide comment on the feasibility of this one

3

Thanks a lot for the kind words and for the detailed request, this is exactly the kind of feedback we love to get.

Good news: the NDEF write path already exists in KeyOS (it is how KeyCard backups work today), so this is more a permission-policy question than an engineering one. Opening NFC write to third-party apps is now in discussion with the team, and an OS-level “export over NFC” will be discussed as well. I can already say we have plans for some export over NFC.

One practical note for your bridge design: today the Prime writes physical NFC-A / Type 2 tags (NTAG21x class, sub-kilobyte payloads); it does not yet emulate a tag that a reader could pull from.

No promises on timing yet, but I will report back here once we have made a call.

4

Thanks a lot for your positive Answer.

Writing to tags (like Ntag2xx) is perfectly sufficient for us, as the SeedHammer2 handles the rest.

Looking forward to see this happen.

Thanks again and keep up all the good work.

We’ll stay tuned.

Bless

5

It has been approved yesterday by management, as long as it does not compromise user Backup Keycard, so i will add a protection for them, then you will be able to Read/Write any NDEF message in blank Keycard.

I don’t have a exact time for this released, but definitively on my TODO list.

6

This is exactly what I was hoping for,
I appreciate your diligence a lot.
Looking forward and I’ll keep my Eyes open on the next Updates :slight_smile: