Passport Prime: Altcoin Support

Passport Prime
1

Hey,
I can see that Prime will support Cake wallet, does it mean that i could use altcoins available on Cake Wallet?

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Yes. Foundation will never work on anything that is not bitcoin only, but Passport Prime is a platform, and builders can build whatever they want. As this is an Open source permissionless platform, anyone can build anything they want, and that includes altcoin support.

Think of Passport Prime as an iPhone - we build the hardware, and will ship with some in-house first party apps, but anyone can build any apps and you will be able to install them on your Prime. As the builders of the operating system we made sure that every app runs sandboxed and their permissions are limited and very controlled to avoid malicious apps from getting any info from other apps, so we do define some rules for apps to be able to run, but that’s pretty much it. Altcoin developers can develop altcoin apps and users will be able to install them on Prime if they want to. And that includes Cake wallet :wink:

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3

Very similar to Ledger, interesting.

4

Similar in the sense that we are building a platform - different in the sense that:

  1. We will build it FOSS and permissionless, and therefore:
    1.1 We will not charge developers for putting their apps in our catalogue, unlike Ledger
    1.2 Developers won’t have to ask for permission - they can bypass us all along and offer the app on their website for people to download and install on their Prime devices
  2. We will build a platform for apps, not coins. This means that the cake wallet team will build a monero app, with their interface, their logos, their colors and the UX they want, unlike Ledger, where teams work to add coins to the Ledger UX.
  3. We will build it with security in mind. Unlike Ledger “apps”, our apps won’t have access to the master seed and their control over the main OS will be very granularly controlled by the OS, as apps will be running in sandboxed environments. This is also why Ledger needs to have dedicated teams to verify that the submitted apps are not malicious, because all apps can access the main seed. Apps in KeyOS can request a hardened child key to be used, but that’s about it.
  4. We will not have dedicated teams to review apps overall - although we might review apps here and there to put them in our Envoy catalogue, our team’s effort will be focused in making Passport Prime, KeyOS and our Bitcoin products better, instead of systematically having to spend time reviewing what other devs submit.

So, as you can see, the approach is very different in many ways, even though at first glance they might look similar. If you have the time, I’d encourage you to listen to these podcasts where this is discussed in great detail.

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5

Thanks for expanding on the notion that it’s similar to Ledger (I still think it is in many ways and that’s not necessarily a bad thing).

Going to stick with my passport 2 for now, not enough of a power user to justify the purchase. I prefer the air gapped nature of my P2.

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6

Probably a silly question, but is there going to be a verification process to prevent any malicious apps from being integrated?

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The main line of defense will be KeyOS, the operating system we built. KeyOS will make Passport Prime run apps fully sandboxed, so they won’t have full access to everything outside that sandbox. They will be able to request certain information from the OS, like a hardened child seed of the master private key for example, but they will never be able to see the master private key, regardless of how malicious the app is. The design of the OS will just prevent how malicious an app can be.

That being said, we will have a curated list of apps that you will be able to install from within Envoy, and we will review every update that goes into these apps. However, as we build a permissionless OS, people will be able to produce apps outside our control, and users will be able to download and install them from the internet like you can download and install an apk from outside the app store. Of course, we don’t have any control over this, so as usual, only download apps from sources you trust, or apps whose code you can verify yourself.

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There was also a security audit planned by a 3rd party for keyOS right? The security of the OS will really be critical for this to work.

Love what i’m seeing so far, ordered one at launch

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