CoolBitX launched in early 2014, ready to change the world. The crypto community experiences a devastating blow just a week later when the popular crypto exchange, Mt. Gox, is breached by hackers with losses valued at over $450 million. This proved that online hot wallets were not as secure as they seemed. As a result, this caused many crypto users to start looking for ways to better protect themselves from these types of attacks. Cold, offline storage was their only option and this is where we saw our opportunity.
At the time, the only cold storage options were USB hardware wallets, which were great, however, we felt that they did come with some drawbacks. They were clunky, required a computer connection, not very user-friendly, and were designed to be hidden somewhere at home. They were also vulnerable to supply-chain attacks where criminals could potentially tamper with the devices before getting into the hands of the customer.
Our solution was to create a wallet that was not only secure, but also very portable and user-friendly. Built on the same technology that Smart Displayer had perfected, we introduced a wafer-thin, credit card-sized cold wallet that was highly secure, durable and convenient to use.