Introducing Hexa Wallet

Hexa app with multiple accounts and seedless distributed backup scheme

There are some great wallets out there but describing them is pretty simple — choose one of the following: ‘too-complex’, ‘custodial’, ‘privacy-leaking’ or ‘not-so-secure’. For advanced users, wallets like Samourai and Wasabi are pioneers in privacy tech. Ledger and Trezor take a security first approach but for offline storage of bitcoins. Custodial wallets like Coinbase offer excellent user experience and but don’t provide users with the ability to control their keys, making them more like a centralised bank. Simple non-custodial wallets, like the Blockchain wallet, are not as secure or as privacy-preserving as they should be. We, at Bithyve, aim to change that with Hexa.

All good apps are essentially a set of tradeoffs

Hexa is an app designed carefully from ground up for the average user. It has the right mix of usability and security while preserving privacy and ownership (self-soveriginity). It achieves this by not focusing on everything and being Bitcoin-only. Reuse of proven open source tech and the tradeoff of features which are not yet ready for mainstream use further helps the goal. Though there is a lot more in the product roadmap that we are excited about, our current focus was to get the foundation right where we double down on security and usability.

The familiar account-based management of funds gives users a comfortable onboarding experience. A Regular account and a Secure account is provided by default, while others can be added based on user needs. Setting up the backup is also super simple with a wizard-like step by step guide.

This simple user interface hides layers of security built into the app.

• Built using the latest security features on both iOS and Android it makes it nearly impossible for anyone to hack into the app.
• The Secure account is 2 of 3 multisig based, which means it needs two-factor authentication to access the fund. So even if someone gets access to your phone and the app, they can’t steal these funds.

• The backup scheme uses a multi-platform, multi-contact, and multi-device approach. Five fragments are created using a cryptographic scheme called Shamir Secret Sharing such that three of them are needed to restore the wallet. Spread across independent and unrelated sources, it makes loss and theft impossible.
• There’s also a Health Check feature that keeps the user updated about the well-being of the backup so that she can take necessary and timely action when needed.

Hexa is a non-custodial wallet, which means that the user holds her own keys and has full control of the funds. This applies to the backup seed as well. At no point does BitHyve have control of the user keys — encrypted or not. The same ideology applies to user privacy. Hexa has been engineered in such a way that it does NOT need any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data, including email or phone number. Any information entered in the app is either stored locally or sent to the users trusted contacts in an encrypted way. Hexa uses its node ‘Radr’ and support for being able to connect to your own node is coming soon.

We are fortunate to have a talented team of engineers at BitHyve who have been working hard for nearly the last twelve months on Hexa. They are very excited to share their work with you all and get feedback.

There are many more exciting things in the product roadmap. You can read more about it or download the SSS white-paper on hexawallet.io. Say hello to the team at hello@bithyve.com or follow us on Twitter @hexawallet.