Trezor One: One of the most trusted hardware wallets in the world

4 min readFeb 15, 2019

I couldn’t avoid talking about one of the oldest and most simple wallets on the market. The Trezor One from Satoshi Labs is a best-seller.

It uses simple and secure solutions like pin codes and passphrases to secure your coins on cold storage.

This wallet is so popular that the company discovered counterfeit devices sold by unknown vendors. A good reason to be very cautious and buy these wallets on the official website or from authorized retailers.

First impressions

The size of the package really surprised me. It’s quite small and very thin. It literally fits inside a small padded enveloppe.

It is also very light and you don’t expect the device to be big.

One important detail you need to pay attention to, is the hologram seals closing the box. They absolutely have to be authentic and uncut so the device inside can be trusted. If you received your box in a different condition, you would need to contact the company and not use the wallet.

This is well explained on the “before you start” section of the website.

The box includes:

Trezor One Wallet
usb power cord
“Getting started” guide
2 recovery notes
ribbon
4 stickers

How does it work?

Technically, it’s very simple: Your seed generates a wallet and the key to unlock it, is your Trezor device which is protected by a pin code.

In order to increase the security level and avoid to get hacked by someone who would have physically access to your computer and Trezor, you can set up a passphrase.

If you use passphrases, each passphrase generates a separate wallet. If you use two passphrases, you have three wallets in total — the two passphrases, and the empty passphrase.

The most popular coins are supported. Except XRP, XMR, ADA, TRX, EOS. You can find the whole list here.

Starting with the wallet

The first thing you have to do once you get your Trezor One is to set it up. You can follow the instructions here. It is very clear and easy to do.

Receiving funds

1) After opening this page on your Chrome browser and connecting your wallet to your computer, you will be asked to enter your pin code.

Then, you will have access to your device dashboard.

2) Choose the crypto you would like to send to someone. I decided to send Ethereum. In this particular case, you have to connect to a client-side interface supporting ETH Blockchain (MyEtherWallet or MyCrypto).

Choose one, follow the instructions and get your ETH address.

Sending funds

Sending ETH is the inverse process. You have to connect on MyEtherWallet (or MyCrypto) and fill the blank spaces with the recipent address and the amount to send.

Of course, you can also choose the Gas amount to process the transaction.

Note: if you want to send/receive another coin integrating wallets on the Trezor software, the whole process is easier since you only have to use the Trezor interface.

This example shows a concrete example of a supported coin without direct wallet integration.

Please note that a beta version integrating a native interface for Ethereum (and ERC20 tokens) is currently being tested.

Conclusions

This small hardware wallet is very simple and a direct challenger of the ledger Nano S.

Available for 69 EUR (excl. VAT), it is a bit more expensive than the Nano S. It also supports a few less coins. But the company has been working to integrate more native interfaces, thus, it will be able to equally challenge the Nano S.

The Trezor interface is very user-friendly and you will never be lost as a beginner.

Disclaimer : this article is not a partnership. I asked the team if they could send me a piece so i could test it and give you my unbiased opinion. If i had to partner with anyone it would be disclosed.