A short story why we think AirGap helps solving key issues.
At AirGap we believe that everyone should have access to an easy and safe way to store cryptocurrencies. During the current Corona pandemic uncertainty has swept across every nation. Unemployment rates increasing, stock markets strangely increasing despite businesses being shut down, has brought a lot of uncertainty amongst people.
But what about the crypto market which is not controlled by a central entity? Well, we have seen a quite good year for cryptocurrencies so far. The value of Cryptocurrencies came with the Financial crisis in 2008 where a lot of people lost all their life savings to centralised entities such as Lehman Brothers which were taught to be too big to fail. The problem with such entities is that we, the end consumer, will never get an insight into what is truly happening behind the scenes.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the founding father of Bitcoin believed in a system where people rule the decisions and not single entities. However, where there was money involved also scammers came along. It soon became one of the most frequently scammed currencies worldwide. Problem is that anything connected to the internet can be exploited, only with the right precautions can you avoid such cases and be truly safe.
Companies such as Trezor and Ledger took up the task to make a hardware wallet which was considered “unhackable” and easy to use. However, these solutions soon proved to be expensive and inaccessible for a large chunk of the world population. The cheapest which could be found was costing around $50.
For many nations where monthly wages range around $30–60, it is just not feasible to acquire a hardware wallet. If you have to spend your monthly wage for such a wallet and that only got you to holding a wallet, it is quite frustrating as you have to wait again to buy cryptos now. This technology was made for the world to benefit from and not to only give the opportunity to developed nations.
As we strongly believe everyone should be able to store their crypto’s safely no matter where or when. We designed AirGap which is a two-device cold storage wallet completely for free.
The only requirements are that you have an old smartphone lying around. With the highest grade of security, you do not have to ever worry that you’ll get your funds stolen. You may wonder why we do this absolutely free. The reason for this is that we truly believe in a fair system which should not penalise you if you do not want to or can spend money on expensive hardware wallets.
In order for this solution to be so safe, you need to take your old smartphone, download the AirGap Vault on it and before you generate your secret go completely offline with that device. This means that once the phone went offline it should stay so for the rest of your life! You may wonder why have it offline forever, this is due to the fact that having anything connected to the internet will give intruders the possibility to potentially extract data from it. This is also the case with Bank applications or online banking. The difference between banks and crypto wallets is that with Banks they would block suspicious activities for you, whereas with crypto wallets you are responsible for yourself.
This should not scare you off from buying crypto as it should give you a sense of anonymity and own power. As stated before, remember Lehmann Brothers? Well, when storing your money with third parties their ultimate goal is to make even more money with it. If the banks risk everything and have a lot of faulty investments you, the consumer, will at the end pay the price, not the bank. That is why we urge people to get their hands on crypto. One could imagine crypto as being this ecosystem where you and I make decisions not politics or Shareholders. This is per se the definition of pure democracy and freedom. No one can get their hands on your valuable crypto. Only you have full control of your assets.
Security is a very big aspect of this world. As funds are digital and you do not own anything physically it is even more important to pay attention to your Mnemonic. The Mnemonic is a 24-word passphrase which gives you access to your valuable virtual currency. This is generated through randomization in order to prevent malicious entities easy access. Please remember we offer both solutions, one in which you can store both the Vault and Wallet on one phone (which is the hot wallet approach), however as we still use a two app approach its safer than hot wallets (two different environments). The second approach is recommended by us which is the one in which you store your Mnemonic on an offline device and your wallet on your online device, making it cold. (cold wallet approach)
The two apps are open source and therefore can be reviewed by anyone who wants to see how secure it is.
AirGap is developed in Switzerland for the world. We take security extremely seriously just like our Swiss bunkers. Do you have problems setting up your AirGap wallet? If so don’t hesitate to contact us and we will gladly help you. For any questions regarding AirGap don’t hesitate to contact us under hi@airgap.it or join our Telegram channel and ask right away.
Note: AirGap is not a financial institution, we do not advise on investing. You are doing so on your own risk!
Download
¬ AirGap Wallet
iOS — App Store
Android — Google Play
Android — GitHub APK
¬ AirGap Vault
iOS — App Store
Android — Google Play
Android — GitHub APK
