AirGap’s 4th anniversary and giveaway
Four years of secure crypto storage, development continues
AirGap’s mission has been to help every crypto owner to store his funds securely. It has been four years since we began this journey, and we would like to thank the community that has been there for us throughout it all. Therefore we would like to give you something back. See at the end of the article.
Photo of the AirGap team back in 2018. Since then we have grown bigger
In 2017, the developers at Papers started working on the idea of making a new kind of wallet. A wallet that offers the convenience of a software wallet while also providing the security of a hardware wallet. A cold wallet that is convenient, safe, and meets the most stringent security requirements of a modern cryptocurrency user. On 24 Jul 2017, this idea became a reality.
The past four years have been a period of continuous development. We have refactored and audited our codebase added support for new cryptocurrencies and provided new and exciting features to our users.
We are pleased that our continued efforts in the development and maintenance of AirGap have yielded our desired goal — your confidence in us.
We do more than just AirGap
Apart from the AirGap solution, we used our knowledge to develop further solutions for the crypto community.
Spire: is a lightweight Beacon-enabled Browser Extension for interacting with Tezos dApps. dApp users can use Spire as a Browser Extension wallet, connect it to a Ledger hardware wallet or any of the other Beacon-compatible wallets and use Spire to interact with dApps.
Beacon: allows you to seamlessly connect your Tezos wallet with an application and interact with it. Requests from the dApp can be signed on a mobile, desktop, hardware wallet, or browser extension.
Ecoo: Earmarked funds for different purposes like a coin for local businesses, or festivals. Ecoo is built on the Tezos blockchain.
Integrations and functionality journey in the last four years
In the summer of 2017, we first had the idea of creating a security focussed wallet that separates the private key on an isolated offline device. After a few weeks, we released the first prototype and announced it on Reddit. AirGap’s initial release only supported Ethereum. Since then several enhancements and integrations have been implemented. Here is a brief history:
2017:
24 Jul 2017: Release of the first proof of concept with Ethereum support. After the great feedback we received, we decided to create a proper solution out of our proof of concept.
2018:
On July 8th, 2018: AirGap Wallet and AirGap Vault were released with Bitcoin support.
On July 11st, 2018: AirGap added support for Ethereum and æternity.
On August 24th, 2018: AirGap became open source.
On August 27th, 2018: AirGap was released on iOS.
On October 11st, 2018: AirGap added support for Tezos.
2019:
On April 10th, 2019: AirGap added support for currency exchange within the app.
On May 9th, 2019: AirGap added support for Groestlcoin.
On July 26th, 2019: AirGap added support for Cosmos.
2020:
February 13th, 2020: AirGap underwent a third-party security audit.
April 8th, 2020: AirGap added support tzBTC and for the Tezos FA 1.2 asset standard.
April 29th, 2020: AirGap added support for XCHF.
June 17th, 2020: AirGap integrated Beacon. Beacon enabled AirGap Wallet to connect and communicate with Tezos dApps.
August 12th, 2020: AirGap added support for Polkadot and Polkadot delegation.
August 25th, 2020: AirGap desktop wallet was created.
September 15th, 2020: AirGap added support for Kusama.
September 29th, 2020: AirGap Desktop Wallet adds Ledger Support for Polkadot & Kusama
November 23rd, 2020: AirGap added support for the top 100 ERC20 tokens.
2021:
February 23rd, 2021: AirGap added support for BIP 85 and Tezos Sapling
Beginning of 2021: AirGap hired a full-time community manager to spread the word about our apps.
August 2nd, 2021: AirGap added support for Walletconnect, introduced a new and optimized Serialization standard, as well as a simplified onboarding experience
In the past four years, much has been accomplished. We are grateful that you were with us during this time. We greatly value your confidence in our service, which helps us recognize that we are on the right track. Being aware of this fact provides us with the energy to continue developing and becoming better in our service delivery.
Roadmap and planned Features
We will continue to enhance our wallet, adding support for additional cryptocurrencies and bringing new features that are in high demand.
Our main focus is and always will be security. But we also want to make this security accessible. Over the next months, we have a couple of changes planned that will both increase the security and usability. Please note that this list is in no way exhaustive because we will continue to improve AirGap.
- Extended support of the Tezos ecosystem’s fungible and non-fungible Tokens and support for in-app swaps powered by decentralized exchanges on Tezos.
- Our Bitcoin integration will receive a major improvement. Currently, only legacy address types are supported, which don’t benefit from lower fees that were introduced with the Segwit update. In a future update, AirGap will offer the functionality to add Segwit addresses and use a standardized format for transaction signing. This will enable users to use AirGap Vault with other wallets like Sparrow or Specter.
- Entropy collection via dice rolls and coin flips allows you to generate secure mnemonics, even if there are vulnerabilities in the random number generation. It also allows you to verify the generated mnemonics in another app or with different tools.
- A new secure mnemonic import feature will be added to prevent typos in your mnemonic and ensure that a malicious keyboard can’t leak your mnemonic.
- We have some smaller features planned that will increase the security and usability of the apps. One feature will allow you to run some security checks inside the app to tell you if there is anything you can do to make your setup more secure.
We love to discuss new ideas and features that will help us advance the security of our apps. If you are interested in taking part in those discussions, please join our discord server or open an issue on GitHub for more technical discussions.
AirGap giveaway
To commemorate this special occasion, we are pleased to announce the AirGap giveaway, in which we will be giving 20 lucky winners a customized AirGap metal plate to store mnemonics as well as a dedicated engraving pen.
The package includes:
- 1 AirGap Recovery Plate (engraved on both sides, 89 mm x 54 mm x 8mm, 304-grade stainless steel)
- 1 engraving pen
- 1 AirGap sticker
All you have to do is make a YouTube video, write a blog, or post on social media about AirGap showing four reasons why you prefer AirGap wallet over other wallets to qualify. Submit the link of your video/blog to hi@airgap.it, and over 1–2 weeks, we will identify the top publications. We are looking forward to seeing what you have come up with!
We came up with the idea of producing seed places because the AirGap community was asking frequently for a recommendation regarding seed storage. We already created a paper template for the seed storage but a piece of metal is the way to go. When taking a closer look we realized that the solutions out there were either too complicated, too expensive, or ineffective. Therefore we decided to create and produce our own and give it to the community.
What’s your feedback on AirGap?
It has been the feedback we have gotten from the community in the past four years that has been a major source of our continued progress. We’ve made significant improvements to AirGap as a result of it.
As part of our continued effort to improve our solution based on your feedback, we’ve created a survey to get your opinion on what is missing in AirGap and how we can improve it. We appreciate you taking the time to complete this survey and sharing your thoughts with us. Therefore, we are also giving the three listed items above to people who provide us with high-quality responses.
