Your Old Game Boy Can Now Be Turned Into a Bitcoin and Ethereum Hardware Wallet

Craving each ’90s nostalgia and ice-cold crypto storage? A small staff of builders at crypto startup Keyp is revamping authentic Nintendo Recreation Boy handheld consoles and optimizing them to retailer cryptocurrency offline, reworking the favored handheld of yore right into a crypto {hardware} pockets referred to as the Recreation Pockets.

However the Recreation Pockets isn’t only a newfangled {hardware} pockets with a Recreation Boy console cowl. In truth, the Recreation Pockets is way from a gimmick—it’s a model new Recreation Boy recreation cartridge that truly makes use of gamification to generate customers’ seed phrases by means of random quests and interactions with non-playable characters (NPCs). 

As soon as arrange, the Recreation Pockets will have the ability to retailer any cryptocurrency that makes use of BIP-32 seed phrases, which suggests it could possibly retailer cash like Bitcoin and Ethereum at launch. Its software program can even be open supply and accessible for anybody to create their very own implementation, if desired.

Keyp founder Joseph Schiarizzi informed Decrypt that the pockets’s recreation expertise can be “Pokémon-like.” 

“Our main focus at Keyp is making Web3 accessible and secure for everybody with instruments like social logins and further safety layers for wallets,” Schiarizzi mentioned. “Recreation Pockets is a enjoyable undertaking [and] extension of that.”

Whereas the Recreation Pockets has been in growth since January, Keyp’s nine-person staff believes the current controversy surrounding Ledger’s new “restoration” service means a very offline storage answer is required. Recreation Pockets is advertising and marketing itself as an offline storage choice that guarantees no firmware updates—ever.

“With all of the drama across the current Ledger {hardware} pockets replace, we realized the necessity for really offline chilly storage that minimizes belief,” Keyp co-founder Sascha Mombartz wrote on a Recreation Pockets product web page.

“What began as a enjoyable thought now appears to be a extremely essential product,” Mombartz added. “Trusting the availability chain for brand new safety units may be scary as a result of we don’t know who has messed with a tool, however I do know precisely the place the Recreation Boy on my shelf has been for the final 20 years.”

The Recreation Pockets doesn’t but have an official launch date, however Schiarizzi informed Decrypt that the corporate plans to open pre-orders quickly and is concentrating on a summer time rollout, barring provide chain and/or technical hurdles.

This isn’t the primary time crypto fans have “cryptified” the Recreation Boy, nevertheless. Two years in the past, a pseudonymous IT safety researcher turned the hand-held right into a Bitcoin mining system—albeit a really gradual one.