We’re thrilled to announce a major new open beta of Envoy, our mobile Bitcoin wallet and companion app for Passport. With this open beta we’re greatly expanding what Envoy is capable of, making it a feature-rich Bitcoin hot wallet in addition to its existing role as a watch-only wallet and management app for Passport. Hot wallet support in Envoy opens up financial sovereignty through our tools to many more users and lays the groundwork for other privacy and security features we’re building behind the scenes.
The best of both worlds
Bringing hot wallet support to Envoy makes the pairing of Envoy + Passport the best of both worlds, allowing you to store your wealth in a highly-secure and yet easy-to-use package with Passport while also spending your Bitcoin on the go with just a few taps in Envoy. You’ll be able to easily move funds back and forth between your hot wallet and Passport, make transactions, and view your hot and cold balances from anywhere – all from a single app!
Not a Passport owner? This update brings you full Bitcoin wallet functionality without ever needing to purchase Passport. You can use Envoy to store and spend your Bitcoin across iOS and Android with strong security, simple privacy via Tor, and a new and uniquely approachable onboarding experience. We don’t want to limit financial sovereignty to only those who can purchase a Passport, so Envoy as a hot wallet is our way to bring our best-in-class design, intuitive and approachable UI and UX, and peace of mind to smartphone users across the globe.
What is a “hot wallet?”
In Bitcoin, the term “hot wallet” refers to any wallet that keeps your keys on an internet-connected device for easier spending and receiving of funds. While you don’t want to keep your life savings in a hot wallet, it provides much easier access to a bit of Bitcoin for spending, tipping, and onboarding new users.
Envoy has traditionally been a “watch-only wallet” that connects to Passport, allowing you to view your balance and create transactions, but providing limited functionality when you are away from your hardware wallet. Now you can enjoy Envoy not just as a companion app for Passport, but also as a fully-featured standalone Bitcoin wallet on the go.
Backups, simplified
Notably, Envoy Wallet introduces a new seedless onboarding experience we call Envoy Auto-Backup. While Envoy users can of course manually handle seed words if desired, we aimed to engineer a solution that enables 60-second onboarding and automatic backups of Envoy’s private key and application data (such as settings and labels).
Additionally, we wanted to ensure that Envoy does this without collecting any user data – no email address, no passwords, no IP address if Tor is enabled – no friction! We hope Envoy Auto-Backup will lead to a massive increase in self custody, with easier onboarding than even an exchange.
Here’s how Envoy Auto-Backup works
- Envoy generates a seed and stores it on your phone’s secure element.
- Since most users have iCloud Keychain or Android Auto-Backup enabled, the seed is automatically synced to your other iOS or Android devices – fully end-to-end encrypted, without needing to give Envoy permission to access your iCloud or Google account.
- Learn more about iCloud Keychain.
- “iCloud protects your information with end-to-end encryption, which provides the highest level of data security. Your data is protected with a key that’s made from information unique to your device, and combined with your device passcode, which only you know. No one else can access or read this data, either in transit or storage.”
- Learn more about Android Auto-Backup.
- “Android preserves app data by uploading it to the user’s Google Drive—where it’s protected by the user’s Google account credentials. The backup is end-to-end encrypted on devices running Android 9 or higher using the device’s pin, pattern, or password.”
- Learn more about iCloud Keychain.
- Envoy then creates a backup folder containing your app settings, account labels, and other non-sensitive app data, making sure that restoring Envoy back to its perfect state for you is a breeze. This folder is end-to-end encrypted with your seed, meaning Foundation can never see the contents. We call this the Envoy Backup.
- The fully encrypted Envoy Backup is uploaded to Foundation’s servers, alongside a hash of the seed (a cryptographic representation of the seed that proves your knowledge of the seed, not the seed itself!) so that we can ensure no one else can attempt to download your backup without proving knowledge of your seed phrase.
- There is no Foundation user account – all you need is access to your Apple or Google account and you’re all set.
Restoring from Envoy Auto-Backup
If you lose your phone or delete the Envoy app, restoring your Envoy Wallet takes only a few seconds with Auto-Backup.
- Envoy checks the secure element on your phone and looks for the seed.
- If it discovers a seed on the secure element, Envoy hashes the seed and sends the hash to our server.
- This merely proves your knowledge of the seed and does not reveal your seed to Foundation in any way!
- If it does not discover a seed, it downloads the encrypted seed backup from Apple or Google and restores the seed to the secure element. Then Envoy hashes the seed and sends the hash to our server.
- If it discovers a seed on the secure element, Envoy hashes the seed and sends the hash to our server.
- Envoy then downloads the encrypted envoy backup from our servers.
- Envoy uses the seed to decrypt the Envoy Backup file locally and restores all user settings, account labels, and other app data, so it’s like you never left.
Other notable changes
We’ve also added the following features and improvements along with the fully functional hot wallet in v1.1.0:
- Added bio-metric/PIN authentication for Envoy
- Now you can protect your hot wallet or Passport balance from prying eyes
- Added the ability to swipe on accounts to hide balances while you’re on the go
- Implemented screenshot protection to prevent screenshots of sensitive screens in Envoy
- Bumped the integrated Tor version to 0.4.7.10
- Bumped Flutter SDK version to 3.7.7
- Improved firmware update flow for Android to better account for slow file transfers
- Some users experienced issues writing the firmware to microSD in the time we set for Envoy, so we’ve better handled those edge cases in this release
Current gaps
- Passphrase wallets are not currently supported.
- We do plan on supporting passphrases with the public release, but are currently working on implementing a smooth user experience around passphrases and how they interact with the auto-backup feature.
- Deleting only the hot wallet is not currently possible.
- You can still reset the app by uninstalling/reinstalling or clearing app data, but please note that this will currently reset the entire app, including Passport accounts etc.
What is a “public beta?”
As this is a major overhaul of Envoy from the ground up, we’re launching hot wallet support first as a public beta to let our awesome community test drive it. When you join the public beta you get to be the first to try out hot wallet support, help drive new features and improvements via feedback directly to our team, and make your mark on what we’re building to empower the next phase of financial sovereignty.
As this is a public beta, we expect that you’ll run into some minor issues and bugs as we work through them together, but we’ve worked hard to make it a complete and usable wallet from the moment the beta launches.
How can I get access to the beta?
We’ve pushed the beta version of Envoy to all of our normal channels as a separate beta release, so you can join one of three ways:
- If you’re on iOS, you can join our TestFlight program at the following link:
- For those on Android, you can either join the beta in the Play Store or download the APK directly from Github:
- Play Store
- GitHub
- Download the APK titled “envoy-apk-1.1.0-beta.zip” directly from the above link, extract it, and install
- As this APK is signed with our own keys instead of Google’s keys via the Play Store, if you’re using the Play Store version you’ll have to uninstall Envoy first before installing the public beta
How can I give feedback?
As you use Envoy as a hot wallet, we’d love to hear from you – every issue, bug, or favorite feature that you love! The more feedback we get during the public beta, the bigger impact you can have in the direction we take with Envoy and the better app we can launch to the rest of Envoy’s users down the road. There are three main places you can go to give us feedback:
- We have a standalone Telegram channel for live feedback and discussion of beta releases to keep the main channel uncluttered for our other community members
- You can email us
- You can direct message us on Twitter
What’s next
Our goal with this public beta is to flush out any remaining bugs or UX quirks so we’ll run the public beta for around two weeks. Throughout the public beta period we’ll push new releases as necessary to allow you to test updates and bug fixes as we go, and then at the end of the beta period we’ll launch Envoy as a hot wallet for every Envoy user across all platforms.
We’re excited to get the next piece of your financial sovereignty toolkit out to the masses and onboard a wave of Bitcoiners to complete self-custody, privacy, and financial sovereignty sat by sat.