Finally got a chance to set up my @Ryder_ID hardware wallet. First impressions 🧵

The overall onboarding experience was absolutely seamless. I *love* that there were zero seed phrases involved. Tap the phone. Tap the recovery tile. Done. Recovery was similarly easy. Tap phone, tap tile, done. I would trust my non-crypto family members to recover my assets if something bad happened, and that’s truly cool.

Feel. The device feels pretty solid. I love the lights on the side that move as it’s doing stuff, feels very futuristic.

Onboarding wasn’t without its bumps. Updating the firmware took ages. When finished, the Ryder had turned off and I couldn’t complete the final step of tapping to verify installation. So now my app is in a weird state where the wallet is upgraded but the app doesn’t know.

The app itself is *super* simplistic. At least for Sol. You can receive and hold sol. You can’t stake it. You can’t swap it. You can’t visit dapps via a browser. No wallets support interfacing with Ryder. Forced to be the coldest of cold wallets.

On that note, I couldn’t find the source code for their wallet app. So it’s hard to verify what it’s doing. Similarly, couldn’t find the firmware source code. So basically you’re implicitly trusting Ryder the company, and it’s a smaller newer company. So not sure I’ll be keeping a large amount of crypto in here.

As always with hardware wallets, there’s a lot of trust assumptions at play. Did they take the private keys before shipping the wallet to you? Do txs actually do what they say? At the end of the day, it’s about whether you trust the company. That being said, with Ledger’s shoddy history, it’s time to get alternatives.

My best advice for the ultra paranoid is probably to de risk these hardware wallets by creating a Squads multisig of hardware wallets. A ledger, a Ryder, and a Keystone. Introduces smart contract risk, but squads is like quadruple audited and used by many top protocols. If we can’t trust that, we have bigger problems.

Overall I’m pleased with my device. It feels like very early days given it doesn’t support anything outside of holding tokens. I’d love dApp support so I can use it with squads. Hopefully that stuff is coming down the pipe soon.