Our History

IronVault Core began in early 2018, not in a boardroom but in a cramped electronics lab in South London. The founding two engineers – both veterans of embedded security – had just witnessed a widely used hardware wallet being exploited through a simple power analysis attack. The device was supposed to be secure, but its microcontroller leaked secrets through timing variations. That night, they decided to build something different: a hardware module with no microcontroller at all. The first prototype was ugly, heavy, and entirely passive – and it worked. That prototype became the spiritual ancestor of everything we make today.

By mid-2019, the team had grown to include a cryptographer who had previously worked on air-gapped signing systems. Together, they filed the initial design for a secure seed storage capsule that used no electronic components – just precision-machined metal and mechanical entropy. A small crowdfunding campaign among bitcoin enthusiasts sold out in 11 hours. That was our proof that the crypto community was hungry for genuinely offline hardware, not just rebranded consumer gadgets. We delivered the first 500 units by hand, often meeting customers in London coffee shops to demonstrate how to load a wallet seed.

In 2020, we relocated our operations to Manchester, Great Britain, to access better manufacturing partners and industrial-grade CNC machining. That same year, we stopped calling ourselves a hardware startup and started calling ourselves a secure storage foundry. We released the first titanium seed plate, which unexpectedly became popular among bitcoin long-term holders who had previously used steel washers and hand-punched letters. Customer feedback drove our second major product – a fully passive electronic key module with no ports, no LEDs, and no external power requirement. By the end of 2021, IronVault Core had shipped over 5,000 units to 30 countries, with zero successful key extraction reports.

Today, we remain a small, independent team of five people based in Great Britain. We have never taken outside funding, because we believe crypto self-custody should not rely on investors who demand growth at the expense of security. Our history is not glamorous – it is a slow, methodical march toward better hardware. We still test every module by hand. We still answer customer emails personally. And we still start every design meeting with the same question: "How could an attacker defeat this secure wallet?" That question, asked in a London lab seven years ago, continues to drive everything we build for bitcoin and crypto users worldwide.