Baukunst\u2019s Tyler Mincey<\/a>, who is also a board member at Foundation. \u201cThere are accounts on Twitter giving excellent coverage of the clear, premeditated fraud that took place, but The New York Times, The Washington Post, these very respected media outlets, I don\u2019t know how you can read their coverage. On Twitter, you can find drastically better, much less biased coverage. And people are waking up to that. But the unfortunate thing is a lot of people have lost their life savings.\u201d<\/p>\nFoundation was founded in April 2020, focusing on building open source hardware and software products that provide users with a \u201cseamless, end-to-end sovereignty experience.\u201d The company\u2019s focus is security-above-all, which has included some crucial choices, including manufacturing its products in the U.S. The company\u2019s founder has very little patience or trust in overseas manufacturing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a geopolitical imperative, and a security imperative, to manufacture in the United States. I think we\u2019re moving toward a multipolar world and it\u2019s only going to get crazier. I personally would never trust a device to store my bitcoin that was made in China,\u201d Herbert said. \u201cAnd I want to be on the ground at the factory myself. We manufacture in New England, and I live in the Boston area. I\u2019m at the factory at least every couple of weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n
One thing is for sure: The company\u2019s devices certainly look very different than many hardware crypto wallets out there. That was not by accident.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe call what we\u2019re aiming for digital deco<\/em>, inspired by the visual language of art deco. We\u2019re embracing color and ornate design. The cryptocurrency industry has focused on dark colors for some reason,\u201d Herbert explained. \u201cI think that\u2019s completely wrong for our industry. I think it should be about futuristic optimism. Bitcoin is supposed to be a counter to the dystopian future, and our design should reflect that.\u201d<\/p>\nAnd the company is picking an aggressive fight with crypto exchanges: \u201cWe strive to play a large part in empowering users to pull their bitcoin off of exchanges and achieve digital sovereignty,\u201d Herbert told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n\n
TechCrunch interviewed Herbert to get a deeper look at the company and its hopes, dreams and ambitions. We talk about the funding round, the need for open source, why self-custody is hard but necessary for crypto and much more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Zach Herbert, CEO at Foundation. Image Credits<\/strong>: Foundation<\/p>\n<\/div>\nWhat makes you the perfect person to run this company?<\/strong><\/p>\nI\u2019m a mechanical engineer by training and I\u2019ve been obsessed with computers since I was little. I learned about bitcoin in 2013, and it quickly grew into an all-consuming passion. At first, I was interested in the investment potential, under the thesis that bitcoin represents an ideal form of money \u2014 that its limited supply means that, as demand increases, so will bitcoin\u2019s price. Bitcoin\u2019s culture morphed my views. As I consumed unending amounts of bitcoin-related content, I began to understand the importance of sound money, of sovereignty, of privacy, of the need to separate money and state.<\/p>\n
In 2017, I dropped out of Harvard Business School\u2019s MBA program to join a Boston-based crypto company, first as head of operations and ultimately as COO. We built hardware and software, including cryptocurrency ASIC mining hardware. I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the stagnation in self-custody tools, especially hardware wallets. So I and some fellow teammates launched Foundation Devices in April 2020.<\/p>\n\n
Personally, I feel like I have two conflicting identities. The first is as a technology executive, startup founder, engineering alum and almost-MBA. That\u2019s my legacy professional identity. But more and more, my real identity is as a Bitcoiner, a sovereign individual. These conflicting identities are probably why Foundation has been able to achieve its success thus far, why we\u2019ve been able to raise venture money for ideas that have historically been considered fringe and why I\u2019m confident we\u2019ll continue to grow and bring amazing sovereign computing products to market.<\/p>\n
How does this fundraise unlock the next steps for the company?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nSelf-custody today is simply too hard for most people; it\u2019s why so many people were hurt this year with the collapse of FTX, BlockFi, Celsius and more. Notably, we think self-custody alone is insufficient \u2014 true sovereignty requires privacy. So we\u2019re differentiating ourselves by building expert-level privacy features into our products and making them accessible to everyday users. For example, Envoy connects to the Tor network by default, ensuring that we can\u2019t see users\u2019 IP addresses or know anything about their balances or identities.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hot on the heels of Ledger announcing it\u2019s working with iPod creator Tony Fadell to create its newest hardware wallet, competing hardware wallet startup Foundation Devices announced it has raised a $7 million seed round to double down on its \u201csovereign computing platform,\u201d which it says is empowering its users to \u201creclaim their digital sovereignty.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1352","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}