NGRAVE

NGRAVE is a Belgian digital asset security company whose flagship product, the NGRAVE ZERO hardware wallet, holds the highest security certification ever awarded to a consumer financial product: CC EAL7 under the Common Criteria framework. Founded in 2018 and registered in Wavre, Belgium as Hestara SRL, the company was built around a simple and sobering question its co-founders could not answer: where can someone store cryptocurrency and sleep at night?

Origin and Founding

The catalyst was personal. CTO Xavier Hendrickx had been in crypto since 2013 and suffered losses in the Mt. Gox collapse in 2014. A subsequent blockchain project he was involved with was hacked for $10 million. Those experiences pushed him and co-founders Ruben Merre (CEO) and Edouard Vanham (COO) to build what they could not find on the market — a hardware wallet with no attack surface, designed from first principles rather than adapted from general-purpose microcontrollers.

The team enlisted Jean-Jacques Quisquater as a key advisor. Quisquater is a Belgian cryptographer and University of Louvain professor with 50 years of hardware security experience and more than 200 published papers. He is also the second reference cited in Satoshi Nakamoto's 2009 Bitcoin whitepaper and pioneered a distributed ledger experiment in 1996 called TIMESEC. His involvement shaped NGRAVE's approach to cryptographic architecture from the outset.

The ZERO: An Air-Gapped Wallet

The NGRAVE ZERO is the company's core product. It is fully air-gapped — it has no USB data transfer capability, no Bluetooth, no NFC, and no WiFi. The only communication channel between the device and the outside world is QR codes scanned through its 640x480 camera. Transactions are initiated in the LIQUID mobile app, which generates a QR code the user scans into the ZERO; the ZERO signs the transaction entirely offline and displays a return QR code that the phone scans and broadcasts to the network. The private key never leaves the device.

The hardware was designed in-house rather than sourced from off-the-shelf secure elements. The 125mm x 70mm device weighs 214 grams and uses a custom alloy of zinc, aluminum, magnesium, and copper. Its 4-inch, 480x800 capacitive touchscreen is readable at 600 cd/m2, and the unit is IP55-rated for water and dust resistance. A 12x12mm fingerprint sensor and an 8-digit PIN serve as dual authentication layers.

The secure element runs a custom operating system built from scratch, not a modified version of an existing embedded OS. This OS is what earned the CC EAL7 certification, reviewed by an accredited laboratory under the same Common Criteria standard used by European defense and government systems. No other hardware wallet and no other consumer financial product has achieved this level.

The Perfect Key System

At first boot, the ZERO generates a cryptographic key using entropy from three sources simultaneously: the user's fingerprint, a built-in ambient light sensor, and interactive shuffling input from the user. The result is a 64-character hexadecimal key — the NGRAVE Perfect Key — which the user can view as a 24-word BIP-39 seed phrase if compatibility with other wallets is needed. The device can hold 100 or more separate wallet accounts.

The GRAPHENE Backup

The NGRAVE GRAPHENE is a stainless steel physical backup designed to store the Perfect Key without any single point of failure. It consists of two separate plates: the top plate contains 64 hexadecimal columns with encoded reference values; the bottom plate receives punched indentations corresponding to the key characters, made using the included metal punch tool. Neither plate alone reveals the key — both are required. The steel is fireproof, waterproof, and corrosion-resistant.

If one plate is lost or stolen, the key remains protected. Replacement plates can be ordered from NGRAVE without exposing the recovery phrase to the company, since NGRAVE never holds or can reconstruct the original key. The ZERO and GRAPHENE together sell as a Combo Pack priced around $498; the ZERO alone is approximately 398 euros.

The LIQUID App

The NGRAVE LIQUID mobile app is the interface layer of the three-part ecosystem. It manages portfolio visibility and transaction initiation while never accessing private keys. Users can monitor balances, generate receive addresses for most supported chains, view Ethereum NFTs, and initiate the QR-based signing flow — all without the ZERO needing to be powered on. Because private key material stays on the ZERO, LIQUID is designed to be safe to use on a networked smartphone.

Solana Support

NGRAVE added Solana (SOL) support in firmware version 1.2. The integration reflects a technical detail specific to Solana's address derivation: SOL addresses are derived from the private key rather than from the public key (as on Bitcoin and Ethereum), which means new Solana addresses can only be generated directly on the ZERO rather than within the LIQUID app. This design preserves the air-gapped guarantee — the private key does not leave the device even for address creation.

Solana token support (SPL tokens) was listed on NGRAVE's public roadmap as a near-term addition at the time of writing, alongside ETH staking and smart contract decoding. The current firmware (1.8, titled "The Foundational Update") introduced open-protocol implementation and Polygon token support.

The ZERO also supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Binance Coin, Tezos, MultiversX, Stellar, Avalanche, Zcash, Dash, Groestlcoin, and Polygon, plus all ERC-20 tokens, all ESDT tokens on MultiversX, and more than 112 EVM chains via MetaMask and Rabby Wallet integrations. Total supported asset count exceeds 3,500 coins and tokens.

Business Traction and Funding

NGRAVE ran the most successful crypto hardware wallet pre-order campaign in IndieGogo and Kickstarter history in 2020, raising $450,000 from 1,225 backers. In January 2022, the company closed a $6 million seed round from Woodstock Fund, Morningstar Ventures, DFG Group, Spark Digital Capital, Moonrock Capital, and Mapleblock Capital, along with angel investors from across the crypto industry. The company ships to more than 90 countries and sells through its own store, Amazon US, and authorized resellers.

Security Posture and Limitations

NGRAVE's security architecture is verifiably the most rigorously certified in the consumer wallet market. However, the firmware is currently closed-source, which limits independent community verification — open-sourcing has been indicated as a future goal. The device's size, comparable to a smartphone, is a trade-off for the larger screen and battery required for QR-code-only communication. The ZERO does not support Bluetooth pairing, which some users may view as a limitation for mobile workflows, though NGRAVE frames this as a deliberate exclusion of an attack surface.

For Solana users specifically, the air-gapped architecture means that every transaction requires a two-step QR scan sequence rather than the single-click signing experience of hot wallets. That is the cost of keeping the private key verifiably offline. For users holding meaningful amounts of SOL and wanting the strongest possible cold storage guarantee, the ZERO represents the highest certification-backed option currently available in the hardware wallet market.