I’ve preordered the anniversary edition of this device 3 months ago and while shipping should have started at the end of May, i got an email that unfortunately shipping of the device will get delayed for a month. But here it is and Ellipal does it again after their Joy device (which i reviewed a bit more than 2 years ago) with a new gadget for cryptocurrency enthousiasts and investors.

The main product is the X card which is a bank-like card in which you can store mnemonic seeds. You need the Starter device to write these seeds to the card which is included in the package. This review will present both products but i should mention that at the moment of writing this review, there was no way to buy just the Starter device although there is a way to buy additional cards without the device.

INSIDE THE BOX

Opening up the box reveals some stickers, a thank you card from Ellipal, a leather wallet for the x card, a cardholder where you can find your x card, a quick start quide, a “what’s in the box” card, and a seed phrase seed where you can write your generated mnemonic seeds down. Underneath these, you can find the starter device which as i said can be used to generate and write mnemonic seed to the x card and the usb cable.

THE STARTER DEVICE

The starter device has 4 buttons, 2 on the left side and 2 on the right. On the left side the buttons are used for navigating the menu (up and down) and the buttons on the right side are used for going back / powering on & off and confirming options. It also features a grayscale display between the 4 buttons and a type-c usb at the bottom. At the top, there is a slot for the Ellipal X cards.

The menu is pretty simple, you get 3 options:

Create Wallet

This option will let you choose a mnemonic seed length to generate (12, 18 or 24 words), before writing it to the X card. You MUST protect the mnemonic seed with a password, the device supports passwords of 6-16 characters. After verifiying your password, the randomly generated and encrypted mnemonic seed gets written to the X card.

Recover Wallet

This option lets you insert an already generated mnemonic seed (for example a seed that you have generated on another wallet) and write it to the X card.

Options

Options will let you add a passphrase to your mnemonic seeds and there’s also an option to see the version of the device but since there is no way to update it, it will stay at version “Starter V1.0.0” hoping there are no bugs to it.

THE X CARD

The X Card can be used to store your mnemonic seeds that have been generated using either the Starter device or other hardware or software wallet as long as you have the Starter device and import that mnemonic seed. It has the same size as a bank card and it even has 16 numbers on it giving the impression of an actual bank card which i suppose is a way to recognize the card on the Ellipal app.

These cards are NFC enabled and can be used to interact with the Ellipal application. They send your public keys to the application and you can also use them to sign transactions with your private keys which remain inside the x card. The card according to Ellipal website is EAL6+ certified and the private key is created directly inside the X card’s secure chip upon setting up your wallet.

CONCLUSION

There’s not much to add for such device, i have played a bit with it and noticed 2 disadvantagies:

1. Navigation buttons are not that good. You have to press them a bit more than the part where they are going to click to actually respond to your press. When entering passwords / mnemonic seeds, around 1 out of 5 presses got skipped, you have to get used on pressing the buttons harder.

2. Battery is bad. I did a full charge before powering it on and the battery lasted for around 10 minutes while generating approximately 4 mnemonic seeds in between and write them to the NFC card. Yeah you probably wont use the device that often and for more than 2 minutes but still, thats just awful.

Other than that, it’s another airgapped device that you may want to add to your repository which basically is going to help you bypass the need to write down mnemonic seeds as long as you can remember a password and will also help you make transactions without having to transfer your private key inside a 24/7 online device which is a win-win situation.

ps) The starter device only has one x card inside the box but you can buy more on Ellipal website in case you want to have multiple mnemonic seeds for different purposes.