Tangem CTO Explains Why 3 Cards Beat A Seed Phrase For Self-Custody

Can a crypto wallet with no screen, no battery and no software updates be the safest place to keep coins? Tangem chief technology officer Andrey Lazutkin says yes, and in a wide-ranging interview he walks through the firm's card-based design, three-card backup, DeFi safeguards, and its stance on regulation and quantum threats.

Tangem Screenless Wallet Security

Lazutkin heads engineering at the Switzerland-based firm, which makes card-shaped wallets that pair with a smartphone over NFC. The cards carry no screen, battery, USB port, Bluetooth or updatable firmware. Private keys are generated and stored inside a certified secure chip and never leave it.

In his view, safety does not hinge on an on-device display. Every added component, from buttons to update channels, widens the attack surface, he argues. "In security, complexity is often the enemy."

Firmware is flashed at the factory and cannot be modified afterward, so the company has no way to push code to cards already in circulation. Lazutkin sees update mechanisms as a permanent code-injection pathway that ties owners to a vendor's signing keys, servers and staff for years.

He recalls the Ledger Recover episode, when the rival firm's support account reportedly acknowledged in a since-deleted post that firmware enabling key extraction had always been possible. Immutability, he says, removes that trust assumption altogether.

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Seedless Backup And DeFi Limits

A standard Tangem set ships three cards holding copies of one key inside separate secure chips, replacing the written seed phrase entirely. Users can keep one card for daily spending and leave the others with a lawyer or relative for inheritance. If all three vanish, the funds are unrecoverable.

Lazutkin calls that outcome the price of genuine self-custody. He notes that Chainalysis estimates millions of Bitcoin (BTC) are permanently lost, mostly through mishandled phrases and keys.

The companion app runs transaction simulation, contract risk analysis and scam-domain checks, though he stops short of calling any of it foolproof. Complex multi-hop contracts and phishing front ends can still slip past screening, he says. "Absolute security does not exist."

A newer Smart Gas feature relies on the EIP-7702 standard and lets users pay network fees in some ERC-20 tokens, including Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC), on supported EVM networks. Keys never leave the card under that arrangement, he says.

Regulation And Quantum Risks

Asked about tightening rules on unhosted wallets, Lazutkin says the card carries no compliance layer and asks no server for permission to sign. Tangem cannot freeze a device or extract a key remotely. "The card protects the key. The user controls the funds."

He expects regulators to keep focusing on exchanges, on-ramps and payment services rather than the signing layer, reasoning that pressure on audited products would push users toward murkier tools.

On quantum computing, he says migration has to begin at the protocol level, since wallets do not decide which signatures Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL) or Bitcoin accept. No post-quantum algorithm has been adopted for everyday signing, and the same transition will reach banking cards, SIM cards and identity documents.

The questions Lazutkin fields are ones the wallet industry has wrestled with for years. Debate over screens, seeds and firmware intensified in May 2023, when Ledger delayed its opt-in Recover backup service after users objected to the possibility of key extraction. Tangem's answer is a device that never changes once it leaves the factory, paired with a heavily hardened mobile app. In a market where lost keys have already erased fortunes, that is the trade-off buyers now weigh.

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