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By creating its own wallet silicon chip, hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor is hastening the production of the new Trezor wallet. By taking over the manufacturing of wallet chips, Trezor hopes to quickly react to demand-stimulating situations like the FTX collapse.
On February 27, Trezor formally announced that it would start facilitating the production of the chip casing, a crucial component in its flagship device, the Trezor Model T. With this change, the production of Trezor wallets will be considerably optimized, cutting the lead time from two years to a few months.
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In May 2020, Trezor and Tropic Square initially announced plans to take over production of wallet chips. They gave several justifications for the decision, including the high cost of chip vendors' government certification. The nation's accreditation regulations, according to Trezor, "limit independent enterprises and open source efforts from use in professional domains."
As was previously said, after the FTX crash in November 2022, cryptocurrency investors swarmed to take their assets out of centralized crypto exchanges, and demand for the Trezor wallet increased by at least 300%.
Trezor was subject to third-party supply risks before it started making wallet chips because of things like geopolitical upheavals, labor shortages brought on by COVID-19, market conditions for cryptocurrencies, and other occurrences. Trezor is able to react fast to each of these variables and satisfy demand at all times by maintaining control over the wallet chip supply.
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Future Trezor products will have more design freedom because to this new business model, which also enables wallet providers to create custom hardware wallet kits.
The chosen company strategy is really original and suitable for exceptional circumstances. According to STMicroelectronics sales manager Tomá Pokorn, we as a manufacturer demand a high minimum order quantity and require the customer to have specialized knowledge to encapsulate semiconductor components. The first user of Tropic Square's product is anticipated to be Trezor.