SecuX wallet: Perfect hand-holding
I was contacted by a member of the DigiByte community asking if I’d like a SecuX wallet to be sent my way to review and give thoughts on. Curious, and never one to shy away from giving my 2 satoshis worth, I agreed.
This is not a paid review by SecuX though, no money or crypto has changed hands, they simply asked if I wanted a unit for review. I like it this way because I can be brutally honest
So here we are, and I think the title sums up my feelings on it quite well: The SecuX team have done a great job of a hardware wallet that is both newbie friendly as well as having a few “power user” features. The perfect amount of hand-holding!
Now I’ve used a few hardware wallets, however most of this review will be comparing it alongside my current favorite: Bitfi
As such I noticed they have opted to include a pouch, compared to the Bitfi “wallet” format. It’s nice, does a good job of covering the SecuX, feels good, and I don’t begrudge that decision. It certainly makes it feel more of a “Keep it safe at home” like a precious ring, than a “Take it out with you to pay in-person like a wallet”. That’s again fine too, you won’t be using this for retail purchases. This is not intended for that.
One of the other immediate things I noticed, especially after pulling it out of the bag the next day, was just how quickly this powers on!
It took me 7 tries to get this photo of it booting up, it’s so damn quick!
When using it for the first time on a LiveStream “unboxing” I streamed to YouTube, I opted not to read any of the accompanying information and see how friendly the device itself is. I was pleasantly surprised! If you want to watch it, you can check that out here:
I’ve since read them and they’re nice to have, but definitely not mandatory.
The initial setup was incredibly simple, being walked through a very quick process. Being forced to write the recovery phrase down is nice, not being able to skip it. I’ve seen far too many people skip over that step on other wallets, only to get stung by their haste down the line.
Overall the entire process was pleasantly quick too, and even a relative crypto novice shouldn’t have any real difficulty navigating the initial setup for the SecuX wallet.
One thing to note was that I was sent the SecuX W20, which is the “big brother” model of the W10, in that it also includes Bluetooth support for wirelessly connecting to your PC, Laptop or Cellphone. My Cellphone wasn’t happy with pairing, however I’m presuming this is because of some of the additional security aspects Xiaomi puts in place on apps, and I didn’t revisit it, though I’m chalking this limitation up to my cellphone more than anything. Instead I simply opted to cable it to my desktop PC which worked fine, as did bluetooth to my work laptop.
The sending and receiving process worked very well too, super fast, and it was a nice touch being able to customize my transaction-fee, so my tx-fee ended up being $0.0000000333 when testing it on the LiveStream which was pretty awesome (Go DigiByte!), and a nice feature for SecuX to offer.
There’s a bunch of nice security features, for example the PIN screen is randomized each time, so that people can’t look at your screen and see where greasy fingerprints (like mine) have been previously:
As far as supporting multiple cryptocurrencies, including DigiByte, I think that it’s great to see the selection that SecuX offer, and their main screen provides a nice “at a glance” summary of what you have on your SecuX:
Overall I really liked the SecuX W20, I think it was very well built, incredibly fast compared to my Bitfi, and does a great job of being very newbie-friendly too. I’d like to see them use HD (Heirachal Deterministic) addresses and generate a new one each time, but that’s probably my only gripe, and something that they could support in future with a firmware upgrade.
If you’re interested in getting yourself one, head on over to their website: https://secuxtech.com/products/
Or alternatively check them out on Twitter or Facebook for the occasional giveaway too!
Thank you again to SecuX for sending me a W20 wallet, and most importantly for adding support for the DigiByte blockchain!
