An Atlanta studio, and a hardware notebook called Yenao.

How the notebook started

The studio spends its days on screens that people touch. Those screens are good at almost everything, and they are a poor home for a private key. Keys were landing in browser profiles, in phone backups, and in photographs of a word list. Once a key is copied into a general computer, every other program on that computer is a neighbor it did not choose.

Yenao began as an internal notebook about a different kind of object. The team wrote down the habits that serious hardware wallets had already proved in the world, then built a board around those habits rather than around a larger computer.

The key should be born offline, on a chip that will not hand it back. A person should read the action on a screen that the laptop cannot repaint. If the object is lost, a phrase written on paper should be enough to restore the key, and that paper should live somewhere else.

What the firmware is

Yenao is the small system on the device. It is not a desktop system and it is not a second computer you carry around. It starts, shows the screen, waits for the button, and makes a signature inside the chip when the screen has been read. That narrowness is the point.

What this website is

Yuenao.com is the studio’s public notebook for the device. You will find the hardware description, the security model, a short journal, and a way to reach the people who publish it. The pages are written by Response Mine Interactive, LLC.