Thank you! You can help already by becoming a Tangem Merchant and spreading the banknotes around while making a profit :-) https://tangem.com/sell


We currently print 0.01 BTC and 0.05 BTC. We're also starting to print other tokens. At the moment there are no «terminals» — these smart banknotes are sold and accepted manually. However, we're planning to manufacture certain hardware.

Haha! Coming to you soon!


We hope so. People are visual, physical creatures and Bitcoin sorely needs better, human-friendly interfaces to use it.


About two billion people have heard about Bitcoin by now, but it's too cumbersome for most of them to try. The earliest holders of Tangem Notes in Singapore were predominantly first time users — and they are spreading the knowledge by showing the physical Bitcoin to everyone they meet and explaining as much as they can.


Fortunately Tangem as a business does not have to guarantee anything — the Bitcoin value is physically on the smart banknotes, inside a highly secure chip, and can only be accessed by the current holder.


I think right now Tangem notes are the safest way to hold Bitcoin in the world. If you keep it physically secure, it should work for centuries (40 years certified), but more importantly the private key does not have a copy. With almost any other way there's always a risk someone would have a copy and you could lose everything.

While Opendime is closest to Tangem in principle, it follows a different security model and is less friendly to the mass consumer, we believe. Nonetheless, we are big fans of their work :-)

Tangem technology supports ETH and ERC20, we're looking to partner with certain gold–backed stable coins.


Tangem Notes are smart banknotes with extremely advanced electronics inside. They are not a replacement for the digital nature of Bitcoin, rather a user–friendly, simple, and secure physical interface to crypto. The fact that smartphones and bitcoin ATMs are physical does not mean they are in contradiction with the digital properties of coins.


Bitcoin is on a chip inside each Tangem Note; if you lose or destroy a note, the Bitcoin is lost. If someone else finds or steals a note, they have the Bitcoin.

Tangem Notes are essentially smart cards, consumers are paying a reasonable premium when buying / selling Tangem Notes in retail compared to current rate of BTC. Part of that premium is covering physical production.


The beauty of Tangem Notes is that Bitcoin transactions can now be physical. As BTC is inside each note, you only need one digital transaction to «load» the note when it's manufactured and sold and another digital transaction to «extract» its value back to another wallet — when the note is no longer needed.


The reality is, 99% of newbies understand physical bitcoins immediately and without any questions. And the government of Singapore is far smarter than what you seem to think.


QR codes are insecure. A special chip inside each Tangem Note carriers the whole BTC value and can be validated and extracted at any time using a compatible Android smartphone with NFC.


The private key is created by the chip when manufactured and can never be seen. The public key and address can be easily seen via NFC. The smart banknote can sign transactions with its private key without disclosing it.

If a Tangem Note is destroyed before its value is extracted, the Bitcoin is lost forever. They are made of an extremely resilient type of plastic with a highly protected chip inside, quite difficult to damage compared to paper cash.

You can always extract the value, whether «outdated» or not, whatever that means. The notes are currently certified for 40 years of service, but will likely last centuries.

You can order a special Pioneer Kit from tangem.com — it's not cheap though. We're setting up pilot distribution around the world fast as we can.

You're drawing your perceived contradictions from using the word «trust» with materially different connotations for a rhetorical effect. Compare:

1. I informedly trust this airplane not to crash, because: authorities are certifying it, Boeing is a serious business, engineers are not murderers, there are many failsafes, planes rarely crash.

2. I blindly trust this stranger to hit an apple on my head with a gun from 30 feet, because: they say they can, how hard can it be, why would anyone want to shoot me, it's so cool.

Tangem was carefully designed and built into #1, Casascius, in any engineer's eyes, is #2.

Our goal is to structure the product in a way where we can't do anything harmful, out of malice or stupidity, even if we really wanted to — including the edge cases of a sudden dissolution of the company or even hostile takeover. Every product will still function forever, and be secure for its lifetime.

To this end, we already closed the trust loop — by keeping the product simple (relatively tiny attack surface) and bridging multinational certifications with independent audit of unquestionable integrity on top of a simple open protocol and reference implementations.

In the consumer space, there's no hardware product that even claims this level of security, much less achieves it.

The chip is highly secure and independently certified. Our proprietary firmware is beautifully simple and audited by Kudelski Group, look it up. https://twitter.com/kudelski/status/994105585825144832

The chip and firmware guarantee no import or export of keys is possible — the chip creates it's own unique private key and can never disclose it. There's manufacturer attestation mechanism on the same secure chip to prevent any chance of counterfeits. You don't have to trust anyone.


Correct, there's nothing between the chip and the blockchain, no company can control it — just an open NFC protocol and our open–source reference apps.

We need to take crypto to the billions.


Tangem Notes are not for small transactions — they are more likes USD 100 and EUR 500 bills, for larger transactions and savings. Technically ever Tangem Note *is* a very secure cold wallet.


Only the chip creates and controls the private key, it's impossible to export or import the key. The firmware is audited and the chip is highly certified. The manufacturer is not in control and even if Tangem disappears or is taken over, the notes will work safely, forever.

Привет! Со-основатель Tangem тут.

Суть крипты, как и интернета, в полной децентрализации. Tangem Notes содействуют этому, каждая умная банкнота — самостоятельное блокчейн–устройство, без привязки к какому-либо центру.


Tangem Notes имеют крипту внутри себя на чипе, стоимость таких банкнот в магазинах соответствует курсу BTC, плюс налог и маржа. Некоторые магазины обновляют курс раз в день, некоторые раз в минуту — решают сами по ситуации.


Это обычный BTC, прямо сейчас на Tangem Notes можно купить, например, драгоценные металлы, и сразу же продать их за сингапурские доллары. Или вывести на свой BTC–кошелёк и купить что угодно онлайн.


Всё так. Маржу определяют ритейлеры, в неё заложена стоимость банкноты. В Сингапуре биткоин к тому же облагается налогом с продаж.


Ограниченное количество специальной версии банкнот доступно с сайта компании https://tangem.com


Да, это наличный Bitcoin, старайтесь не терять наличные деньги. Приватный ключ только внутри банкноты и достать его оттуда невозможно. Пока это единственный вариант обеспечить децентрализованное хождение физического BTC.


Крипта внутри каждой банкноты и не контролируется никем, кроме физического держателя. Bitcoin из умной банкноты можно извлечь любым телефоном Android с хорошим NFC. Займёт это одну–две минуты идеального контакта с банкнотой — для безопасности.


Физические транзакции Tangem Note надёжнее, быстрее, дешевле и анонимнее ZK–схем. Единственное ограничение: транзакции физические.


Спасибо

For clarity, Singapore was just convenient to start, there's no backing from the government. We hope to expand Tangem to many countries as we solve cross–border crypto–fiat logistics, which is not yet trivial.

Paper wallets cannot be circulated reliably. Opendime comes close to circulation, but is too complicated to use and not secure enough (in our opinion) for mass adoption. Tangem Notes, we claim, are the first physical instruments ready for billion–scale everyday use by everyone who knows how to use paper cash.

You can request a free sample (we ship selectively) or order a Pioneer Kit from our homepage at https://tangem.com

The rhetorical fallacy of «cashless society» is really very simple. You're not getting rid of cash, you're replacing it with a behemoth monolith of an infrastructure which is catastrophically centralized.

We start in the ballpark of USD100 and USD500 bills because that's where the most demand is. They are not meant for coffee shops, but rather casual experimenting, savings, gifts, storage, transactions where fractions below 0.01 BTC do not really matter. They are meant to be spent physically, whole.

That said, a willing coffee shop will give you change in fiat. And we're working on another exciting solution to small payments.

It's the inability to steal that requires and leads to ultimate centralization.
That's the whole point — the notes are for all the other people, billions of them, who'd like to get into crypto, but can't since setting up and maintaining a wallet is not easy or safe for them, and buying bitcoin is even harder.

The actual truth is, 150 billion banknotes are printed every year and growth is at 9% — much more dynamic than global economy.

Think about Tangem Notes as a familiar and secure physical interface to blockchain technology that enables more people to use it. Most of the «cashless» technologies you're thinking about are incredibly centralized and controlled. For actually decentralized ecosystems, a lot more tools need to be invented, scaled, and given to the people. Tangem is one of them.


The concepts of «cards» or apps you're thinking about are inherently backed by centralized companies. Crypto is about decentralization, trustless ecosystems, reclaiming control. People need to have finer grain control over their digital assets now and a smartphone alone cannot do it without siloed hierarchies.

Does Bitcoin need smartphones, hot wallets, hardware wallets, Internet, servers, OTC desks, exchanges? Of course not, it is as beautiful in the white paper as it is in the real world.

We can't make it any less digital. Tangem Notes are just an interface. Like your smartphone wallet. But 100x more understandable and accessible to 7 billion people.


We're relatively small and young and focused on technology, but a complete rework of the website and other materials is in progress, of course.

You can extract funds from a Tangem Note by asking it, over NFC, to sign a transaction from itself to an arbitrary address. For security, the note will require a perfect connection with the smartphone for 60–120 seconds, which requires a compatible device with a good NFC sensor and carefully touching the note with it for the duration. After that the smartphone broadcasts the transaction to the network.

Tangem Notes are met with extreme enthusiasm in every market we approached. Distribution channels are setting their markups when selling loaded Tangem Notes, which includes a relatively small cost of the note itself. Our goal is to pursue the mass market in the widest sense — enabling billions of people to use crypto.


Validation is quick, technically NFC can work through stacks of cards — we're working to make this possible with some Android smartphones — and for large cashflow situations we can make note counters. For national cryptocurrencies, governments can choose to restrict extraction to accredited entities, and protect their smart banknotes with both NFC and physical measures.

Opendime is perhaps closest to Tangem Notes in terms of ideology. Like Ledger, Opendime uses secure electronics in addition to insecure chips. Our goal is to make Tangem Notes by far more secure and easier to use than any other technology on the market.

Thank you!

The current first production batch is made from the very expensive Melinex PETF by Dupont Teijin Films. It's a thinner–than–usual plastic card that is virtually indestructible. We haven't tested, but it might easily survive a thousand full cycles in a washing machine.

The cost of Tangem Notes does not currently depend on denominations, although we might consider additional security mechanisms for very high value ones like 1 BTC. Currently we only ship 0.01 BTC and 0.05 BTC.

The Notes are always denominated in crypto, they don't need to be synced — an app can show their current market value.


Haha, the idea was there from the start of Bitcoin, I think, but it was really impossible to implement. The best the community could come up with was Opendime, which is great, but not user friendly and not as secure as I would like. Tangem Notes are made possible only with the latest advances in secure microelectronics in 2017, which finally caught up with blockchain and became powerful and energy efficient enough to perform Elliptic Curve Cryptography on an NFC chip.

Tangem Notes are completely decentralized, and can be used physically or digitally.


The BTC is electronically stored on each Tangem Note, so there's zero need for any centralization or protective regulation. It's all made safe with state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms.

We're working with distributors around the world to figure out the right feature set and volume pricing. Aspects of reusability can be restricted in the basic variants meant primarily for physical circulation and fixed denominations.

The ones in the Pioneer Kit are more like full featured hardware Bitcoin wallets, only more secure, simpler to use, and much cheaper.

It's impossible for the manufacturer or anyone else to ever see the private keys — they are created and protected by an independently certified chip and audited firmware.


Nobody has to guarantee the value inside Tangem Notes — it is real Bitcoin inside and you can easily verify it with any NFC phone, and extract it to another wallet if you're sure you don't need the note anymore.


Each Tangem Note can be circulated forever — it takes a fraction of a second to validate it with any NFC phone. Tangem Notes are exactly like actual bank notes, only better — there's no risk of counterfeit, no risk of government devaluing your currency, and you can extract the value via NFC if you urgently need to send it digitally rather than physically.


We would never make Tangem Notes if there was no way to verify that it is impossible to have a copy of any private key The chip creates and protects the keys, it's a highly certified secure element with an independently audited firmware. We cannot open source the firmware at this time, but a summary from Kudelski Security will be published when they're done with their analysis. However, we are open–sourcing our reference app and the protocol.

You'll be able to get Tangem Notes without value on them. For most people, they need them loaded with Bitcoin already.


If we're successful reaching a billion people with Tangem Notes, BTC will be valued at over USD 1 million in current terms. Of course, governments will start adapting long before that.


Of course you can extract Bitcoin from Tangem Notes, you don't need their private keys for that, just a special signature. The chip cannot import a private key, only create its own unique one. The firmware is audited.


Tangem Notes are completely decentralized and do not need the manufacturer, an issuer, or any third party to keep track of it. The value is inside them on a secure chip and they can be redeemed back to blockchain at any time via NFC — the same way you validate their authenticity and current value.


Fortunately you don't need to trust the manufacturer — the Bitcoin value is inside each Tangem Note, can be verified over NFC and extracted at any time.

Tangem Notes are completely trustless and decentralized beyond the multi–party security audit — in fact more trustless than any other current way to store Bitcoin. The chip is a tiny standalone HSM designed entirely for mission critical security applications and is completely air–gapped with just a tiny API to access it. You don't need anyone to guarantee their redemption as you can redeem Tangem Notes yourself with an NFC phone using an open protocol — or our reference apps (iOS open–sourced, Android to be open–sourced).


Tangem Notes compare to mobile wallets same way fiat banknotes compare to mobile banking apps. Except mobile banking actually has banks behind them, while mobile wallets are relatively insecure. For most people without a background in engineering and security Tangem Notes are by far the safest way to store Bitcoin right now.


We want entrepreneurs, financial organizations, and governments to use the base Tangem technology for thousands of different tokens, currencies, and applications. It looks like Bitcoin will be the flagship for at least a long while.


The price tag is just for a limited edition Pioneer Kit for people who want it now, while we're rolling out normal distribution channels around the world, which takes time. The Pioneer Kit also comes with additional features which makes it useful as a highly secure hardware wallet. For retailers the cost of a basic Tangem Note is designed to nicely fit within their margins.


The chip and firmware inside every Tangem Note is designed to be secure not just against hacking, but against sporadic failures. The secure element should survive magnetic fields and pulses as well as cosmic rays better than most other electronics. It is rated for at least 40 years in operation, but is expected to last much longer than that. We apply extreme mechanical and RF testing, targeting CQM and other standards compliance.

In short, value stored on Tangem Notes should be orders of magnitude safer than that on exchanges, cloud wallets, hot wallets, cold wallets, or paper.

Anything printed is trivial to counterfeit. When you validate a Tangem Note over NFC, there's a cryptographic challenge–response authentication which is impossible to fake. In a few milliseconds the app gets the public key and a proof that the private key is on the chip, as well as another digital signature that attests the manufacturing authenticity of the item.

Since we already rely on NFC and the secure chip to establish value and authenticity, adding too many physical cues could decrease overall security by making people rely on them in some situations.

If we apply Tangem technology to national cryptocurrencies, governments can limit redemption of the crypto banknotes they issue to accredited agents that guarantee physical destruction at redemption — then people can rely on physical properties for those banknotes.