Original source: OneKey
OneKey is taking a step towards the unicorn club in the Web3 encryption field.
The user assets and Defi scale stored by this open source encrypted hardware wallet (cold wallet) company have increased 11 times in the past three years, and product sales have increased at an average annual rate of nearly 300%.
It is reported that OneKey announced the completion of its Series B financing, with a valuation of US$150 million. This round was led by YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs), which is its largest investment in the hardware wallet field to date. Past supporters include top venture capital institutions such as Dragonfly, Ribbit Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.
This six-year-old startup with 60 employees is known for its open source code, security reputation, and low-key and pragmatic qualities. Its products have been long adopted by major exchanges and well-known project parties.
"From day one, OneKey has been a completely open source product. We are confident in our code and the community can be confident too."
——Yishi Wang, Founder and CEO of OneKey
Asset security requires a hard core
For new crypto users, whether using Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron or Solana, managing private keys is always a painful thing.
Many people use plug-in wallets that generate private keys in an online environment. Some people don't want to worry about the details of private keys and put their funds in large exchanges such as Binance. But if you really want to control your private keys and isolate risks such as network attacks, Trojan infections, and backdoor vulnerabilities, then choosing an open source and audited and trusted hardware wallet or cold wallet is the only way.
Earlier this year, a well-known "LuMao multi-opening browser" was exposed to have quietly updated its code, resulting in the theft of private keys of a large number of ordinary users and LuMao studios. Fortunately, many studios used OneKey hardware wallets, and the physical isolation and manual confirmation of private keys allowed them to escape.
According to WeChat Index statistics, OneKey has a higher mind share among Chinese users than any other similar products, and is currently the most recognized hardware wallet. It is also the only hardware wallet that has been co-branded and adopted by leading exchanges such as Binance, OKX, Bybit and Bitget.
In an offline event for security experts, OneKey's technical team demonstrated their strength in security design. At that time, a hacker stole more than $1.5 billion from an exchange because the hardware wallet used could not parse the complex calls of the Safe contract, and only displayed a string of illegible codes on the device, which eventually led to the operator's mistaken authorization.
If the OneKey series of products are used, the transaction will be correctly parsed, the call structure will be fully displayed, and a risk warning will be given. This is possible because OneKey has long invested extremely high resources in contract parsing and interactive security for hardware wallets and App wallets.
The average selling price of a hardware wallet is just over $100. No one wants to pay a sky-high "security tuition fee". Between the purchase cost and the painful price, hardware wallets are the obvious choice.
In the open source field, OneKey has maintained a very high level of activity, and the issue and PR processing speed of the Github repository even exceeds that of many well-known software companies. Community users can review and reproduce the entire code and firmware compilation process of OneKey at any time, which provides users and security experts with unprecedented transparent audit capabilities.
Compared with many closed-source hardware wallets in the industry, OneKey has achieved full open source from hardware to underlying firmware and UI. OneKey believes that true security comes from complete transparency.
Beyond cycles and pushing boundaries
The company has achieved some success in the Asian market and is now setting its sights on overseas markets with great ambition.
In the corridor of JW Marriott Hotel Hong Kong, Yishi Wang was running for the annual Web3 event. He said to investors as he walked quickly: "Our team is distributed in many countries and regions such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Dubai, Italy, etc., and our dealer system is spread across many economies around the world. If we were just a remote team for Web3 online products, the path would be very direct; but we are a fintech company that makes hardware, and it is a huge challenge to manage complex supply chain collaboration and technical closed loops."
The other side of complexity and difficulty is the moat. In the face of challenges, the core members of the team are confident. OneKey Chief Growth Officer Niq Chen is an early participant in the NFT circle and a well-known collector. As a member of Generation Z, after experiencing two bull market bubbles in the cryptocurrency circle, he deeply realized: "What is really worth doing is products and companies with long-term influence and value, and doing challenging things with excellent people."
Currently, OneKey's growth in the German-speaking region is much greater than in other markets. Users from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland report usage issues every day through social networks, email, and other channels. As a result, the team quickly launched German support.
In Brazil, OneKey also performed beyond expectations. The team traced the source and found that some key opinion leaders in the crypto community initially tried and actively recommended OneKey, which led to its explosive spread. It also attracted many local dealers and even OTC offline stores to actively join and promote it.
Mildred, Chief Sales Officer of OneKey, said: "This has given us a lot of inspiration. If we penetrate the product strength, solve real needs and satisfy customers, the overseas market can grow naturally."
[Many bloggers recommended it at Binance Blockchain Week offline event in Dubai]
Yishi has always expressed his pioneering stance on technology and talent on social media. He publicly stated that he could not accept engineers who could not use AI coding efficiently and safely in 2025. This statement caused a lot of controversy, but he still firmly holds pioneering requirements for technical talents.
He did not shy away from expressing his desire for smart people and high efficiency: "Different team sizes and different smart people determine that the organizational style is completely different from that of traditional large companies. I think it is not excessive for the DeepSeek team to have an average annual salary of 1.5 million US dollars, because their RPE is an order of magnitude higher than Pinduoduo." In Yishi's view, AI has greatly improved personal output efficiency. The same tool can produce completely different results when used by different people. "The AI era has rewritten the efficiency model. If you use old standards to recruit people, you will only recruit outdated people."
The members of this entrepreneurial team come from ByteDance, DJI, OPPO, etc. They have established an internal security laboratory OneKey Anzen, which specializes in testing and cracking various existing hardware wallets on the market for security research.
In the past six months, the crypto market has been turbulent, and many entrepreneurs are worried that the macroeconomic downturn and the collapse of the financial system will become a huge obstacle in the crypto field. Yishi also knows that in this cycle, we should not expand blindly or pile up people in a disorderly manner. "We may be one of the companies in the world with the largest amount of funds served by a single employee." He paused, "There are people who leave in every crypto cycle, but we are always there. Without patience, you can't be the iPhone of the crypto industry."
"I brought together a group of crazy people who really understand encryption, hardware, and security. These people are challenging boundaries all day long and repeatedly denying themselves. They are not calculating KPIs, but building a set of things that we think are right."
[OneKey CTO, CEO and COO with CZ]
[OneKey Eco Lead Cavin shared safety practices at an event]
Opening the ceiling: secure on-chain financial management
After the OneKey Earn module was launched on Morpho’s USDC current product, the subscription amount exceeded US$62 million in a very short period of time.
"We have almost become the golden sunflower for attracting Defi users on the chain." Yishi sighed. In his opinion, there are only two modes in the crypto industry that can make huge profits: one is to issue assets, and the other is to participate in asset circulation and provide irreplaceable services, such as exchanges and wallets.
With considerable positions accumulated on the chain, Defi users began to actively approach us, hoping to capture on-chain profits while using hardware wallets for self-custody. For this purpose, OneKey built the Earn module, emphasizing that it does not custody user assets, only provides a secure entry, and focuses on making secure Defi hardware wallets and software wallets.
But it goes far beyond that. Yishi said that Defi on-chain financial management actually has greater room for imagination:
Capturing protocol subsidies and public chain incentives is the first step. We will launch structured products in the future. Taking Pendle as an example, its PT/YT model can split the right to income and the right to principal to adapt to the time preferences of different users. However, the order book on the market is currently inefficient, and the token is systematically misvalued.
He envisions building a basket of LP pools to match liquidity according to different time preferences and improve overall market efficiency. The financial Lego properties of the DeFi market give us unprecedented freedom. We have the opportunity to combine unlicensed secure self-custody to provide users with flexible, efficient, and in-depth investment tools, which is something that traditional finance cannot do.
Yishi wrote this in Slack: "If you always keep your eyes on your competitors, you will forget what features users really need. The most important thing for a company is always to make the right decision, not to make small changes. It is useless for people to over-consume details, and success cannot be achieved by physical strength alone."
[Yishi has a golden frog on his desk in Hong Kong, which was given by Ribbit Capital. It is Ribbit’s signature gift for portfolio projects.]
The story of hardcore financial security technology continues
OneKey did not rush to occupy the dazzling narrative, but chose to focus on the most basic and least pleasing parts. In a fast-changing, frenetic narrative-driven industry, this slow and continuous advancement is less "addictive" but more rare.
As they wrote in the YZi Labs Twitter announcement - OneKey adheres to the values of focus, duty, and perfection. On the road to creating the most extreme, most secure, and most user-friendly open source hardware wallet, they are deeply exploring and never ending.
OneKey Official Introduction
Founded in 2019, OneKey is one of the world's best-selling and most secure open source hardware wallet and cold wallet brands.
Its core concept of being completely open source from day one has won the trust of billions of assets. All its hardware and software codes have passed the security audits of SlowMist and Offside Labs, and are completely open source on Github for community review. With its excellent quality, OneKey has received financing support and adoption from top investment institutions such as Yzi Labs, Coinbase, and Dragonfly.
$99 entry-level security hardware + free app = $100M-level institutional-level security solution. OneKey’s vision is to make institutional-level full-link security asset self-custody technology available to every crypto citizen in an open-source, permissionless manner.
OneKey Products:
Classic 1S / 1S Pure: Best-selling entry-level ultra-thin credit card style cold wallet.
OneKey Pro: Air-gapped signature, encrypted fingerprint verification, wireless charging, providing top-level true wireless security protection.
All hardware wallets are equipped with EAL6+ industry's highest level security chip + anti-theft self-destruction technology, and support almost all chains.
OneKey App: Supports 60+ blockchains (including Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB chain, Tron chain, Solana, XRP, Cardano, etc.), supports multiple asset types including NFT, covers mobile phones, computers, browser extensions and web versions, and easily accesses the Web3 ecosystem. Supports advanced website and contract anti-phishing detection, signature result simulation analysis and other security features.
OneKey official website: https://onekey.so/
This article is contributed by a contributor and does not necessarily represent the views of BlockBeats.