Your Old Game Boy Can Now Be Turned Into a Bitcoin and Ethereum Hardware Wallet

Craving both '90s nostalgia and ice-cold crypto storage? A small team of developers at crypto startup Keyp is revamping original Nintendo Game Boy handheld consoles and optimizing them to store cryptocurrency offline, transforming the popular handheld of yore into a crypto hardware wallet called the Game Wallet.

But the Game Wallet isn’t just a newfangled hardware wallet with a Game Boy console cover. In fact, the Game Wallet is far from a gimmick—it’s a brand new Game Boy game cartridge that actually uses gamification to generate users’ seed phrases through random quests and interactions with non-playable characters (NPCs). 

Once set up, the Game Wallet will be able to store any cryptocurrency that uses BIP-32 seed phrases, which means it can store coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum at launch. Its software will also be open source and available for anyone to create their own implementation, if desired.

Keyp founder Joseph Schiarizzi told Decrypt that the wallet’s game experience will be “Pokémon-like.” 

“Our primary focus at Keyp is making Web3 accessible and safe for everyone with tools like social logins and extra security layers for wallets," Schiarizzi said. "Game Wallet is a fun project [and] extension of that."

While the Game Wallet has been in development since January, Keyp's nine-person team believes the recent controversy surrounding Ledger’s new “recovery” service means a truly offline storage solution is needed. Game Wallet is marketing itself as an offline storage option that promises no firmware updates—ever.

'Backdoor' in Ledger? Here's What's Going On—And How to Keep Your Crypto Safe

A contentious new feature has been added onto all Ledger hardware wallet devices. On Tuesday morning, the announcement had Crypto Twitter buzzing.  Although advertised several weeks back in a Wired article, today’s release brought the fire from the crypto community. The feature in question is Ledger Recovery, an ID-based private key recovery service would allow users to backup their private seed phrase directly to their personal identity through three different custodians. The service will cost...

“With all the drama around the recent Ledger hardware wallet update, we realized the need for truly offline cold storage that minimizes trust,” Keyp co-founder Sascha Mombartz wrote on a Game Wallet product page.

“What started as a fun idea now seems to be a really important product," Mombartz added. "Trusting the supply chain for new security devices can be scary because we don’t know who has messed with a device, but I know exactly where the Game Boy on my shelf has been for the last 20 years."

This Guy Turned a Vintage Game Boy Into A (Very Slow) Bitcoin Miner

Stacksmashing, a pseudonymous IT researcher and YouTube content creator, has adapted a 1989 Game Boy–Nintendo’s first major portable game console–into a Bitcoin miner. Albeit a rather slow one. Mining Bitcoin on the Game Boy! Starring the @Raspberry_Pi Pico as a Game Boy Link Cable adapterhttps://t.co/fxNGoFRWVx pic.twitter.com/Xwx9I64TyD — stacksmashing (@ghidraninja) March 27, 2021 The modified Game Boy can mine Bitcoin at a “pretty impressive” hash rate of roughly 0.8 hashes per second. “If...

The Game Wallet doesn’t yet have an official release date, but Schiarizzi told Decrypt that the company plans to open pre-orders soon and is targeting a summer rollout, barring supply chain and/or technical hurdles.

This isn’t the first time crypto enthusiasts have “cryptified” the Game Boy, however. Two years ago, a pseudonymous IT security researcher turned the handheld into a Bitcoin mining device—albeit a very slow one.