I think it's comparable to more "traditional" hardware wallets: the chip we use is very similar to the one used by Trezor, so we have a very similar security model.

On top of that our device doesn't have a battery so it's completely offline when not in use. And we use NFC, which is a very simple stack with pretty low attack surface, so compared to other mobile-compatible devices based on Bluetooth we should have a security advantage, at least on paper. 

afilini

interesting.

do you view Portal as being more or less secure than existing hardware wallets that aren’t designed to be mobile-first?

bitcoin

Alekos Filini AMA

I was initially trying to build a better version of the famous NFC lightning cards - I wanted to add a display so that the user could confirm how much they are paying.

I built that thing and showed it to a bunch of people, and I got pretty negative feedback about it: nowadays lightning is still mostly used for smaller payments, so people want the most convenience, not the most security.

So i ended up repurposing the hardware for a different use-case, on-chain transactions, where security is even more critical.