Tangem

Tangem is a Swiss company that produces a hardware wallet in the form factor of a payment card rather than a traditional USB device. Founded in 2017, Tangem took a fundamentally different approach to the seed phrase problem: their cards have no seed phrase at all. The private key is generated and stored inside the card's secure element chip and never leaves it, eliminating the most common crypto theft vector - seed phrase theft or loss.

The Tangem wallet uses NFC (Near Field Communication) for signing. To authorize a transaction, you tap the Tangem card to your NFC-enabled smartphone. The private key signs the transaction inside the secure element without ever being exposed to the phone or app. Three cards are included per wallet set, each containing a copy of the same private key for backup purposes - if one card is lost, the others provide access. Additional backup cards can be added.

This design trades the seed phrase recovery mechanism for a card-based redundancy model. The tradeoff is significant: if all three cards are lost or destroyed simultaneously with no backup, the funds are permanently inaccessible. No seed phrase means no other recovery path.

Tangem grew significantly in 2023 and 2024 as users sought simpler hardware wallet alternatives after seed phrase exploits hit headlines. The card form factor fits in a normal wallet and requires no charging. The companion app supports 6,000+ tokens and WalletConnect for dApp interaction. The wallet is certified by CC EAL6+ secure element, the same certification level as high-security government IDs.