The Lab — science and art, under stage lights
Review units come from manufacturers and are disclosed on every review — gifts never buy verdicts; the disclosure proves it. No paid placement, no affiliate links, ever; every link is the same one a stranger would find. Only open tech gets a comb — closed boxes are indexed once, with reasons, on the guide page. Negative results publish, with the data, and vendors get right-of-reply appended verbatim. Scores are versioned to firmware, never evergreen.
The Comb Score — six cells, no fake total
Six axes, one hexagon, in bComb's own geometry. Five cells are computable; the sixth belongs to a human, and no average hides it: ⬡ Openness · ⬡ Air-gap · ⬡ Custody law · ⬡ Build · ⬡ Art · ⬡ Ecosystem fit. A device can bench perfectly and still die in the Art cell — that verdict is data too.
On the bench now
Trezor Safe 7 / bSAFE 7
Noise XX host channel: handshake, transport, tamper-refusal — 4/4 automated tests green. Key build: PRF→Ed25519 derivation deterministic across 26 pinned-vector tests; full WebAuthn ceremony verified against a CTAP2 authenticator with PRF. Pending bench: bComb beam throughput from the device screen (the no_std renderer compiles; capture-rate runs queued), BLE-vs-optical signing latency, battery under continuous beam.
Pending write-up — first impressions logged since first-generation Trezor onward; the Safe 7 verdict publishes with the beam demo. The bar: does the countersign ceremony (fingerprint words on device) feel like a ritual or a chore?
⬡ Air-gap stock: none · fork: beam-capable
⬡ Custody law phrase floor, no exfil path
⬡ Build three hardware layers
⬡ Art awaiting the human
⬡ Ecosystem the anchor; FIDO2 rung native
Foundation Passport Prime
The maker's own frame is the right one to test: "a hardware wallet protects Bitcoin keys — Passport Prime protects your authority across Bitcoin, identity, 2FA, security keys, encrypted storage, and KeyOS apps." That's an authority platform claim, and it happens to be our own T5 doctrine said in another accent — so the bench will treat it as a claim, not a slogan: KeyOS child-seed isolation probed from a hostile app, FIDO2/PRF conformance, QR/UR capture rates, Shamir NFC-card recovery walked by a first-timer. The Art cell asks the only question that matters at 2am in a crowd: does authority feel like yours?
SeedSigner & Krux (build-party bench)
Queued: assembly-time trials with first-time builders (the build page's party doubles as the bench), stateless-boot verification, QR round-trip rates on cheap camera modules. The Art cell here is communal — six builders, six verdicts, printed unedited.
Complementary gear — completes the kit, reviewed by the same law
| Class | What & why |
|---|---|
| Steel | Metal backup plates — the 24-word floor, made fireproof. Bench: stamp legibility after heat/immersion. Open designs preferred (washer-and-stamp beats proprietary puzzles). |
| Silence | Faraday sleeves & bags — radio silence you can verify. Bench: attenuation measured, not advertised. |
| Eyes | NIR-capable camera modules & Pi kits — the builder rung's optics, and Lane-A research hardware for the bSAFE device path. |
| Mesh | LoRa radios & open mesh nodes (Meshtastic-class) — bMeshNetWork's field layer; what carries the stack when festival towers choke. |
| Touch | NFC/RFID reader-writers — study the closed wristband systems (EDC/Tomorrowland) to surpass them; program the open ones. |
| Pulse | Open wearable dev kits (PineTime/Bangle.js-class) — Lane-B presence research; the open-ring gap is still an open invitation. |
| Software shelf | FOSS only: Sparrow, Nunchuk, Electrum-class coordinators, the BNR surfaces & offline recovery tool. Multisig quorums exercised air-gapped end to end. |
Same law as everything above: open designs, direct links, zero affiliates. If a category has no open option worth listing, the row says so — that gap is an assignment for the build page.