“But hardware wallets are more secure…”

Here are some points you might still consider along with that premise:

Flexibility

You can do far more with a Frankenwallet than with the stake pool or key management tools on a hardware wallet.

We should assume the UI for hardware wallets will be state-of-the art, but some including the author will never be satisfied without a full scale, functional computer screen in the air-gapped environment… which for the Frankenwallet includes the ability to:

  • create and edit secure text documents and spreadsheets
  • access the host machine files through rich-data applications
  • prepare email and other communications (to save on the host, not send!)
  • package your crypto will & testament with the encrypted keys & seed phrases in it

…and more: limited only by your imagination and growing with your workflow needs.

Privacy

Nobody ever needs to know that you have a Frankenwallet.

As the world governments, regulators, tax authorities and criminals increase their efforts to identify cryptocurrency holders, there is a threat of security breach via the purchase or warranty records for the premium hardware wallets, which naturally require owner authentication and support.  Please see and consider: Ledger users threaten legal action after hacker dumps personal data (2020-12-20) and its repeat performance: Crypto wallet firm Ledger faces customer data breach through payment processor Global-e (2026-01-05).

Transparency

Regardless of popular assurances, you will never know whether your hardware wallet has an unintentional (or intentional) bug.

See TRM: The Largest Hardware Wallet Exploit of 2026: Inside the USD 116 Million Coldcard Hack — leading with this significant observation:

Beginning July 30, 2026, an attacker exploited a five-year-old firmware flaw in Coinkite’s Coldcard hardware wallet… The flaw traces to a March 2021 firmware release and a build configuration error that caused seed generation to fall back on a weak software random number generator rather than the device’s hardware-based source of entropy.

This is signifcant because it was caused by exactly the same kind of software chain problem that hardware wallet maximalists claim is exclusively a security risk of software wallets. And since hardware configurations in the modern world are generally derived from software, this means hardware-implemented algorithms are in theory just as vulnerable as those coded into device firmware.

Since it is impossible to avoid error or compromise in any world, the user’s best option for verifiable security is to insist on as much transparency as possible: far more obtainable in software-only environments than on generally proprietary hardware.

Autonomy

You might trust the company making the “black box” but can you trust the world itself?

Security conscious people will know that neither closed nor open platforms are perfect.  Yet there is a long standing argument supporting open source tools: that code visible to the public will quickly weed out any additions that provide “back doors” through all but unanticipated and accidental exploits.  Hardware wallet users should ask themselves if they can have that same level of trust in a device manufactured in secret: especially in this modern era when covert surveillance through electronic devices, often government-mandated, has become the rule rather than the exception.