You don’t usually meet a hardware Bitcoin wallet founder who could just as easily be lecturing on synapses and brain plasticity.
Yet that is exactly the lane shift taken by Dr. Douglas Bakkum, a former neuroscience researcher, and the BitBox team, creating a Swiss hardware wallet company born out of a university lab.
He tells me his fork-in-the-road moment was simple: become a professor with a boss and a tenure committee, or build something that might actually change how people hold money.
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Bitcoin
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Bitcoin
BTC
Price
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Volume in 24h
$34.49B
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won.
“I like to work on things I think will change the world. The brain is one. Bitcoin is one also,” Bakkum told as CES 2026.
After a week of obsessively digging into the tech, he realized it solved the Byzantine generals’ problem and wasn’t going away. The next problem was uglier: actually holding the stuff safely.
“It took me maybe a week until I was actually comfortable holding it… I was like, this is never gonna be adopted if this is what you have to do for security,” Bakkum says.
Here’s what to know about BitBox, the new Bitcoin wallet that makes it even easier for grandma to store.
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FTX and Mt. Gox Failed Are Proof We Need Bitcoin Wallets
We’ve already watched Mt. Gox and FTX vaporize customer funds while buying arena naming rights and celebrity endorsements.
According to CoinGecko, centralized exchanges still process tens of billions of dollars in daily volume, but the trust premium that once justified keeping coins there has been shredded.
“Every year, still, billions are lost on exchanges, either through hacks or exit scams… you do have the counterparty risk.” – the BitBox team told us
Iran's currency has collapsed and is now officially worth $0.
Iran needs Bitcoin
pic.twitter.com/s5GxaXupbt
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) January 12, 2026
Glassnode has shown a multi‑year downtrend in Bitcoin held on exchanges, with balances falling roughly a quarter from their peak as more coins migrate to self-custody.
At the same time, DeFiLlama tracks hundreds of billions in crypto assets sitting in smart contracts, making “not your keys, not your coins” more than just a meme.
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The Bull Case for a “Grandma-Ready” Hardware Wallet
What BitBox is selling is the “easiest to use” Bitcoin wallet that has hit the market.
“We really target new people in the space… a lot of our customers say this is the hardware wallet that I give to my parents, my wife, my grandparents.” -BitBox Team
The key features include:
- Up and running in four minutes
- BitBox uses an onboard microSD slot to store the seed phrase for users who don’t want to handwrite 24 words
- Its side-touch controls turn address verification and password entry into a modern and simple device to hodl
Look Mom, I'm at @CES in Las Vegas! pic.twitter.com/HvUDfBq2So
— BitBox (@BitBoxSwiss) January 7, 2026
As the BitBox team told us, “If you’re holding Bitcoin yourself, doing self custody, the regulations don’t apply to you… you can still be sovereign.”
The company ships both a Bitcoin-only wallet for purists and a multi-coin version for people who insist on dabbling in ERC‑20s and stablecoins.
“You should have the right to do whatever you want with your money… just be careful with it. Don’t get burned,” Bakkum told us.
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Key Takeaways
- You don’t usually meet a hardware Bitcoin wallet founder who could just as easily be lecturing on synapses and brain plasticity.
- BitBox is selling is the “easiest to use” Bitcoin wallet to hit markets.
The post The Bitcoin Wallet Built for “Grandma Investors:” BitBox Review appeared first on 99Bitcoins.
