NGRAVE in 2026: The Most Expensive Hardware Wallet in the World, and the Certification Claim Nobody Checks

NGRAVE sells the most expensive consumer hardware wallet on the market. The ZERO costs 398 dollars, roughly eight times a SafePal S1 and three times a Trezor Safe 5. The entire justification for that premium rests on one claim, repeated in every review, on every product page and in every press release: EAL7, the highest security certification in the world.

That claim is more complicated than anyone has reported, and unpacking it properly is the reason this article exists.

There is a second story too. In January 2026 a group of investors acquired NGRAVE's core assets, and the language around that transaction deserves closer reading than it received at the time.

Neither of these is an accusation. NGRAVE built genuinely impressive hardware in collaboration with serious cryptographers. But a 398 dollar security product should be able to withstand the questions this article asks.

The company

NGRAVE was founded in 2018 in Belgium by Ruben Merre, Xavier Hendrickx and Edouard Vanham, with Merre as chief executive, Hendrickx as chief technology officer and Vanham as chief operating officer. The company is based in Brussels, with Antwerp also listed in several databases. [1][2][3][4]

The founding motivation is unusually concrete, and it is worth telling properly. Hendrickx was personally affected by cryptocurrency thefts and was involved in the 2017 Parity multisig incident, in which the Swarm City project lost 44,000 ETH. He joined the white-hat group that moved roughly 208 million dollars to safety in the hours that followed. All three founders describe themselves as early adopters who had been hit by crypto attacks. That is a more credible origin story than most wallet companies can offer. [5][6][7]

The engineering pedigree is real. Development was carried out in collaboration with imec, the Leuven nanoelectronics research institute, and the COSIC cryptography group at KU Leuven. Jean-Jacques Quisquater, a Belgian cryptographer at the University of Louvain with over twenty patents and more than two hundred published papers, is associated with the project. One source notes his work is cited in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. [8][9][10]

Funding history:

• June 2020: crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo raised roughly 425,000 to 432,000 dollars from 1,225 backers, the third most successful rewards campaign in Belgian history [11][12]
• January 2022: a 6 million dollar seed round led by Woodstock Fund, with Morningstar Ventures, DFG Group, Spark Digital Capital, Moonrock Capital and Mapleblock Capital [13][14]
• November 2022: a Series A led by Binance Labs, amount undisclosed [15]
• Total disclosed: approximately 6.49 million dollars across six rounds from fourteen investors [2][16]

One figure from that period is now testable, and it did not happen. In December 2022 The Block reported, from a pitch deck, that NGRAVE was seeking 15 million dollars at a 60 million dollar pre-money valuation, that the ZERO had sold in 90 countries with cumulative sales of 2.2 million dollars, that sales rose fivefold in November 2022 after the FTX collapse, and that the company projected 400 million dollars in sales for 2026. [17]

Headcount has fallen sharply over the same period. The Block reported 25 employees in December 2022 with plans to more than double. Tracxn lists 13 employees as of 31 May 2026. [2][17]

January 2026: what the restructuring announcement actually says

On 14 January 2026 NGRAVE announced that a group of long-term investors, including the Lydian Group, founded by the creators of Mangrove Capital, had acquired the company's core assets. PitchBook records the transaction as an acquisition by Lydian Group on that date. [18][19][20]

The stated ambition is to grow assets secured on NGRAVE solutions from approximately 1.5 billion dollars today to 10 billion across 2026 and 2027. Lydian is described as serving over 20 million customers monthly and transacting over 50 billion dollars annually. Quentin Grutman is chairman of the board, and the announcement states that the core technology, including firmware, operating system, cryptographic stack and the GRAPHENE backup, remains intact with zero security incidents to date. [18][21]

Two things here deserve a closer reading than the coverage gave them.

First, the phrase "acquired the company's core assets." An asset purchase, as distinct from a share purchase, is the structure typically used when a buyer wants the technology and the brand without inheriting the liabilities of the existing legal entity. Set that beside the collapse in headcount from 25 to 13, and beside a 400 million dollar sales projection for 2026 made in 2022, and the picture is of a company that hit trouble and was restructured. The announcement never says this. It was distributed as sponsored content, and the outlets that carried it, including Cointelegraph, Invezz and The Block, labelled it a press release or a paid post rather than reporting it.

To be clear about what is not established: whether the previous NGRAVE legal entity entered judicial reorganisation, liquidation or bankruptcy under Belgian law was not determined in this research, and must not be asserted. What can be reported is the asset-purchase structure and the trajectory around it.

Second, who is running the company is unclear. The January 2026 announcement says Merre "will return in his initial CEO role" and gives his contact as co-founder and chief executive. His own biography on X, however, reads "Founder and former 7y CEO of NGRAVE." These cannot both be current. Check the NGRAVE site and his LinkedIn before naming anyone. [18][22]

The product

[23][24][25][26]

The ZERO measures roughly 125 by 72 mm and weighs about 122 grams, closer to a small smartphone than a typical hardware wallet. It has a 4-inch colour touchscreen at 480 by 800 pixels, a fingerprint sensor and a camera. The body combines titanium structural elements with a polycarbonate frame, with IP55 water and dust resistance. It is manufactured in Belgium. [24][26][27]

GRAPHENE deserves more attention than it usually gets. It stores the 64-character Perfect Key across two interlocking stainless steel plates. Holes are punched through the upper plate, leaving unmarked dots on the lower one, and the dots only align correctly when both plates are stacked. NGRAVE recommends storing the plates separately, which makes it a genuine two-factor physical backup rather than a metal seed plate. Among all the backup products in this series, it is the most thoughtful. [28]

Security architecture

The ZERO is genuinely air-gapped. There is no Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, no NFC, no cellular. The USB-C port is used only for charging and firmware updates, is isolated from the rest of the device, blocks data transfer outside update mode, and requires a reboot to enable. All transaction communication happens through one-way QR codes: the unsigned transaction goes in via the camera, the signed transaction comes out on screen. [23][29][30]

Perfect Key generation blends three entropy sources: the chip's hardware true random number generator, the user's fingerprint, and a sample of ambient light captured by the camera. NGRAVE's argument is that not even NGRAVE could reconstruct the key. [26][31]

Physical protections include a metal casing that cannot be opened without leaving evidence, and tamper-responsive sensors that wipe secrets from the secure element if the device is opened after setup. Data at rest is encrypted with AES-256. [24][32]

Passphrase support allows a user-chosen sequence of 1 to 512 characters entered on the device, case sensitive and counting spaces, creating hidden wallets that are not stored on the device. Over 100 accounts can be created. [23][33]

One detail NGRAVE underplays is the most reassuring thing about the product. The Perfect Key is a 256-bit private key that can be displayed either as a 64-character hexadecimal string or as a standard 24-word mnemonic, and converted between the two on the device. The ZERO uses standard BIP44 derivation paths. That means your key is portable to any BIP39-compatible wallet, and your funds do not depend on NGRAVE continuing to exist. For a company that has just changed hands through an asset purchase, that is worth knowing. [30][34]

EAL7, examined properly

This is the section the whole article turns on, because every other review repeats the marketing without unpacking it.

What NGRAVE says. The ZERO is "the only financial product in the world that achieved EAL7 certification," described as the highest security certification available. [23][35]

What EAL7 actually means. Evaluation Assurance Level is a grade from EAL1 to EAL7 assigned after a Common Criteria evaluation. The standard's own definition is unambiguous and undercuts the marketing: the EAL level does not measure the security of the system itself, it states the level at which the system was tested. A product with a higher EAL is not necessarily more secure in a given application than one with a lower EAL, because the two may have entirely different functional requirements in their Security Targets. EAL7 does require formal mathematical verification of design and implementation, which is genuinely demanding and expensive. [36]

What the scope actually is. The certification applies to the operating system, which NGRAVE built from scratch rather than deriving from Android or another general-purpose system. The most careful review found states the precise position: an EAL7-certified operating system paired with an EAL5+ secure element. [26][37]

That is not the same thing as an EAL7 device, and it is not directly comparable to Trezor's or Ledger's EAL6+ claims, which describe the secure element chip itself. On the chip, NGRAVE is a tier below Trezor's Safe 3 and Safe 5.

The hedge in the company's own language. The January 2026 announcement describes NGRAVE as "the only cold wallet solution in the world featuring EAL7-designed security." "EAL7-designed" is a materially weaker formulation than "EAL7-certified," and it appears in NGRAVE's own press release. [18]

And one honest gap. No NGRAVE entry could be located in the Common Criteria certified products list during this research. That is not evidence that no certificate exists. Certificates are issued under national schemes and the search may simply have missed it. But a reader spending 398 dollars on the strength of a certification claim is entitled to ask for the certificate number and the issuing scheme, and to be told where to verify it. EAL7 testing was reportedly performed at imec in Leuven. [27]

The fair framing: NGRAVE's operating system underwent an unusually rigorous evaluation process that no competitor has matched, which is a real and expensive achievement. That is a different statement from "the most secure wallet in the world," which the standard itself does not support.

Open source, and what you cannot check

NGRAVE's firmware and operating system are not open source. This is the single most consistent criticism across technical reviews. [37][38][39][40]

NGRAVE's own stated position is that it "will gradually open-source except for its secure element and the secure OS that achieved EAL7 certification." In other words, the two components that actually protect the key are the two that will remain closed, permanently, by policy. [35]

One reviewer states the consequence plainly, and it is not an accusation but a statement about verifiability: because the code is partially closed, it is technically impossible for an outsider to know whether NGRAVE has any access to keys through the operating system, or whether keys could be extracted from firmware. [40]

This is the exact philosophical opposite of Trezor, which publishes its firmware and, with the TROPIC01 chip, has published a secure element design for public audit. One industry analysis frames the divide cleanly: Keystone and Coldcard bet on community-verifiable transparency, while NGRAVE and ELLIPAL bet on proprietary engineering backed by institutional certification. Both are coherent positions. Only one of them lets you check. [41]

Vulnerabilities and incidents

No publicly documented exploit, physical attack or firmware vulnerability against the NGRAVE ZERO surfaced in this research. NGRAVE states zero security incidents to date, and has publicly addressed the Dark Skippy attack class, saying it has safeguarded against that threat since launch. [18][21][9]

But that absence needs an honest caveat, and it belongs in the article. Trezor's vulnerability record is long partly because Kraken Security Labs, Unciphered and Ledger Donjon have all spent time attacking it. Tangem has three Donjon disclosures against it. Keystone published a high-severity finding from Keylabs. A closed-source device with a small user base and no bug bounty of comparable prominence presents a much smaller target for security researchers. Absence of published findings is not the same as absence of flaws.

No NGRAVE customer data breach was found either. Given that Trezor disclosed one on 13 August 2026 and SafePal on 16 August 2026, both exposing customer names and home addresses, that is genuinely worth stating, with the same caveat about a smaller customer base.

Whether NGRAVE operates a public bug bounty programme could not be confirmed.

Assets, app and the real limitation

Native support covers 15 blockchains: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Dash, Zcash, Litecoin, BNB on both Beacon Chain and BSC, XRP, Dogecoin, Tezos, MultiversX, Groestlcoin, Solana, Stellar, Polygon and Avalanche. Plus all ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, all ESDT tokens on MultiversX, and Ethereum NFTs. Total asset counts vary across sources between "over 1,000" and "around 1,500." [42][43][44]

Notable omissions: Cardano, Tron, SUI, Hedera, Kaspa and XDC. Custom tokens can only be added on Ethereum and MultiversX. [38][45]

Staking is not natively supported in the LIQUID app. NGRAVE's roadmap lists ETH staking as forthcoming. [45][46]

There is no WalletConnect support. DeFi access runs only through MetaMask and Rabby Wallet integrations, which extend coverage to 112 or more EVM chains but add friction. With MetaMask, EIP-712 typed data signing was still unsupported in the most recent documentation found, and MetaMask does not display transaction details alongside the QR code, meaning you must note or remember the details to verify them on the device. NGRAVE's own documentation acknowledges this makes verification harder, which is an awkward admission for a device sold on transaction clarity. [38][47][48]

Recurring practical complaints: QR scanning often requires several attempts, syncing slows beyond roughly 100 accounts, and the fingerprint sensor is criticised. LIQUID has its own four-digit passcode, separate from the phone's authentication. [38][49][50][51]

Cost, and what it buys

The device price is the honest part: 398 dollars or euros for the ZERO alone, 498 for the combo with GRAPHENE. There are no recurring fees, no subscription and no custody charge. [24][25][37]

At 398 dollars, the comparison is unforgiving. One reviewer puts it directly: for that money you could buy a Trezor Safe 5, a Blockstream Jade Plus and a BitBox02 and still have change left over. The same review scores the ZERO 7.5 out of 10 and concludes that the extra 200 dollars over a Keystone buys certification and premium aesthetics rather than meaningfully better key security for most threat models. [24][37]

Independent verdicts are notably split, and the article should present the spread rather than pick one. One review calls the ZERO straightforwardly the most secure consumer wallet available. Another says it does not justify the price. A third scores it 7.5 out of 10 with genuine strengths and real limitations. [24][26][37][45]

Buying one in Greece

NGRAVE ships worldwide from Belgium, with free next-day shipping on orders above 300 dollars, and payment by credit card, Bancontact or crypto. [30]

This is a genuine advantage that no review mentions, and it matters for your comparison. Because NGRAVE ships from Belgium, delivery to Greece is an intra-EU shipment with no customs procedure and no import VAT surprise. Keystone ships from Asia and ELLIPAL from Hong Kong, both of which can add import VAT plus a courier handling fee to the advertised price. A UK customer publicly complained about 76 pounds in import fees post-Brexit, which is exactly the cost a Greek buyer does not incur. [49]

At 398 euros the ZERO remains expensive. But the landed cost is the sticker price, which is not true of two of its air-gapped rivals.

NGRAVE operates an authorised reseller programme. As with any hardware wallet, buy from the official store or an authorised reseller only. [30]

Not verified in this research: whether the LIQUID app has a Greek-language interface, the exact euro price including Greek VAT, delivery times to Greece, whether NGRAVE offers Greek-usable transaction export for tax purposes, and warranty and returns terms for Greek buyers.

Credibility

Trustpilot review volume is small and growing slowly: captures show 234, then 260, 282, 309, 312, 313 and most recently 314 reviews. The profile carries no merge notice, but the low volume means the score should be cited with its capture date rather than presented as a trend. Compared against Trezor's thousands of reviews, the two numbers are not measuring the same thing. [49][52][53]

Positive themes are consistent: build quality, the air-gap design giving peace of mind, and unusually responsive customer support, with one support agent named repeatedly by customers. Several reviewers report receiving free replacement devices. [49][52][53][54]

Negative themes are specific and worth listing individually:

• Battery failure. Multiple reviewers report devices that would not charge or stopped working after months. One notes that if the battery fails you must replace the whole wallet. This is a legitimate design criticism of putting a battery in a cold storage device that may sit unused for years. [55]
• QR transactions requiring repeated attempts [49]
• Fingerprint sensor quality [52]
• Slow feature updates and lagging coin support [49]
• Price relative to competitors [56]
• Not fully open source [56]

Trustpilot labels the company page with a note that it may be associated with high-risk investments, which is a category label applied to crypto businesses generally rather than a judgement on NGRAVE. [53]

How it compares

[24][26][37][41]

The most direct comparison for a buyer who specifically wants QR-only air gapping is the Keystone 3 Pro, which several reviewers name as the obvious cheaper rival: same air gap, three secure elements, published audit reports, partially open firmware, reproducible builds, a fingerprint sensor and far broader software-wallet support, at less than half the price.

For Bitcoin-focused users, Foundation Passport at 199 dollars delivers air-gapped QR signing with open firmware, and one review argues NGRAVE's Bitcoin-specific features fall behind it.

What NGRAVE genuinely offers that they do not: the GRAPHENE two-plate backup, the fingerprint-and-ambient-light entropy model, Belgian manufacturing with an intra-EU shipping route, and an operating system that went through a formal verification process no rival has attempted.

The risks, stated plainly

1. You cannot verify the security claims yourself. The operating system and secure element are closed and will stay closed by company policy.
2. The EAL7 claim is narrower than it sounds. It covers the operating system, sits alongside an EAL5+ secure element, and the company's own recent language says "EAL7-designed."
3. The company changed hands in January 2026 through an asset purchase, with headcount down to 13. Firmware updates and support depend on the new owners continuing to invest.
4. Battery dependence. Multiple customer reports of charging failure on a device costing 398 euros.
5. Narrow chain support and no native staking. No Cardano, Tron, SUI, Hedera or Kaspa. DeFi only through MetaMask or Rabby, with degraded transaction verification.
6. Price. Three times a Trezor Safe 5, more than twice a Keystone 3 Pro.
7. The clean vulnerability record may reflect low researcher attention rather than device strength.
8. Your seed is portable, which is the real protection. The Perfect Key converts to a standard 24-word BIP39 mnemonic, so if NGRAVE disappears your funds do not.

What we could not verify

Deliberately absent above: whether the pre-January-2026 NGRAVE entity entered any formal Belgian insolvency or reorganisation procedure; Ruben Merre's current role; the current management team beyond Grutman as chairman; revenue, profitability, valuation or the terms of the Lydian transaction; whether an NGRAVE certificate appears on the Common Criteria portal and under which national scheme; whether NGRAVE runs a public bug bounty; whether the absence of published vulnerabilities reflects device strength or lack of researcher attention; the current Trustpilot score with a firm capture date; Greek-language interface, VAT-inclusive pricing, delivery times and warranty handling for Greece; and whether ETH staking has shipped since appearing on the roadmap.

Frequently asked questions

Is the NGRAVE ZERO really EAL7 certified? The certification applies to the operating system, paired with an EAL5+ secure element. That is not the same as an EAL7 device, and NGRAVE's own January 2026 press release uses the phrase "EAL7-designed" rather than "EAL7-certified." Ask for the certificate number and the issuing scheme before paying a premium based on the claim.

Is a higher EAL number always more secure? No. The Common Criteria standard states explicitly that the EAL level indicates the rigour at which a product was tested, not how secure it is, and that a product with a higher EAL is not necessarily more secure than one with a lower EAL.

Has NGRAVE ever been hacked? No public exploit, physical attack or customer data breach was found. Note that NGRAVE has attracted far less independent security research than Trezor, Ledger or Tangem, so that record is less informative than it appears.

What happens to my funds if NGRAVE disappears? The Perfect Key converts to a standard 24-word BIP39 phrase on the device, and the ZERO uses standard BIP44 derivation paths. Your funds restore on any compatible wallet.

Is it worth 398 dollars? For most buyers, no. A Keystone 3 Pro gives you the same air gap plus published audits and open firmware at less than half the price. The ZERO makes sense if you specifically want the GRAPHENE backup, the entropy model, Belgian manufacturing, and are untroubled by closed firmware.

Any advantage for a Greek buyer specifically? Yes, and it is real. NGRAVE ships from Belgium, so delivery to Greece is intra-EU with no customs procedure. Keystone ships from Asia and ELLIPAL from Hong Kong, where import VAT and handling fees can apply on top of the advertised price.

Sources

All accessed 19 August 2026.

1. Dealroom, Ngrave company profile
2. Tracxn, NGRAVE company profile, Jun 2026
3. Crunchbase, NGRAVE organisation profile
4. Crunchbase, Ruben Merre person profile
5. NGRAVE via Medium, "Interview with NGRAVE CEO Ruben Merre by Elev8"
6. imec magazine, "Will this Belgian startup democratize cryptocurrencies?", Jul 2019
7. Woodstock Fund, NGRAVE investment thesis, Jan 2022
8. NGRAVE, "About NGRAVE", ngrave.io/about-us
9. NGRAVE, "Ruben Merre: We Will Never Compromise On Your Security"
10. NGRAVE, LinkedIn company page
11. Ruben Merre, LinkedIn profile (crowdfunding figures)
12. Tech.eu, "Belgian coldest wallet engraves $6 million seed funding", Jan 2022
13. Nordic9, NGRAVE $6M seed round
14. Investing.com and CoinEdition, "NGRAVE Raises $6 Million in Seed Round", Jan 2022
15. BitDegree, "Binance Labs Makes Strategic Investment in Belgian NGRAVE", Nov 2022
16. Tracxn, NGRAVE funding rounds and investors
17. The Block, "Ngrave looks to raise $15 million Series A at $60 million pre-money valuation", Dec 2022
18. NGRAVE press release via GlobeNewswire, "NGRAVE completes strategic restructuring", 14 Jan 2026 (sponsored content)
19. Crypto Briefing, "NGRAVE completes restructuring targeting USD 10 billion", Jan 2026
20. PitchBook, NGRAVE company profile (acquisition record)
21. Metaverse Post, coverage of the restructuring announcement, Jan 2026
22. Ruben Merre, X profile biography
23. NGRAVE, "NGRAVE ZERO" product page, ngrave.io/en/zero
24. bitcoins.tools, "NGRAVE ZERO Review 2026: EAL7 Wallet Tested", Mar 2026
25. GitHub gist, "NGRAVE ZERO Review", Mar 2026
26. CoinCodeCap, "NGRAVE ZERO Review: Coldest Crypto Wallet 2026", updated Jun 2026
27. Bitcoin.diy, "NGRAVE ZERO Review 2026: The Most Expensive Air-Gap Wallet", Apr 2026
28. CryptoNews, "NGRAVE ZERO Review 2026: Is It The Most Secure Cold Wallet?", Jan 2026
29. ICOBench, "NGRAVE Wallet Review", May 2025
30. NGRAVE homepage, ngrave.io
31. hardwarewallets.net, "NGRAVE ZERO Wallet Review", Jun 2026
32. BitDegree, "NGRAVE ZERO Review", Feb 2026
33. NGRAVE ZERO product page (passphrase specification)
34. NGRAVE Help Center, "Which coins are supported" (BIP44 derivation paths)
35. NGRAVE, "NGRAVE Custom OS", ngrave.io/en/safest-operating-system (open-source policy statement)
36. Wikipedia, "Evaluation Assurance Level" (definition of what EAL measures)
37. Radio Static Dreams, "NGRAVE ZERO Review 2026"
38. CryptoNews review (coin support and LIQUID limitations), Jan 2026
39. Coinweb, "Ngrave Zero Review", Jun 2024
40. Finder Australia, "NGRAVE ZERO review 2026", Apr 2026
41. Yellow, "Top 5 Air-Gapped Crypto Wallets", Apr 2026
42. NGRAVE, "Coin Support", ngrave.io/en/coin-support
43. NGRAVE LIQUID, Google Play listing, Jul 2026
44. NGRAVE LIQUID, Apple App Store listing
45. hardwarewallets.net review (unsupported chains, staking), Jun 2026
46. NGRAVE, "Roadmap", ngrave.io/en/roadmap
47. NGRAVE Help Center, "About the integration of ZERO and MetaMask"
48. NGRAVE, "ZERO and MetaMask Integration" page
49. Trustpilot, ngrave.io reviews, page 6
50. Material Bitcoin, "NGRAVE ZERO Wallet Review", Sept 2024
51. NGRAVE, "NGRAVE LIQUID", ngrave.io/en/liquid
52. Trustpilot, ngrave.io reviews, page 5
53. Trustpilot, ngrave.io reviews, main page
54. Trustpilot, ngrave.io reviews, page 8
55. Trustpilot, ngrave.io reviews, page 3 (battery failures)
56. Trustpilot, ngrave.io reviews, page 2

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