Mycelia ethereum wallet
The epoxy has to be removed first before the chip can be desoldered from the motherboard, so here I have begun to scrape away at it from the sides. To remove the potting epoxy and desolder the EMMC chip so it can be read from I have a setup with a microscope, hot air soldering station, and other assorted soldering irons.
The EMMC chip has been desoldered from the motherboard now. Here you can see a better view of the black potting epoxy that has been used to encase the chip. The silver pads beneath where the chip used to go are the pads on the motherboard that connect to the chip.
I put the chip into a vise so I can begin cleaning it up and removing any left over potting epoxy and solder. I quickly opened up the databases in an SQLite database GUI but did not find anything that immediately indicated a private key of sorts.
However, I decided that in the unlikely chance that Mycelium does not encrypt the private keys more on this later , I could simply copy the database onto a working device and see if Mycelium would open it for me instead of having to parse through the database and search for the private keys manually.
Luckily though there was a Moto G4 running Marshmallow at the shop, so unlocking the bootloader and rooting the device was about as simple and straightforward as it could get.
One swipe later and I was officially a super user! I copied over the recovered database folder to a microSD and put it into the phone. And then downloaded Mycelium wallet and Solid Explorer from the Play store.
The wallet has been recovered! I now have full access to the private keys and can transfer them to cold storage or another wallet. For better or for worse, I suspect the main reason why I was able to recover the wallet relatively easily once I had access to the old filesystem was due to: The EMMC chip is surrounded by potting epoxy. Tools being used to remove the EMMC chip. Desoldered the EMMC chip from the motherboard.
Lots of potting epoxy underneath it. With entropy, a small USB device that uses hardware based entropy to create paper wallets, we earned some money. We have a well recognized brand and now we try to monetize our brand. I think the financing of wallet development is a general problem. There is no way to make money with the wallet itself. There is the idea to charge for transactions, but than people leave and use other wallets. The only way to earn money with wallets is to provide a service on top of it.
Coinbase and circle for example sell bitcoins, ledger or trezor sell hardware. We made some money by integration third party services, like cashila, and with local trader we earn a small income with fees.
Mycelium is made for advanced users. There are a lot of of Bitcoin wallets, and some are simple — you have an acount, and you can send and receive money. With Mycelium you have different types of accounts and we support third-party-services, like trezor. We also allow to build a paper wallet and to sign a message with your key.
Recently you announced a big new release at the end of the year. Can you tell me something about your plans? The idea of Mycelium is to bundle multiple services in the wallet. The way the wallet is designed, we are the only ones who can add features.
Any time a third-party wants to have their service added, they have to come to us and we have to make it. This takes much time from our developers. The new wallet will be designed more modular: Third parties can use our APIs and build plugins by themself, and users can add the plugin they wish to use. The same we make with Bitcoin itself. By now we use a specific bitcoin code we wrote ourself. That makes it difficult to switch to another blockchain.
But we make bitcoin modular itself, as a plugin, so we can add other blockchains, another currencies, and another protocols like colored coins and so on. This allows us to concentrate on the security and focus on bitcoin specific improvements. For example we plan to support coin-shuffle and stealth adresses to enhance privacy, or multi-sig for security. Another big announcement was the crowdsale of shares in Mycelium. Can you explain this?
The wallet will be a separate entity and decoupled from the rest of our company. We are selling 5 percent of the wallet division. If this happens, the share will be converted to something that pays out dividend. We build the token on colored coins. Anybody can trade them and prove he is the owner. You need the colu-wallet to save them now, but we are working on adding colored coins to Mycelium.
We are working on Segregated Witness for a few month.