Konstantin Shulga, CEO of Tangem – Interview Series

Konstantin Shulga is CEO of Tangem, bringing nearly two decades of experience across capital markets, institutional trading, and consumer financial services. Before taking the role, he co-founded Finery Markets, an electronic communications network serving institutional digital asset participants, and built a retail investment brokerage business in Europe. Having previously served on Tangem’s board, he now leads its expansion from hardware wallets into a broader financial platform built around self-custody.

Tangem is a Swiss-based company developing hardware wallets and non-custodial software for managing digital assets. Its card and ring wallets use NFC to connect with a smartphone app, while its broader ecosystem includes a mobile wallet and integrations for trading, staking, decentralized applications, and payments. In this interview, Shulga discusses hardware security, recovery, immutable firmware, lessons from institutional markets, and the evolution of wallets into everyday financial interfaces.

Before joining Tangem as CEO, you co-founded Finery Markets and spent much of your career building infrastructure for institutional trading and capital markets. What originally led you into digital assets, and how did that journey ultimately bring you to Tangem and the consumer side of crypto?

I’ve spent almost 20 years in capital markets, across both institutional and consumer businesses. Before founding Finery Markets, I built one of the largest retail investment brokerage businesses in Europe. So moving to Tangem is, in many ways, a return to the consumer side.

What attracted me to digital assets was the opportunity to build financial infrastructure from the ground up. The market was developing quickly, but institutions were missing many of the tools they expected in traditional finance. We founded Finery Markets to address that through an electronic communications network serving banks, brokers, payment providers and market makers.

With Tangem, the opportunity is to bring that same ambition to everyday users. As a board member, I saw how strongly the community responded to the product. People genuinely valued its simplicity and the control it gave them.

That feedback loop is what I love about consumer businesses: you build something useful and see the response from hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Tangem combines that customer enthusiasm with some of the greatest growth potential I’ve seen in my career. The next step is to turn a product people already trust into their primary financial app.

Hardware wallets have become an increasingly competitive category. When the core promise of every hardware wallet is essentially secure self-custody, how does Tangem differentiate itself beyond simply claiming to be secure?

Every hardware wallet claims to be secure, so the claim itself carries no information. I judge a security product the way I judge a trading venue: by its track record, its independent audits, and its behavior under stress.

In terms of track record, Tangem has more than 6 million wallets in the field and has had zero funds lost to a breach since its launch in 2017. On verification, Kudelski Security and Riscure audited our firmware, Cure53 audited our mobile SDKs, and our chip carries EAL6+ Common Criteria certification.

Most crypto losses come from people: lost seed phrases, phishing, and failed backups. Tangem removes those failure points by design.

The hardware wallet itself is simple and stealthy. A black ring on your finger or an obscure card in your pockets—no cables, no batteries, or embedded components. Simplicity here is the security feature.

The second differentiator is what happens after you secure your assets. In one app, Tangem users can trade, earn yield, access DeFi, and spend with a non-custodial Visa card.

There are several players in the hardware space but no one is nowhere near close to Tange, when it comes to daily finance usability. The Tangem hardware wallet is one part of a financial platform built on self-custody. The market sees hardware wallets as safes, and we see the safe as just a foundation.

Tangem puts the secure element into a card or ring and uses a smartphone as the primary interface rather than a screen and buttons. What were the design trade-offs behind this architecture, and how do you address users who believe a dedicated screen provides an additional layer of security?

We designed Tangem around one question: what does the average person already carry and trust? Modern smartphones already have high-quality screens, fast processors, secure elements, biometrics, and NFC antennas.

A second screen, a battery, and buttons in a separate device add cost, failure points, and friction. Batteries die, cables break, and update prompts become an attack vector of their own.

So we made the cleanest choise:the phone handles the display, and the private key stays in a certified secure element that no phone, app, or server ever touches.

I respect the screen argument, but the market overstates its importance. A dedicated screen protects the user only when they read and verify a long address on a tiny display, and most users confirm what they see without checking it anyway.

Attackers know this, which is why blind signing and drainer contracts hit screen-based hardware wallets every month. A screen is only as good as the human reading it.

Our answer is to make the transaction readable where the user actually looks. We invest heavily in the app layer. The Tangem app treats the phone as hostile territory, with runtime integrity checks, anti-debugging, anti-emulation, root and jailbreak detection, encrypted storage, and certificate validation. On top of that, tapjacking protection blocks invisible overlays, and secure input handling detects rogue keyboards.

Physically, the card or ring has no battery and no always-on connection. It draws power from the phone’s NFC field only when signing a transaction.

Tangem emphasizes that private keys are generated and remain within an EAL6+ certified secure element, while the firmware has undergone independent audits. What attack vectors concern you most today, and how does the security model protect users against threats ranging from physical device compromise to malicious applications and supply-chain attacks?

The attacks that worry me most are the ones that scale. Phishing, malicious token approvals, address poisoning, and fake apps on app stores steal far more crypto every year than hardware exploits ever have.

Our security model starts from that reality and works through three layers.

The first layer is the chip. A certified hardware generates the private key within a certified secure element, and the key never leaves that chip.

The second layer is the device lifecycle. Keys are created only when the user creates the wallet, so no key exists at the factory, during shipping, or on our servers. The app verifies that each card/ring is genuine before setup.

The third layer is the software. The phone never holds the key, so a compromised phone or malicious app cannot extract it.

Supply-chain security follows the same logic. A device that ships with no key, no seed, and no updatable firmware gives an attacker nothing to pre-load, swap, or push later.

Stronger security can often come at the expense of usability and recovery. Tangem allows users to create backups across multiple devices and also offers optional seed-phrase support. How do you determine the right balance between reducing single points of failure and making recovery understandable for mainstream users?

A seed phrase on paper scores well in theory and poorly in practice, because people lose it, photograph it, or type it into phishing sites.

Tangem solves this with redundancy with hardware. A Tangem set includes two or three devices that share the same wallet, so a user keeps one at home and carries the other.

Users who want a seed phrase can choose one at setup. Experienced holders who run several wallets or want an offline record select it, and mainstream users skip it.

The right balance comes from matching the recovery model to the user. We set a default that protects beginners, and we also give advanced users full control over the alternative.

Tangem’s hardware firmware is non-updatable, which reduces the possibility of malicious firmware updates but also means functionality cannot simply be patched. Why did Tangem make that architectural choice, and how will you manage newly discovered vulnerabilities or changing cryptographic requirements over a device’s lifetime?

With immutable firmware, nobody can push malicious code to a Tangem card: no attacker, rogue insider, or third party. The code a user receives is the code that independent auditors reviewed.

Long-term risk is managed at three levels. At the software level, the app evolves continuously, so we add networks, tokens, features, and protective checks without touching the hardware’s firmware.

At the hardware level, we release new device generations, each incorporating the latest chip capabilities. The wallet on the market today is the second generation of the Tangem Wallet.

At the research level, we run a bug bounty program and commission independent audits. Cryptographic change, including the long-term question of quantum computing, plays to the strength of our hardware cycle. Our device generations turn over far faster than any credible timeline for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.

Tangem has expanded beyond its hardware products with a mobile wallet, which recently underwent an independent Cure53 security audit. How do you view the respective roles of mobile wallets and dedicated hardware wallets, and what types of users or asset balances should determine when someone moves from one security model to the other?

Treasury desks solve this problem every day. They keep operating cash close and fast, and they keep reserves in the vault.

A Tangem Mobile Wallet can be an operating account. It is still fully self-custodial with 3 backup options: seed phrase, cloud backup, and the Tangem hardware wallet. Users can start with the mobile wallet, and when their balance grows, they upgrade security to a card or ring and move savings to cold storage without learning a new product or leaving the ecosystem.

My rule of thumb is emotional before numerical. If losing the balance on your mobile wallet would ruin your month, it belongs on hardware.

Your background spans institutional electronic trading, crypto market infrastructure, and now consumer self-custody. What lessons from traditional financial markets still need to be incorporated into digital asset infrastructure before crypto can support significantly broader institutional and mainstream adoption?

Traditional markets learned their lessons through crises, and crypto is repeating the curriculum. Three lessons matter most.

First, separate the functions. In traditional finance, execution, clearing, settlement, and custody are handled by different regulated entities, and FTX showed exactly what happens when one company handles everything with customer money.

Second, price counterparty risk. Institutions need credit-screened trading, independent settlement, and clear rules on who holds what, and retail users need the same clarity in language they understand.

Third, make security verifiable. SOC 2, Common Criteria, and independent audits exist because trust must be demonstrated, and every serious crypto company should publish its evidence.

Market structure is the remaining gap. Crypto is the most fragmented asset class in history, spread across hundreds of venues, and equities went through the same consolidation in the 1990s when electronic trading connected them.

Mainstream adoption will come when people can use crypto without becoming experts, and when the underlying infrastructure is boring, reliable, and verifiable. This is the standard I bring from capital markets to Tangem.

As wallets evolve into interfaces for swapping, staking, payments, decentralized applications, and potentially tokenized real-world assets, where do you see the boundary between providing useful financial functionality and introducing additional security or counterparty risks into a self-custody product?

The boundary is simple: the key never leaves the user. Every feature we add must pass that test, and anything that requires us to hold customer funds fails it.

Inside that boundary, users gain enormous functionality. They swap through third-party liquidity, stake onchain, connect to dApps, and spend with a card, and they sign every step with their own key.

Each integration brings its own risks, and our job is to make those risks visible. Smart contract risk, protocol risk, and counterparty risk with a liquidity or payment partner are real, and the user deserves to know about them.

Market infrastructure taught me to separate roles. Tangem provides the interface and the security layer, specialist partners provide liquidity, staking, and payments, and no single party controls both the assets and the execution.

Tokenized real-world assets follow the same logic. A tokenized treasury bill or equity in self-custody gives the owner control over something that tracks the asset, a structural upgrade over holding a claim through a chain of intermediaries.

Done right, more functionality reduces total risk. Users who do everything from their own wallets stop parking funds on centralized platforms, where the largest crypto losses occur.

Looking several years ahead, do you expect the concept of a standalone “crypto wallet” to remain distinct, or will wallets increasingly become a broader financial identity and asset-management layer spanning cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, tokenized securities, payments, and other forms of digital ownership?

The standalone crypto wallet is a transitional product. In five years, people will stop saying “crypto wallet” the same way they stopped saying “internet banking.”

The wallet is where you hold, earn, spend, collect, and own. That is the direction we are building at Tangem: a crypto-first financial platform built around self-custody.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more about hardware wallets, self-custody, and everyday digital asset management should visit Tangem.