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Edge AMA: Duress Mode The Backup Plan for Real-World Crypto Threats
Recorded: June 5, 2025 Duration: 0:32:51Space Recording
Short Summary
Edge Wallet introduces innovative 'dress mode' feature to enhance user security, amidst rising concerns over crypto-related attacks, while preparing for the launch of version 4.29 with new staking capabilities.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Okay.
So I am live.
You guys can hear me okay?
Mine doesn't let me.
Yes, I can hear you.
I'm getting rj set up
all right i'm not able to monitor the riverside part but i don't think that's important so
yes no worries. Let's see.
Did you hop off? Awesome.
Okay, I think we're good. I think we're good.
I think we're good.
A little bit of echo on your side, Arjun. you
got an echo michael no you're too? Yeah, we're good to go, but I'm still waiting maybe for a few more minutes.
There's only one other person. Yeah, for sure. Go ahead and get started. You guys can chat, maybe in like two minutes.
I'm just going to.
Okay.
All right.
Well, what's going on, Michael?
Hey.
So, we haven't done Spaces in a while.
I think we have one person right now.
It's kind of nice to be back doing this.
We used to do this on a regular basis for a few months.
That was like, what, two years ago?
How many years ago was this?
Like two, three years ago every week?
I think it was about two years ago.
We would do it once a week, which I think the frequency this time around is going to be a little bit less than that.
It looks like this time around, for the one listener, RJ has kind of been piecing this together a bit more than I was.
Before, it was much more freeform.
I will say that this time it feels like we're going to start talking about features and things like that, which is pretty cool.
I was kind of looking at your outline for it.
So I'm excited to dive into it. I think we're going to give it a couple more minutes to see if we can get some people to listen.
But otherwise, do you know if it's going to be hosted live after this?
Or I don't see the intent.
Edge will probably repost it afterwards
so other people can listen to it afterwards.
Awesome, awesome, awesome.
Yeah.
Hey, Mark. And one
one man down. How's it going?
One man, Dan, part of our support team joining us.
OK, so it looks like as far as Mark is concerned and then whoever else is going to join, just kind of quick intros, I'd imagine, is due, right?
Is anybody else having a hard time hearing Michael really quickly?
I received a message saying that they can't hear, so listeners, feel free to let us know.
Am I quiet?
Yeah, Elizabeth says some of the listeners can't hear you.
So I think she's checking up on Dan, Daniel.
up on uh on dan daniel
what is with kenny you hear me or hear michael or is this just like
okay so we want to call this one off or
oh the riverside okay Oh, the Riverside. Okay.
So scrap the Riverside.
Okay.
I was going to say, I'm coming through on spaces.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
That was my question.
That was my question on the Riverside part.
Like I knew I had to mute my mic in order for this to work.
So that's why next time around I can route it different, but my audio is not built for what we're doing.
Yeah, we're good.
Yeah, we're good at least on Spaces.
So don't worry about it, Michael.
We'll come over to Riverside next time.
Yeah, we'll do a little test before.
Okay.
Well, yeah, anyhow.
But as far as Spaces is concerned,
we're good audio-wise or no?
Yeah, we're good.
Okay, cool.
Okay.
Okay.
Let's start where we left off.
Kick it off, Michael.
You want to introduce yourself first?
Sure.
All right.
So for those that don't know, I'm Michael McMurray.
I am the head of the support team over here at Edge, leading great people
like Dan, who's here, and then Jared, Alberto, and David. And then go ahead and introduce
yourself. Yeah, my name's RJ. I've been with Edge for quite a bit. I've done support, lots of QA. I basically find the bugs along with David and some other QA staff.
So, yeah, nice to be here.
For those that don't know what Edge Wallet is,
Edge Wallet originally started as AirBits back in 2014.
We were a Bitcoin-only wallet.
Later, we transitioned into a multi-asset wallet, focusing on privacy and, you know, being non-custodial.
And rebranded as Edge Wallet, I think around 2016 or 2017.
And from there, yeah,
we've been primarily focused on privacy and self custody as a wallet.
Yeah.
And yeah, so today's topic, we're basically going to talk about a new feature that was
rolled out a few weeks ago in 4.27, dress mode.
So for users that are wondering, like dress is basically, you know, like, it's all over
like something harsh or you're going through something like a severe treatment. So then if you combine mode or dress mode, you're basically in a harsh mode or in a mode where you're under severe treatment.
Or in this case, you might be being forced to do something that that's against your will.
And dress mode is basically entering a mode where it's like a silent cry for help,
mode is basically entering a mode where it's like a silent cry for help where you can trigger and
log into an account with still your account but with different wallets with different funds so
that if you were attacked you wouldn't be accessing your your account with all your real funds
right like a panic mode uh for a lot of um a lot of cases, wrench attacks and things like that, right?
I think ultimately, too, crossing borders, I think, is part of where a big appeal is.
But yeah.
Yeah.
So users probably have had this out already for quite a bit.
But if not, basically to enable dress mode,
you would find this in the settings of your account.
And if you unlock the account settings,
there's a dress mode that you can enable.
And when you enable dress mode,
there's a pin that you can set.
And if you were to log out and log in with this new pin
for dress mode, that would log still into your account,
but in a mode where almost everything
looks the same, you still have to create a wallet for the first time. But that's the
mode where you could load up a wallet with some funds so that if you were to get robbed into
feature, you could log in that dress mode and then send the attacker, you know, like $50 or
you know, like $50 or whatever that wallet was set up before.
whatever that wallet was set up before.
Right. So then you're safeguarding your actual large account. So say you have, you know,
a much larger amount of Bitcoin, this would be a way to obfuscate that slightly. So the attacker
thinks they're actually getting something, you know, imagine a few dollars in your wallet that
you just hand to them, but then you're able to cancel your credit cards on the back
end.
That's a similar scenario.
Exactly.
Michael, do you know of any other wallets off the top of your head that has this kind
of safety feature or address mode that logs you into an account with, you know, funds that
you could spend?
Zero.
Yeah.
Yeah. When we when we were pitching this idea, I started hearing about it as far as
it was like an idea I heard come trickle up from the devs.
I didn't know this was something we're going to do before that.
Did look at other wallets and yeah, it's something I've never even heard of.
So that was kind of innovative, this kind of idea to create an additional layer
to hide your funds.
Right, and with address mode,
is there anything in Edge that looks different
when you're in address mode compared to the real login
or normal mode?
From my understanding, it is a mirror identical.
So when you go into address mode,
you cannot differentiate the two.
Yeah, so that's the exact idea. So we want it where it's you can't distinguish whether
you know, the user is a normal mode or in dress mode. So it looks exactly the same. Even, you
know, changing account settings and whatnot will be affected also as if it's the real account.
not will be affected also as if it's the real account.
Right.
One of the nice parts too, is the,
these this concept of having it in dress mode at all times.
Even if you leave your device somewhere now,
all of a sudden there's an additional layer
to protect your phones as well.
Something I was thinking about other like use cases for this,
you know, you leave your phone at a restaurant or something like that,
and someone knows your pin or even if it was left open. Yeah, you know, you're still protected. So
just dress mode in general is a nice feature to protect your account.
Yep. And even if you have multiple accounts, so say you have a second or a third account on edge,
if you're logged in or you triggered dress mode, if you're logged in or you triggered Dress Mode,
if you were to log in any of the other accounts,
it would still continue to be in Dress Mode.
Even if you do a full password or biometric login,
it would still continue in Dress Mode.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
And given that the additional other accounts
that you have were also set up in Dress Mode.
So you still have to make sure that your other accounts were enabled have were also set up in dress mode. So you still have to, you know, make sure that the other accounts were enabled
with the rest mode and also you have some wallets loaded up.
So, Michael, what are some attack vectors or scenarios that could play out or maybe
something that you've seen in support where if we maybe had this, you know,
in the early days of Edge Wallet could have prevented or saved a user from you know a
wrench attack so fortunately in support i actually don't have any stories of people losing funds to
a wrench attack uh i've been with edge what going on five years at this point. Fortunately, you know, no wrench attacks that I remember.
However, the big one that I think is nice for this is with new regulation and crossing borders being something where people are, you know, scared of moving funds, not advocating for anything illegal, by the way.
of moving funds not advocating for anything illegal by the way um but this idea is you can
have a dress vote on and cross borders with little fear of them locating any actual large sums of
money um you know as we move into a self-custody world people are going to start holding larger
sums of money on their person and crossing borders is one place where we kind of want to be able to protect that.
You know, if you're not using a bank and you, you travel, you still may have a lot,
large sums of money on you and they don't need to know that that's your, that's your, your wallet, your account. That's your business. Yeah. Yeah. So it almost sounds like that's
a big use case for me. That's, that's what, that's what I really find dress mode to be appealing for.
That's my big one.
Obviously, there's protection for bad actors and wrench attacks and things like that.
But that's the big one to me.
I really see a lot of value.
Right.
So it sounds like almost like if you want to, you could always stay in dress mode.
So, for example, if you set up your main account that has your personal funds and set up dress mode so for example if you set up your main account that has your you know your personal funds and you set up dress mode and you budget your dress mode account with so your daily
spending money maybe 500 or a thousand bucks everywhere you go you go to vegas you go to
mexico you go to you know uh foreign countries you're always logged in dress mode and like you
said earlier michael um you could still feel safe that even if you left your phone sitting and it's logged in or you're forced to log in into your account, they would only have access to whatever funds you loaded up on that dress mode account.
Right. Yeah, you know, it's it's actually almost like a an evolution of the pin to spend. I was thinking about that when it was introduced,
like we have that pin function
where you can't send without the pin.
Obviously that doesn't stop people that are holding up
with a gun or something of that nature.
But when it comes to what would the next evolution of that be?
The rest of it seems like a no brainer,
like, okay, so I can just move funds
and it's almost like a checking savings account.
If you don't look at it from the lens of it being to protect your account,
it could be used that way too.
It's just a savings and a checking account, similar to that.
So let's put our thinking hats like if we were the attackers and I were to attack you,
what could I do or what kind of actions could I do to see if like,
is this guy really in dress mode or in his real account? And let's say like I've done
some investigation and I know about Edge, what could I do to kind of analyze like is
Michael really logging into his account or is that his dress account, dress mode account?
So that's actually one of the things where doesn't that not come down to the person.
So if I am literally under duress, so like the name says, how do I stop the person?
As long as that is my account, I believe that they have to take my word for it as I continue to say that's my account.
As long as they're getting funds out of that account, there would be no reason to pry beyond that, even if they know that duress exists.
But it's actually one of the things that I almost want to bounce back to you and would love to hear more input on.
What other concepts have we come up with to say, Okay, well, what if the bad
actor is doing that, that it leads it leads to another question of how deep does the dress hole
go? Like, yeah, dress mode. So unlock it, you know, yeah. So they're like, this is like the
type of things that I would do. So if I was a packer, I would check like, okay, Michael's logged
into his account, I'm going to check into settings, enable dress mode.
Does it look like it's enabled or disabled, right?
And so we have that covered that
even if you're in dress mode,
it looks like it's not enabled.
So we have that covered
if an attacker wanted to dig deeper.
There's still other areas which I won't specify
where you could still kind of figure it out,
which we're gonna improve on and refine
to make it indistinguishable, but it's very minor and you would have to have real high
attention to details to be able to figure that out. But yeah, I'll try to figure out all the
little things, little areas where just minor differences to be able to determine if it's a real account or a dress account as an attacker.
Right.
Let's see.
Michael, through your experience playing around with dress mode, how was your experience enabling it, disabling it?
How was the experience so far with it?
Pretty easy? So far, yeah, so far seamless. I mean, as long as you can conceptualize this idea that it's like this additional layer that you do have to move funds to to protect yourself.
That's the biggest hurdle. But once you understand that, it's just an extra layer on top of your already existing edge account.
That's the big concept that you have to understand though.
Here's one caveat though with dress.
If a user forgets the real pin, they might be stuck in dress mode.
So that's one thing to consider.
And if that were to happen, you could still recover the account.
You'd have to, you know,
delete the app and reinstall to enter the full password because if you forget the pin at this
point, you're going to be stuck in dress mode. That opens the big conversation that we always
have is, you know, protect your, your credentials, you know, that's, that's paramount in the use of the edge app in itself. So yeah, that's
kind of that whole speech that I've given countless times at
this point, being in support. But yeah, know your credentials,
do not forget your pin, do not forget your username and
password.
Yep. And then with dress mode, you can also go deeper layers.
If you're under attack and attacker wanted to see if you're in dress mode and you're in your dress account, you know, assuming the attacker doesn't know, you could also create another dress pin within the dress mode account and it goes into deeper layers.
Oh, yeah. I forgot that you could do that.
Yeah.
Edge inception.
I forgot all about that.
That was the joke a few weeks ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's see what else we got here.
In terms of recent events, have you seen any recent events where, you know, grunge attacks
that happened recently here around the United States
or elsewhere? Only what we've talked about and what I see here, like the New York one.
You'll have to elaborate on these. I didn't know these stories, actually.
Okay. Yeah, they actually talked about it a little bit at the Vegas Bitcoin conference,
but yeah, there was one in New York, looks like this guy named Michael Valentino, not you, Michael, but Michael Valentino got kidnapped and tortured for 17 days in
New York, in Manhattan. Yeah. And then another one in France, looks like a couple, they got
their fingers cut off and demanding 5 million ransom and another one with 10 million. So that was, it looks like,
the kidnapping of co-founder Ledger David Balland
had his finger cut off during that ransom.
But it looks like, yeah, various other attacks,
Canada, Australia, UK.
So dress mode is designed to help you,
but it can only go so far if they're persistent.
Like if they're going to keep you for 17 days
and they don't believe you, yeah that might be tough but yeah it will help you to a certain extent
better than nothing right yeah better than nothing and you know there's there's
there's only so much you can do when it comes to protecting it makes me wonder about this now
because like i said I forgot about
this layers upon layers do you go two layers deep is that really the proper duress mode
yeah like put a hundred a hundred dollars on surface level thousand dollars on the next level
and then your actual money on the level below that something like that yeah yeah Yeah, yeah.
Where are you, Michael? Do you have any questions or anyone from the audience
that might have questions in regards to dress mode?
Do you travel a lot?
Are you already using dress mode?
Yeah, I am. So I have that set up for personal accounts and whatnot. You never know.
Yep.
And then we don't have a dev joining, do we?
No, we don't.
We don't, but we could ask for one next time.
Hey, guys.
I wanted to chime in, if you guys, if you don't mind.
Sure.
Yeah.
So for those of you guys who don't know, my name is Madison.
I do the design over at Edge.
And when we were, um, playing around with making this, um, something that I got inspo
from was actually ring doorbell.
So ring doorbell has a duress mode where you can enter a duress pin and it notifies the,
um, police department around you.
I'm sure there's other home security systems that do this,
but yeah, I just wanted to provide that layer of insight
that this is something that other systems do,
though entering your duress pin won't notify any police
or anything in the context of EDGE.
I thought that that was a cool thing that the home security systems do. And it's where a bit of the inspiration came from
as I was looking into making this for our users.
It's funny you mentioned that. My brother mentioned that as like a feature request.
Like if you log in dress mode on edge,
it would like send logs or something
or contact a specific person.
But yeah, that's something that we're not.
What if you set it up so that one of the entered pins
call 911 from that standpoint right there that's an idea write that
down yeah it's a global feature you know for global users so it wouldn't always be the you
know the 9-1-1 I think I was just you set up for their region right right I was just yeah and I
think the emergency number was zero zero zero um but yeah that's that's an interesting that's an interesting take you know it for people
who just want to enter their duress pin and their dress account while they're traveling
it wouldn't necessarily be for for them but um yeah it's a little bit of an under the hood
example of how how this was created and then the thought process that went behind it.
Well, since you're here, do you know of any other additional features that we're trying to add into
Dress? We definitely want it to look as normal as any other account. You know, it, it, if somebody is looking over your shoulder as you log into it,
we want it to look as if, you know, it was your real account. So I think there's going to be an
effort to remind users to fund it. We, we don't want it. We don't want them to just create the
duress mode. We want them to fund it and make it look as if it was a,
you know, a real account that's used. And so I think there's been talks of maybe a reminder
for people to log into their duress mode every six or so months so that they kind of can get
into the habit of how to use it and remembering that. That would be really good.
Yeah.
We don't want them to be in a high stakes situation and then have them not know how to do it.
So reminders to fund it and then also to practice using it are in the works.
Can you imagine that situation?
Like we already see, you know,
sometimes in support where a user calls them, they forgot their PIN or their password, they can't even log anything set in stone that we've decided on.
If anyone has any ideas from the audience, of course, send them in.
We love hearing from our users.
But I do know that those are the two that we've talked about pretty heavily.
Looks like Amy joins. Hello, Amy.
Hello.
Let's see. So that wraps up the dress part.
Before we were doing these, we did do open floor,
which I believe that's kind of where we're at in this space.
So there's two people here.
That's typically we just invite whoever to come up
and they have anything going on crypto
or want to comment or ask questions.
Yeah, we're going to show.
Now's your time.
Looking at you, Mark.
Looking at you, Amy.
Smaller audience. Okay.
Yes.
So if there's no other questions,
I guess we can talk about a little bit upcoming features
or we have a release coming up.
Amy's up.
Amy's up as a speaker
go for it Amy
hi everyone sorry I'm joining
late you might have already mentioned this
in the duress
mode part but
can you have multiple duress mode accounts
or I know we were talking about
you know you want to fund it to make it look like a real
account too but then you know
if you go into deeper layers,
attack, right?
Like what if someone attacks you for the,
and you enter duress mode and they know it's a duress mode.
Sorry if it was answered before previously and I joined.
No, no.
Okay.
That's okay.
So yeah, actually we didn't touch on it.
And that's actually something I totally forgot about,
but there is like the edge inception thing.
So you can go duress mode and then trigger another dress mode on top of that and then keep going as deep as
you'd like whoa that's wild yeah which i i was joking about earlier it kind of seems like the
the proper way to do it really when you think about it because if if the attacker knows how
deep are they going to make you go? One, two?
Yeah.
And that would leave you, the agency, to kind of make that decision on your own, right?
Great.
Thanks so much.
I still need to stop Duresmo, but that's a great invention.
Thank you, everyone.
Yeah, of course.
Thank you, man.
Hey, J-Pop.
Hello, J-Pop.
Yeah, so we're just up to part with any questions,
but we're finishing up here.
So if there's no other questions,
we're just gonna touch base on the upcoming releases.
We're just about done with 4.29, our next release.
And that's supposed to come out like sometime next week.
And yeah, we'll have the ability to basically stake
and unstake TCY.
So for those who have been waiting for it now you can finally on stake and
stake again if you wanted to also got another asset e-cash being added as well as the ability
for uh bridging from phantom to sonic for the migration so if you had phantom from before
you'll be able to bridge that to sonic, you know, through an exchange plugin.
Yeah, lots of stuff coming out next week to look forward to.
Nice, nice.
Yeah, we'll have to touch on the TCY.
Maybe that could be our next phases actually.
That's one that's kind of near and dear to support.
Kind of unfortunate, but at the same time,
it's something that, you you know it's a reality and
we really do need to tackle that so that would be like a thumbs up for me to like maybe be the next
spaces if i don't know i'm more than willing to hear what the audience wants to hear about more
too now that we're kind of starting to set a more regular routine but the tcy one's a big one that
one's painful but it's reality we want to make sure people understand what to do.
Yep.
And let's see, do we have any other announcements?
I believe the Ed's team, we're going to be at Porkfest.
Do you remember what dates those are?
Yeah, Porkfest is, let me see.
It's June 16 to 20.
Got it. Well, actually,une 16 to 22 it looks like so
yeah that after that will be there the whole time and edge will be leaving it
the on the 21st sorry so uh that's pork fest and then Monero Con and Prague Paul will be there as well.
Right. So we got the votes.
Okay. Yeah. So with that said, it looks like we'll have our next spaces live
two Thursdays from now on the 19th. 19th, perfect.
Will the TTY stuff be out then?
Because if so, I'm gonna prep for that.
Then I'll be, I'll talk here, you're out about that.
Yeah, that might be the next one
and maybe some of the other features that come out,
you know, next week that we can highlight.
Okay, cool.
Well, it's good to be back in space.
That's nice. Yeah, do this again. All right.'s good to be back in space. That's nice.
Yeah. Do this again.
All right.
See you guys soon.
Thanks guys. Catch you.
