Quarterly Self-Custody Update - Q2 2026 with NVK | SLP751

**Stephan Livera** (0:00)
Hi, everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Rejoining me is my friend, NVK, and we're going to try something today. We're going to try a quarterly self-custody update. So NVK and I have pulled together a few items, and we're going to just talk a little bit. So NVK, any kind of overall comments before we get into the first item on the list? Any broad themes you want to touch on for, let's say, self-custody this last quarter?

**NVK** (0:22)
Yeah, I mean, I think real Bitcoin is hot again on Twitter. You know, like, you know, for a little while, like, people were just like, buy my stock, buy my stock, right?
And I think it's kind of like, it's always good for people to be reminded that there is a massive difference between real Bitcoin and, you know, and like Bitcoin exposure through some stocks, like nothing wrong with the stocks. I mean, you know, some people that works for them. But, you know, I think for most people, especially people who are not seasoned stock traders and things, like they should just stick it to the real Bitcoin, you know, like buy the thing, stick it in your cold card, and then move on with your life, right? Like this is a long game. This is not a, you know, what is it? Like it's not a get rich quick, is a don't get poor slowly game. But whatever it was, maybe I got this wrong. But anyways, point is, it's nice to see self-custody is sort of like, you know, being sort of called out again.

**Stephan Livera** (1:23)
Coming back into being cool again.

**NVK** (1:26)
That's right. Nothing like being a sovereign individual.

**Stephan Livera** (1:29)
So let's start. We'll try to keep a good pace with it. I know we had a Sparrow wallet on our list. I know there's some updates there. Now, this is, I also had a recent episode with Craig Roar where we spoke a bit about that. But anything you want to touch on there on the Sparrow side of the house?

**NVK** (1:43)
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, they have, like, silent payments now, dust detection.
They're, like, I mean, Craig's been doing a lot of work on silent payments, right? The Frigate thing, which is, like, a kind of, like, a silent payment detection server, right? They watch the index and then they find your payments. I think you mentioned to me this.

**Stephan Livera** (2:07)
And I guess just the high-level point I would mention for the listeners is Frigate adds, like, a 1000X speed up using GPU acceleration to quickly do the silent payment scanning. So that's kind of a really interesting point, because I think Craig sees this as, like, look, one of the big problems in the ecosystem right now is a lot of people are doing address reuse. So what's one way to help stop that? Hey, it's silent payments. And I think the point he would make is going back to the early days, changing from the kind of key pool approach to the HD wallets was kind of a lift too, but there were some downsides of HD wallets, but it was still a step forward. And I think he sees it the same way, like silent payments is a step forward, and it will reduce address reuse. So that's kind of a good thing from a perspective of if we can get more people to use that for donations or for exchange, deposit and withdrawal. So I think that's kind of the key kind of takeaway there.

**NVK** (2:58)
It's a very cool spark, but it's a massive diff. Like it's like implementing silent payments is not trivial.
It's a big job. So that's why I think you've seen sort of adoption being very slow, especially from the hardware side. There's a lot to it.

**Stephan Livera** (3:18)
Yeah. And I think that's the point actually in the podcast I had with him, he mentioned that like basically hardware wallets could theoretically support silent payments, but they have not yet. And as you said, it's probably because it's a bit of a lift on your side, especially you're a hardware wallet guy, you're a manufacturer yourself.
So I guess from your perspective, what are the main challenges you see there?

**NVK** (3:40)
I mean, it's just the amount of code you have to write to support it. It's like equivalent of supporting like MiniScript or supporting Moosig. It's gigantic.
So that means, like with hardware, especially secure hardware, you can't just add gigantic code changes, right?

**Stephan Livera** (3:59)
Because you have limited memory to begin with.

**NVK** (4:01)
And also the security concern, right? I mean, like for the software wallets like Sparrow, like the concern about security is a lot lower, right? Because it's already assumed that the computer is going to compromise, right? So the security assumption there is that he will depend on hardware wallets to keep the seeds secure, like real seeds, right? Maybe you have some seeds with less money there, but for your real money, you do it multi-sig or you keep it in a hardware wallet or both, you know?