Jan Pleskac – Tropic Square: Open Chips for a Decentralized Future | BTC Prague 2025 Keynote

What if your sense of security is just an illusion — and what if we can actually fix that? I shared this question from the BTC Prague stage, arguing that true security starts not with software, but with the chips underneath it — and those chips need to be open and auditable.

A Meeting That Changed Everything

Back in 2019, I had one of those rare meetings that shifts how you see the world. I met the team at Satoshilabs and we talked about security, open source, and their efforts to build open and auditable silicon. They shared how they struggled against an established industry that wasn’t ready for that conversation. I left with two questions I couldn’t shake: What if our sense of security is just an illusion? And what if we can fix that?

The Problem Hidden in Your Pocket

Every piece of software runs on hardware, and that hardware is a chip. Security is very frequently broken exactly at the point where software meets hardware. The transistor, invented in 1947, is the foundation of it all — and you carry billions of them in your pocket. But security was never really designed in from the start.

In the early days, nobody thought about security when using a calculator. The device itself was the valuable asset. The first real attacks came with printer cartridges, then gaming consoles in the mid-90s, then SIM card cloning with mobile phones. By the time security became a topic, attackers were already several steps ahead of defenders.

Obscurity Is Not Security

The old industry response was security through obscurity — don’t tell anyone what’s inside, lock the designers in the basement, and hope nobody finds the weakness. That approach may have protected vendors once, but today, in a data-driven, hyper-connected world, it only exposes users. We either consume data or generate it constantly, and closed black-box chips are fundamentally incompatible with that reality.

Imagine buying a house where you’re told it’s perfectly secure — great locks, high-end technology — but you’re not allowed to walk inside and check. The fence is so high you can barely see the windows. Would you buy it? Of course not. Yet that is exactly how we buy chips today. We can’t audit them. There are no independent checks. It’s take it or leave it.

Auditability Is the Answer

The shift we need isn’t just technical — it’s cultural. We need to move from closed black-box systems to open, auditable ones. That’s exactly what we’re building at Tropic Square with our first product, TROPIC01 — an auditable secure element chip.

What makes it different? Everything documented in the spec is actually in the chip — no undocumented features, no hidden back doors. Firmware is open so users can build the code themselves and verify cryptographically that what they built is what’s running. We publish a clear threat model explaining what we defend against and what we don’t. And we share our hardware sources so anyone can see the design that becomes the final product.

Where third-party IP blocks exist and can’t be fully opened, we explain exactly how we mitigate the risk — for example, by encrypting data before it ever reaches closed memory.

Don’t Trust. Verify.

If you’re building on black boxes, you’re placing blind trust in vendors. And no matter how hard they rely on obscurity, attackers always find a weakness — the headlines prove it over and over. Auditability isn’t a buzzword. It’s the mechanism that lets device makers build on informed decisions, and it’s the only real foundation for trust in a world where machines will increasingly make decisions on our behalf. Open means auditable. Auditable means no surprises. And no surprises means you can actually build something secure.

Don’t trust. Verify.