- Blockstream’s Jade wallets hold bitcoin and nothing else, on purpose. Three devices: the original Jade (£51 on sale from £60), the beginner-focused Jade Core (£75) and the metal-bodied Jade Plus (from £112), all fully open source.
- The security design is unusual: instead of a bank-style secure chip, the key is locked behind your PIN and a remote helper server, so a stolen Jade contains nothing worth extracting. Clever, genuinely, and it means trusting Blockstream’s server or running your own.
- The pedigree is the deepest in the business: Blockstream was co-founded in 2014 by Adam Back, whose earlier work is cited in the Bitcoin white paper itself, and the company employs longstanding Bitcoin developers.
Every other wallet we review tries to hold everything. Jade refuses. It stores bitcoin, full stop, and Blockstream argues that refusal is a security feature: less code, fewer integrations, a smaller surface for something to go wrong. The company behind it is Bitcoin royalty rather than a gadget maker, co-founded by Adam Back, the cryptographer whose Hashcash is cited in Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, and it funds some of the developers who maintain Bitcoin itself. If your crypto is bitcoin and only bitcoin, this review is for you. If your portfolio has anything else in it, stop here and read our Trezor or Ledger reviews instead, because a Jade will not hold it.
Everything below was checked against Blockstream’s own store and documentation in September 2026. This page is monetised: buy through the gold link and Blockstream pays us a commission, at no extra cost to you. We link only to their hardware, never to their exchange or products, for the reasons on our disclosure page, and the criticism below stays in regardless.
What you get
Three devices, all running the same open-source firmware, all managed through the Blockstream app on phone or desktop, and all equally happy paired with the serious independent Bitcoin wallets: Sparrow, Electrum, BlueWallet and Nunchuk among them. UK buyers see prices in pounds with free international shipping, though orders ship from North America or Germany, so allow a week or two.
| Model | Price | Controls | Air-gapped option | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jade | £51 (usually £60) | Small colour screen, click-wheel | Yes, camera and QR codes | Buy |
| Jade Core | £75 | Colour screen, buttons | No, USB-C or Bluetooth | Direct from Blockstream |
| Jade Plus | £112 plastic, £127 metal | Bigger screen, faster camera | Yes, the best QR scanner of the three | Direct from Blockstream |
The original Jade is the value pick of the whole hardware-wallet market for bitcoin holders: a full-featured device with a camera that can run entirely air-gapped, signing transactions over QR codes without ever plugging in, at around fifty pounds. The Core, added in April 2026, goes the other way: it drops the camera and the complexity and just wants to get a beginner off an exchange with USB-C or Bluetooth and a guided setup. The Plus is the same idea as the Jade with nicer everything: metal body, larger screen, and a faster camera that makes the QR routine feel effortless. Accessories follow the usual pattern, including a £15 JadeLink drive for cable-free transfer and steel capsule bundles for storing recovery words; our self-custody guide explains why metal beats paper.
Buy direct from Blockstream. Tampered devices turn up on marketplaces, and the on-device genuine check is no reason to invite the risk.
Bitcoin only, fully open source, and nothing worth stealing left on the device itself.
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Is your crypto safe?
Jade’s answer to the secure-chip question is the most interesting in the industry. Trezor and Ledger put your key inside certified tamper-resistant silicon. Jade instead stores the key encrypted and splits the ability to unlock it between three parties: your PIN, the device, and a small helper service Blockstream calls a blind , which never sees your key or knows what it is helping to unlock. Enter the wrong PIN three times and the oracle stops cooperating, permanently. The result is that a thief with your Jade holds a paperweight: there is, as Blockstream puts it, nothing of value to extract from the device, which neatly sidesteps the physical-attack cat-and-mouse that has embarrassed Trezor’s older models and keeps Ledger’s closed chips closed.
The honest cost of that design is a server in the loop. Unlocking your Jade with a PIN involves the oracle answering, which means trusting that Blockstream keeps it running, or using the get-out the open-source design provides: anyone can run their own oracle, and the fully air-gapped modes reduce the dependence further. If the company vanished tomorrow, your recovery words would restore your bitcoin in any standard wallet regardless. Everything, hardware and firmware, is open source and auditable, the device verifies its own authenticity against supply-chain tampering on setup, and the bitcoin-only firmware philosophy means the code doing all this is smaller than any multi-coin rival’s. As ever: no FSCS, no password reset, and the person holding the recovery words holds the money.
The history you should know
Blockstream was founded in 2014 and is one of the oldest and most technically credible companies in the industry: it employs long-serving Bitcoin Core contributors, runs satellites that broadcast the Bitcoin , and built the Liquid settlement network used by exchanges. The Jade line launched at the start of 2021 and has had no publicly demonstrated theft of coins from a device, and no customer-data leak on record, with the usual caveat that Jade is a smaller target than Ledger or Trezor.
The company’s wider record took a serious knock this week. On 6 September 2026 the shared wallet backing Liquid, the settlement network Blockstream built and anchors, was drained of roughly 4,000 bitcoin through what early reporting describes as a working authorisation key. Most of it has since been returned; around 598 BTC, near $47m, has not, the network remains paused as we write, and Blockstream’s public silence through the first days was not its finest hour. Read our ongoing coverage for the detail. What matters for a Jade buyer: Liquid is a custodial arrangement, coins held by a committee, which is the opposite trust model to the hardware wallet in this review, and no Jade device or self-custodied key was involved. The incident says nothing about the device’s security and something real about the company’s operational week, and we will update this page as the story resolves.
Two smaller things belong in the flags column alongside that. First, the sale pricing churns: the Jade has spent much of its life “on sale” from its regular price, which is a marketing habit rather than a scandal, but treat the higher number as the real one when comparing. Second, Blockstream the company sells much more than hardware these days, including and finance products aimed at institutions. We link to none of it: some of it would be a regulated financial promotion to UK readers, and none of it is needed to use the wallet. The hardware stands on its own.
Who it’s for, and who it isn’t
The Jade suits the bitcoin-only holder wanting the cheapest serious device going, the security enthusiast who likes an air gap at a £51 price instead of the Keystone’s £110-plus, and anyone who weighs a maker’s pedigree heavily: no other wallet company is this close to Bitcoin’s own development. The Core suits a beginner buying their first device who wants guided, plug-and-play custody. The Plus suits someone who will use the QR routine daily and wants it frictionless.
It is the wrong pick if you hold anything besides bitcoin, now or probably ever, since the refusal to support other coins is permanent and philosophical rather than a roadmap gap. It is also wrong if a remote server participating in your PIN security bothers you more than physical-chip trust does, and you do not fancy running your own ; that is a legitimate preference, and it points at a Trezor Safe 3 instead.
Common questions
Why is there no secure element chip?
By design. The blind-oracle scheme means the device never holds an unencrypted key for a chip to protect, so there is nothing for a laboratory attack to extract. The trade is a dependence on the oracle service for PIN unlocking, softened by the fact that the oracle software is open source and self-hostable, and that your recovery words restore everything without it.
What happens if Blockstream disappears?
Your bitcoin is recoverable from the in any standard wallet, from any maker. You would lose the convenience layer: the app, the oracle service, future firmware. That risk is real for every hardware maker and smaller for Blockstream than for most startups, but it is why the recovery words, not the device, are the thing to guard.
Is bitcoin-only actually an advantage?
For security, modestly yes: less code means fewer places for a bug to hide, which is why several rivals now ship bitcoin-only firmware as an option. For usability it is simply a constraint. If you own only bitcoin it costs you nothing; if you might buy anything else, it decides the question against Jade by itself.
Jade or the Trezor Safe 3?
Both are superb value. The Safe 3 at £49 is cheaper, multi-coin and simpler to reason about; the Jade at £51 adds the camera air gap and the bitcoin-only philosophy. Bitcoin-only holders who like the air gap should take the Jade; everyone else, and anyone who wants one device that could hold anything, the Safe 3.
Checked against Blockstream’s store and documentation in September 2026. This review is updated on a schedule and when something material changes. Blockstream pays us a commission on hardware purchases through the gold link above, which never changes what we write, in line with our affiliate disclosure and editorial policy.