Arculus Cold Storage Wallet

The Arculus Cold Storage Wallet is a metal card with an NFC chip that holds your private keys and signs transactions when you tap it against a phone running the Arculus app. Arculus’s How It Works whitepaper (2023) says it was created by CompoSecure (NASDAQ: CMPO). Arculus dates the launch to 2021 on its hub page, and its bundle page says “Made in the USA.” Arculus says it needs no charging. The Arculus store showed it at $59.76, marked “Now”, on 14 October 2026; Arculus’s help center gives a price of $99.00 including shipping.

How does the Arculus card work?

Per the whitepaper, private keys “are generated, encrypted, and stored in the Secure Element on the Arculus Card” and never leave it. The card talks to the app over NFC, which the whitepaper says has “a range of only a few centimeters.”

Arculus markets three-factor authentication: a biometric, a PIN and the card. The whitepaper is more specific: the app uses biometrics or a card tap before showing balances, and “All transactions require you to enter your PIN and tap your card to authenticate.” The six-digit PIN is stored on the card. After three wrong PIN entries the card is reset and its keys are wiped, and you restore the wallet from the recovery phrase.

The card has no screen. You read the address and amount in the Arculus app and tap to approve, so in our reading the phone is the only place to review a transaction. The Tangem Wallet works the same way; a device such as the Ledger Nano X shows the details on its own display.

Arculus’s compatibility article lists Android 11 or newer on phones with NFC, and iOS 17.5 or newer on iPhone XR and later models.

Who is the Arculus wallet for?

It suits people who manage crypto from a phone, want a signer that needs no charging, and are happy to buy, swap and send inside one app; Arculus says it routes purchases and swaps through partners Onramper and Changelly.

It is a weaker fit if you:

• want to confirm transactions on the signing device itself;
• work from a desktop: the only connection is NFC to a phone;
• want an optional passphrase: we found no Arculus documentation of one;
• need Bitcoin multisig: Arculus says the card “is not a multisignature (multisig) wallet”, though it can be one owner of a Safe smart-contract account through WalletConnect; that does not give you Bitcoin multisig.

Is Arculus secure?

Arculus describes a secure element with a “CC EAL6+ Hardware Classification”, and the whitepaper diagram shows it running JavaCardOS. We found no chip name or certificate number.

The whitepaper says the card is “shipped locked, meaning the code on the card can’t be updated.” Arculus presents that as blocking malicious code; it also means a card keeps the firmware it shipped with. Arculus’s coin list requires card firmware 2.0 or above and says “Edition Zero and Edition One sold prior to March, 2023” do not support most of the listed coins. We found no published card firmware source or licence.

Our dataset records no published attack on the card. The only entry is a scam warning: in an article updated 10 October 2026, Arculus warns that scammers claim wallets like Arculus, Ledger or Trezor are “unsafe” or “compromised” to push fake “QFS” products, and that fake “Web3 validation” pages ask for your 12-word recovery phrase. The warning describes recovery-phrase phishing, not a demonstrated card exploit.

How do Arculus backup and recovery work?

The whitepaper says the card creates a 12- or 24-word phrase under the BIP39 standard, shown once in the app, which then asks you to re-enter it; “the recovery phrase is not stored on the card or the phone.” The app can also restore any 12- or 24-word BIP39 phrase. If you lose the card, Arculus says you can buy a new one and restore, or restore in another wallet that uses the same derivation paths. Each card holds one wallet at a time.

Those paths matter. Arculus says that for Bitcoin it uses the path m/0’, which “may not be supported by other wallets like Ledger”, though many wallets let you enter it manually. Check that a fallback wallet accepts the path before you rely on it. We found no SLIP-39 support. See our seed phrase guide.

Arculus vs Ledger: what is the difference?

• Screen: the Ledger Nano S Plus and Nano X have a 1.1-inch display on the device; the Arculus card has none.
• Connection: Arculus uses NFC to a phone; the Nano S Plus uses USB-C, and the Nano X adds Bluetooth.
• Recovery: Ledger documents a 24-word phrase with passphrase support; Arculus offers 12 or 24 words, no documented passphrase, and a Bitcoin path Arculus says other wallets may not support.
• Code: Ledger describes its firmware as partly open; we found no published Arculus card firmware.
• Price on 14 October 2026: $59.76 for Arculus, $69 for the Nano S Plus and $99 for the Nano X on Ledger’s shop.

More in Is Ledger safe? and Tangem vs Ledger, which covers the same card-versus-screen trade-off.

Which coins does Arculus support?

The product page claims “50+ Blockchains” and over 10,000 tokens. The help-center list includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano and XRP (listed as Ripple). WalletConnect connects the card to decentralized apps. We found no Bitcoin-only edition.

What we could not verify

• The secure element’s part number and certificate.
• Card dimensions and weight.
• Optional passphrase support.
• The card firmware source.
• Whether you can send while Arculus’s servers are unreachable. The help center treats an “Arculus Cloud Unreachable” error as a phone or network problem and does not address an outage on Arculus’s side; the fallback Arculus documents is restoring the recovery phrase in another wallet with compatible derivation paths (see above).

Read how we compile each datasheet in our methodology.