Organization Name – Zen Cardio

Category – Payment

About

powered by irmaAI

Zen Card is a hybrid cold-plus-hot wallet product from Ninety Eight, the team behind Coin98 — a Vietnamese Web3 company with a 2017 lineage that has built wallet and DeFi infrastructure across the Coin98 ecosystem. The Zen Card combines hardware-level cold storage security with software hot-wallet convenience in a single product form factor. A physical showroom in Vietnam opened in 2024. Founder Thanh Le is publicly prominent within the Vietnam Web3 community but has not been verified against Zen Card’s specific team disclosures by VaaSBlock. The VBTS of 3.1 at the 9th percentile is below… category median. No MES data was available.

The mental model for cold-hot hybrid wallets starts with the custody spectrum. At one end, a hardware wallet keeps private keys entirely offline — maximum security, minimum convenience. At the other end, a browser-based hot wallet keeps keys online — minimum security, maximum convenience. The hybrid approach is an attempt to occupy the middle ground: hot wallet convenience for small, frequent transactions, cold wallet security for large holdings. The design challenge is that the security guarantees of a hybrid depend entirely on the implementation — if the hot wallet component can be compromised in a way that exposes the cold wallet keys, the hybrid provides cold wallet complexity without cold wallet security.

The Coin98 lineage provides Zen Card with an existing user base and brand recognition in the Southeast Asian market. Vietnam has developed a distinctive crypto-native retail community, and a locally recognised brand has distribution advantages that pure technology products lack. The physical showroom is an interesting investment — it suggests the team believes in-person product demonstration is important for hardware wallet adoption, which is consistent with how other hardware wallet companies (Ledger, Trezor) have historically operated. The security architecture of the cold-hot hybrid requires independent technical review before users store significant assets on the device. Zen Card is Unverified under VaaSBlock’s RMA framework. Read More