Trezor Safe 5: what it fixes compared with the classic Trezors

Analysis reviewed on September 7, 2026. The price is checked separately and carries its own date.

Its price — with the date we checked it — is in the purchase block further down. Its case is not that it looks better than the previous one. It is that it carries something the classic Trezors did not, and that something exists because of one very specific attack.

The 2020 attack that explains this device

In January 2020, Kraken's security team published that with the device in hand and around fifteen minutes you could extract the encrypted seed from a Trezor One and a Trezor Model T. The technique means taking the chip apart and hitting it with very carefully measured voltage faults until it gives up what it holds. They told the manufacturer on 30 October 2019 before going public. Kraken Security Labs' write-up · SatoshiLabs' response.

Two qualifications that matter and that tend to get lost in the headline. The first: it needs physical access, so it is not an attack that reaches you over the internet — it is the attack of the house move, the burglary or the search. The second, and Kraken says so itself: a strong passphrase neutralises it completely, because that passphrase is not inside the device.

Even so, the manufacturer's underlying answer was to put a dedicated component into the new range. This model carries a secure element certified to EAL6+, one level above the EAL5+ that Ledger declares.

What you can verify without trusting anyone

This is the real difference with Ledger, and it is not a marketing one. Trezor's firmware is open: it is published, it can be read and it can be compiled. And the secure element the Safe 5 fits is presented as free of non-disclosure agreements, which is the condition for open firmware to be able to talk to it without closed layers in between.

Translated: with Ledger you trust an external audit you cannot repeat; with Trezor you — or anybody else — can go and look at the code. Whether you will is another matter, but the fact that it can be done means there are thousands of people who do, and that is a guarantee of a different kind.

The screen is not a whim

A 1.54-inch colour touchscreen, 240 × 240 pixels, Gorilla Glass 3 and haptic feedback. It sounds like a brochure until you understand what it is for: the wallet's screen is the only place where you can read what you are really signing. The computer can show you one thing and send you another; the device shows you the one it is going to sign. The more legible it is, the less likely you are to confirm blind — which is, today, the most common way of losing your money.

It has happened to SatoshiLabs too

On 17 January 2024, a third party gained unauthorised access to the support portal Trezor had contracted with an external provider. The contact details — name or nickname and email — of up to 66,000 users who had written to support since December 2021 may have been exposed. Funds were not affected. SatoshiLabs' notice.

It is less serious than Ledger's 2020 case — postal addresses came out of that one as well — but it points to the same thing: in this sector, the link that breaks is almost never the device, it is the external provider handling the emails, the orders or the support.

If you already have one of the older Trezors

It is worth saying even though it plays against us: among the products we link to there is a Trezor Model One and a Trezor Model T, and those are exactly the two models the 2020 attack reached. They are not broken and they are not useless; they are devices without a secure element, and that means their defence against somebody walking off with them is the passphrase. If you have one and you have not turned it on, that is the best-spent afternoon of your year.

When it is worth it and when it is not

It is worth it if open source is part of why you wanted a hardware wallet in the first place, if you are going to hold amounts that justify what it costs and if the scenario that worries you is somebody ending up with the device in their hands.

It is not worth it if you need support for coins from odd niches — Ledger's catalogue is broader — or if you are below €1,000 in crypto: there the money does more work in not leaving your balance on a platform without two-step verification. It is explained on the main products page.

This link does not pay us

The purchase link on this page goes to the manufacturer's own shop, and we have no agreement with Trezor: if you buy there, we earn nothing. We say so because the same site does earn a commission on other products and those are marked as such. A link marked as advertising when it is not misleads just as much as an unmarked one when it is.

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