The March 8, 2021 announcement that PayPal agreed to acquire Curv was met by many in the industry with excitement, but for others concern. After all, it’s common for such acquisitions to lead to fundamental changes that require a new direction for the customers of the company being acquired. While change is never easy it also opens the door to new opportunities to select new solutions from the perspective of experience and insight on changing market requirements. As the original pioneer and industry leader in MPC and Threshold Cryptography (TC) schemes Sepior is helping many companies through this transition and stands ready to assist others.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued a letter on July 22, 2020 clarifying US national banks' and federal savings associations' authority to provide cryptocurrency custody services for their customers. This is a major step forward in bringing cryptocurrency to a place where more mainstream adoption is likely. The big questions are what’s different about providing custody of cryptocurrencies, and how will these mainstream institutions provide these services?
In 2008, the same year that Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous Bitcoin white paper, a group of cryptography researchers in Denmark implemented the first production deployment of a technique known as Multiparty Computation (MPC). It was not obvious at that time, but MPC would ultimately become the basis for Crypto Wallets 2.0, ushering in an era of increased security for institutional- and consumer-grade wallets, with native support for any digital asset.
The announcement last week of Fusion Foundation’s $6.4M cryptocurrency theft was not major in terms of the magnitude of the loss on market scale, but it’s an important reminder that even the best secured wallets are no more secure than the security of the keys that protect them. The resulting loss of more than 80% in market cap value, (now improved to 40%) is also a reminder of the consequences to shareholders when such events happen.
A quorum policy is a policy which is used to ensure that different stakeholders approve of some transaction to remove the single point of failure which occurs when only one entity is needed to approve a transaction. Ironically, many ways of implementing such a policy will introduce a technical single point of failure in the very solution intended to remove the original point of failure. The solution is to have each approver provide their share of an approval signature using a cryptographic algorithm which natively generates the transaction signature only when the required number of approvals is satisfied.
The recent announcement of the CYBAVO VAULT™ is an important milestone in the industry’s migration toward more secure, multiparty computation (MPC) -based cryptocurrency wallets and expands the rapid adoption opportunities to a far wider range of users.
As the popularity of cryptocurrency trading explodes, one of the biggest risk factors for existing and potential investors continues to be the large scale hacks of exchanges and digital wallets. Digital wallets are well-known across legacy applications such as e-payment and PKI, with cryptocurrencies now added to the list. Security is very important for all of these applications, but perhaps most for cryptocurrencies, because transactions are irrevocable when they’re used in conjunction with blockchain schemes.
