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?
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreHD wallets are a feature of bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies with the goal of providing improved privacy and usability. Compelling benefits can be achieved when using non-hardened key derivation. The problem is that if the private key corresponding to an xPub address is somehow leaked, then the private keys of *all* “siblings” and the parent can be exfiltrated. Multi-party computation offers a way to improve this state of affairs because a private key is never in one place (even when signing).
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreA 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.
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