CoinGeek Live 2020: The future of digital asset security and custody

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The emergence of institutional investors into the digital currency industry has brought with it the need for world-class custody and security solutions. During Day 1 of CoinGeek Live, a number of the top companies in the sector gave their insight into the future of digital asset security and custody.

Karen Wendel, the CEO and founder of TrustChains, LLC was the first to take to the stage. She broke down what custody essentially is—the provision of a mechanism to store, manage and report on any form of asset by a regulated third party.

Karen has had an interest in digital currencies and blockchain for a few years now. However, it’s when she attended the CoinGeek London Conference in February 2020 that her interest piqued. She said:

The experience was transformative. As a result of participating in that conference, my life actually changed. I changed the career path I was on and the partners I was working with, because the power of Bitcoin SV and the blockchain was so evident to me that I wanted to be part of an entirely new way of approaching custody.

Karen announced her company’s new product—the first true blockchain-powered digital asset custodial service, “turbocharged by Bitcoin SV.”

“It’s turbocharged through the use of the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s turbocharged natively through the transparency, immutability and auditability that are native to Bitcoin SV.”

The service is a partnership with The Bayesian Group. It will allow users to transform previously illiquid assets such as real estate and precious metals into digital forms, enabling them to transparently and securely trade them seamlessly. TrustChains will use custodied assets to create new forms of liquidity through tokenization, availing these tokens to both retail and institutional investors.

Karen was later joined on stage by Gabriel Frank, the director of sales at Curv and Sebastian Higgs, the vice president of the recently-established custody services at industry titan Genesis. The companies, which both support Bitcoin SV, have approached custody in different ways, with Curv being a cloud-based enterprise-grade infrastructure provider for wallets and custody, pioneering the use of multi-party computations (MPC). Genesis takes a more traditional route, having integrated Vo1t’s technology after acquiring it in May 2020.

In a panel discussion moderated by Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen, the three shared some of the most prevalent concerns in the digital asset custody sector. Segregation of responsibilities, security and ease of access to assets have been some of the common concerns, especially from institutional investors.

“And of course, we have solutions for all these concerns,” Karen told the audience.

The three talked about how they secure their clients’ assets, the implementation of threshold signatures as a security measure, the emergence of trust holders to enhance security of assets, what retail investors can learn about security from their institutional counterparts and the metric of “temperature as a digital asset security measure”—hot and cold wallets.

Watch the CoinGeek Live panel, The Future of Digital Asset Security & Custody.

https://youtu.be/FAEoXeN0b8M?t=12457