Hybrid Custody using Layer 2 Smart Vaults can help recover your Bitcoin and similar Altcoins even when your private-keys are lost or stolen!
How can you recover my Bitcoin even when my private-keys are lost or stolen? Do you store a copy of my private-keys?
No, we do not have any access to your private-keys!
We do this using Hybrid Custody™ Vaults, that are locked with a private-key from you and a private-key from us.
Under normal circumstances, you can unlock your Hybrid Custody™ Vault and transfer your Bitcoin as you wish with just your private-key – similar to Self Custody.
But when your private-key is lost, we can still unlock your Hybrid Custody™ Vault with just our private-key using Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Smart Contracts. However, if we try to unlock your Hybrid Custody™ Vault using our private-key without your consent, you can always sign a recovery transaction with just your private-key and override such a malicious unlock transaction.
On the other hand, if your private-key is stolen and is used to unlock your Hybrid Custody™ Vault, we can both co-sign a recovery transaction with our respective private-keys and override the malicious unlock transaction!
We can also manage inheritance for your crypto in Hybrid Custody™ Vaults without any prior setup with your beneficiaries.
This is how we make Bitcoin and similar Altcoins unstealable, unlosable, and unconfiscatable!
Is this Smart Vaults™ and Hybrid Custody™ technology vetted and validated externally?
Dr. Ittay Eyal and his team at Technion University, Israel, have vetted and verified the protocol and POC implementation.
And here is an independent peer-reviewed research paper by crypto heavyweights – Dr. D Maram (Cornell University, USA), Mr. M Kelkar (Cornell University, USA), and Dr I Eyal (Technion University, Israel) proving that Smart Vaults is the most secure technology currently available to protect Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies! It is also accepted to ACM CCS 2024.
PS: The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) is the flagship annual conference of the Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The conference brings together information security researchers, practitioners, developers, and users from all over the world to explore cutting-edge ideas and results.
How does it all work for end users?
Our users can manage their Bitcoin and crypto using our state-of-the-art Hardware Wallet and companion apps just like they do now with Ledger, Trezor, and other Hardware Wallets. The only difference is that our solution offers our users an option to store their Bitcoin, etc. in a Hybrid Custody™ Vault in addition to their simple private-key linked wallet.
Note: Both the wallet and vault use private-keys stored inside our Hardware Wallet. So the wallet is as secure as any other Hardware Wallet based wallet offered by Ledger, etc. and the vault offers additional benefits as discussed above.
Can users use their existing Hardware Wallets to create and manage Hybrid Custody™ Vaults?
The process for creating and managing Hybrid Custody™ Vaults is significantly different from that for managing regular transactions and it is not practical to push for such extensive changes from existing Hardware Wallet vendors like Ledger and Trezor.
Hence, our users cannot use third-party Hardware Wallets to create and manage Hybrid Custody™ Vaults.
How is this better than simple Self-Custody with a Hardware Wallet or Self-Managed/Assisted MultiSig setups?
No other solution, except Hybrid Custody™ Vaults, can help you recover your crypto even when all of your private-keys are lost or stolen.
Hardware Wallet vendors such as Ledger, Trezor, etc. only offer hardware and software to manage private-keys and transactions but do not offer any services that can help you recover your Bitcoin and crypto when your private-keys are lost or stolen.
Coming to MultiSig setups, nobody wants to manage multiple private keys, with device vendor and backup storage diversity, when managing a single private-key is already a chore for us. Even assisted custody services like Casa that use Multi-Sig/MPC vaults ask you to manage multiple private-keys while they manage one private key on your behalf. While these setups can help when one of your private-keys is lost or stolen but they cannot help when more than one private-key is lost or stolen – and most people end up storing their keys or their backups together completely negating the benefits of this scheme.
The bigger problem with these setups is that you remain the single point of failure for your crypto when you manage all your private-keys or you dilute control of your crypto when you delegate some of your private-keys to friends and family who might later prevent you from spending your Bitcoin and crypto as you see fit. These trustee setups also encourage insider fraud and crime, a far bigger threat than remote hacks and attacks.
As the old adage goes – Never mix friends and family with money.
With Hybrid Custody™ Vaults, you only have one private-key to manage and you can recover your Bitcoin and crypto even when that private-key is lost or stolen! As simple as that!
We can also handle inheritance for your crypto as per your instructions without any prior arrangements with your beneficiaries.
Alright, what’s the status and when can I use Hybrid Custody Vaults to protect my crypto?
Protocol and POC Implementation were vetted and validated by Dr. Ittay Eyal and his team at Technion University, Israel. POC implementation published on GitHub for scrutiny and review.
Independent peer-reviewed research paper modeling the threats and proving our technology as the best available by Dr. Maram, et al. from Cornell University, USA.
State-of-the-art, mobile-first, extremely user-friendly, and affordable (~20 USD) Hardware Wallet was designed and developed in collaboration with cutting edge security hardware manufacturers – ready for mass production.
Hardware Wallet firmware and companion apps for iOS and Android are in development.
Tell me about the team behind Hybrid Custody and SmartVaults!
Dr. Praveen Baratam is the Founder of CoinVault and is the inventor of Smart Vaults™ Layer 2 Protocol. He along with Jakub Pavlik have developed the Hybrid Custody™ service framework to help protect Bitcoin and similar altcoins for people holding 1 to 10 BTC. Dr. Ittay Eyal, Technion University, Israel, has been the guiding angel all through and looks into the academic and research aspects for CoinVault. Vivek Dahiya looks into the Intellectual Property aspects of CoinVault.
The team has decades of experience building mining frameworks to Algo trading bots in crypto and media search engines to AI/ML models for early detection of adverse events in healthcare outside crypto. This diversity in skills and experience is what drives the innovation and lateral thinking inside CoinVault.
