Keystore founder and CEO Ouyang Meng said that this round of financing was mainly used for the company’s talent development and technology update.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the strategic cooperation blockchain media “Odaily Planet Daily ” (Public ID: o-daily, < a href = "https://download.odaily.com/"> APP download )
On January 17, 2020, Odaily Planet Daily learned exclusively that Keystore, an enterprise-grade crypto asset service provider, had received a pre-A round of financing of US $ 10 million. This round of financing was led by Jianyuan Fund, a subsidiary of Tunnels, with distributed capital following. Keystore founder and CEO Ouyang Meng said that this round of financing was mainly used for the company’s talent development and technology update.
Keystore is the first investment of 建元 基金 in the blockchain field. Shen Peiliang, Managing Partner of Jianyuan Fund, commented, “As one of the first traditional equity investment funds to deploy blockchain technology, we have always paid close attention to the blockchain industry. The security of crypto assets is the most basic and the most basic in the industry A core requirement is the key factor for the stable development of the blockchain industry. We are very optimistic about the innovation of Keystore’s underlying technology and the huge development space of future business. “
Bo Shen, the founder of Distributed Capital, also emphasized, “Distributed capital has witnessed the rapid development of the industry in the past few years. At the same time, it has also seen the lack of construction of the underlying security infrastructure in the industry. Services will be the next focus area for distributed capital. “
Users keep their private keys to reduce trust risk
Keystore was established in August 2018. It is positioned as a global enterprise-level encrypted asset service provider. With the core business of secure storage of private keys, it provides information security protection and encrypted data processing technology to enterprise users.
Keystore’s depository business includes self-depository and full depository: self-depository is that the user holds the private key, Keystore does not touch the private key, and the user is in Keystore opens an account and obtains a dedicated corporate wallet address after review. The user’s encrypted assets are directly entered into this address; full depository means that the user entrusts Keystore to keep the private key, and the extraction time is about 2 hours, which is more suitable for traditional institutions.
The depository solution is very important for both traditional and innovative financial markets. As an emerging asset, crypto assets are vulnerable to hacking and difficult to track due to online storage. In fact, depository services are more urgently needed.
But there are so many crypto depository service providers in the circle at present, many wallets and mining pools have already entered the market, and traditional financial giants of Wall Street including Goldman Sachs and Morgan are exploring digital asset depository services. Tat has released an institutional depository solution in mid-2019. How is Keystore different?
“In terms of the underlying technology, we have made greater optimization and innovation based on the existing private key sharding technology. For example, Coinbase uses a cold wallet to do depository and put the customer’s private key offline Cold wallets are kept by themselves, which may be more friendly to traditional institutions. But for users in the circle, they may not be assured because they subconsciously believe that the private key should be kept by themselves. “Keystore Founder and CEO Ouyang Meng told Odaily Planet Daily.
In order to implement multi-signature custody service for multiple assets, the Keystore team used the Secret Sharing cryptography principle to rewrite the underlying code. To a certain extent, it can implement multi-signature protocols for most assets and protect the private keys of assets Minimize single points of risk throughout the life cycle.
In addition, Keystore has designed HSM “Hardware Encryption Module” signing device with reference to traditional finance, which enables users to operate private keys in a secure physical environment (similar to the working principle of a cold wallet). The difference is that the cold wallet still needs to save the user’s private key. In Keystore’s solution, neither the user’s private key nor the private key fragment will be stored in the HSM. Only when the user needs to conduct a transaction, the HSM will The private key fragments submitted by the user are recombined for transaction signature.
In this way, users can keep their private keys without depositing them to a third party, avoiding the risk of trust. “We provide a secure operation and maintenance environment, which is not currently available at Coinbase’s depository,” said Ouyang Meng. At the same time, Keystore is continuously investing in zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, PQC and other fields.
Taking depository as the core, extending Staking and online banking wallet services
In addition, Ouyang Meng introduced that in addition to the custody business, Keystore also provides staking services and online banking tool services for users in the circle.
At present, Keystore has cooperated with more than 20 head public chains to jointly deploy PoS and DPoS nodes, including: Cosmos, PlatON, Wanchain, Ontology, Qtum, Vechain, IRISNet, ChainX, GXchain, CPChain, FCoin, etc.
The online banking tool service is the third business direction of Keystore. This service is used to ensure the security of crypto asset payment and transfer, similar to the bank’s U-Shield. At the same time, for the needs of corporate customers in the actual management of crypto assets management, multi-account, financial data processing and analysis needs, Keystore provides separately Supports multi-signature, multi-account, one-click export functions in accordance with accounting standards.
According to Ouyang Meng, online banking tools charge basic service fees and are not Keystore’s main revenue business. Custody and staking will account for about 80% of Keystore’s overall revenue.
In addition, Ouyang Meng said that for crypto asset service providers, depository management is only on-balance sheet business, and the possibility of financial management services such as quantification will not be ruled out in the future.
Mainly serving institutions in the circle and traditional institutions holding crypto assets
At present, Keystore’s main markets are in China and Southeast Asia, mainly in-house institutions and traditional institutional customers who hold crypto assets; its investment institutions that have cooperated include distributed capital, Fundamental Labs, NGC Ventures, JRR Crypto, Ledger Capital, Benrui Capital, etc.
To further expand traditional institutional users outside the circle, Keystore provides technical cooperation and channel cooperation:
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Technical cooperation. Keystore is currently in talks with some traditional banks to use blockchain technology to improve bank clearing efficiency.
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Channel cooperation. Also seeing the high-growth PE and private equity funds of the blockchain, facing the issue of compliance admission, Ouyang Meng believes that Keystore can help traditional institutions that have just entered the market to understand the mining process and details in depth, and through this process , Assume a role similar to investment banks. At present, the development of the industry is still in a wild era. The biggest ceiling is still about compliance issues. How to characterize crypto assets. Once the crypto assets have a clear definition, the crypto asset custodian industry will usher in a complete explosion.