Payment giant PayPal officially announced that it will acquire cryptocurrency security and custody company Curv. It is expected to complete the acquisition in the first half of this year. The financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed, but the media speculated that the purchase price was between 200 million and 300 million US dollars.
The original text was published in April 2020.
Written by: Donnager
On an online live program ” Crypto Tonight ” sponsored by Chain News, Itay Malinger, CEO of Curv, a crypto security company headquartered in New York, revealed that the world’s largest listed fund management company ” Franklin Templeton Fund ” has used Curv The technology provided is used for key management of digital assets to ensure the security of digital assets.
“Our secret is a key management protocol based on Secure Multi-Party Computing (MPC). Through this technology, institutional users can enjoy bulletproof protection, digital asset holders can be completely anonymous, and availability is instant.” Itay Malinger said that this is the first such company to obtain Ernst & Young’s SOC2 audit certification.
Curv has obtained SOC2 certification
Itay Malinger also revealed to Lianwen that Curv has recently established an Asia-Pacific office in Hong Kong and will begin to expand opportunities in the Asian market, especially the Chinese market, in 2020. He said: “Asia has maintained a leading position in the adoption of digital assets, and we will develop it further there.”
Curv is a digital asset security platform. It can be regarded as an institution-oriented crypto asset wallet service provider that uses a secure multi-party computing protocol. They are eliminating the outdated single point of failure such as “private keys” to create a secure digital asset Institutional standards.
Multiparty Secure Computing (MPC) is a popular technology in the field of cryptocurrency, commonly used in privacy or security scenarios, including PlatON, ZenGo, Enigma, NuCypher and other well-known institutions in the industry are also conducting research and development around MPC, but most of them have not yet been released Mainnet. And Curv’s technology has been commercialized, and it has cooperated with Munich Re to provide institutional-level insurance to customers to further ensure the safety of funds.
Three advantages of MPC over traditional technology
Let Chain Wen pay attention to this company because at the beginning of this year, the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the regulator responsible for overseeing U.S. derivatives transactions, organized a seminar on cryptocurrency, the CFTC’s Technical Advisory Committee Curv CEO Itay Malinger was invited as an expert in the field of MPC technology to report to the committee the security advantages of key-based solutions such as MPC and hardware security modules (HSM) and multi-signature (MultiSig). This information will help the CFTC Technical Committee understand the technical details of MPC, and may refer to it when setting up a regulatory framework in the future.
Itay Malinger introduces MPC technology to the CFTC Technical Advisory Committee
Curv’s team is in the United States, but the core staff, including CEO, CTO, and chief scientist, all graduated from the famous Hebrew University or Tel Aviv University in Israel. CEO Itay Malinger worked in the Israeli government’s research and development department in the early days. Before founding Curv, he served as the director of Akamai, the world’s largest content distribution network.
According to Itay Malinger, the company’s services mainly face the world’s leading exchanges, custody service providers, OTC trading institutions and brokerage institutions, and have been favored by traditional financial institutions and digital asset management institutions. In addition to the “Franklin Templeton Fund”, Digital Currency Group’s cryptocurrency lending platform Genesis and social brokerage platform eToro are also their customers. These are the leading institutions in their respective verticals.
Some of Curv’s customers
Cryptocurrency exchanges are also potential customers of Curv, but many exchanges are building their own custody solutions. For example, one can often hear mentions of using cold wallets or multi-signature (MultiSig) technology. Itay Malinger revealed to Lianwen that if exchanges switch multi-signature or traditional solutions to their MPC solution, it will bring three things: “compatibility”, “asset support”, and “security and liquidity”. Advantage.
He said that there are no restrictions on the types of assets supported by MPC, unlike multi-signature technologies that only support specific blockchains. For example, ETH does not support multi-signature. “We have previously published an article on BSV about the recent Genesis fork. As a result, multi-signature providers have to stop supporting assets such as BSV, so any customer who uses a multi-signature solution will face operational challenges.”
In November last year, the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit was hacked, resulting in the loss of 342,000 ETH. Itay Malinger believes that this is related to the way Upbit funds custody. Ethereum does not natively support multi-signature technology, but uses smart contracts to imitate multiple ETHs. The effect of signing will bring about wallet compatibility problems.
Upbit’s institutional suppliers used a smart contract-based multi-signature solution. Due to compatibility considerations, Upbit could not use the multi-signature solution and could only build their own solutions, which eventually led to the occurrence of this incident. If they treat Curv as a solution for all their types of assets, this kind of problem will never happen.”
If the market fluctuates greatly, there is no longer a need to distinguish between hot and cold wallets?
The recent huge volatility in the cryptocurrency market has made Itay Malinger see the use of MPC technology to help exchanges resolve the conflict between asset liquidity and security.
He said that MPC technology can maintain the same level of security as cold wallets, while taking into account liquidity, as long as they are connected to the Internet, they can be used at any time. “Using a key-based solution, exchanges have to transfer funds to cold wallets to reduce risks. But when market volatility increases, users’ demand for liquidity is very strong.”
The most recent black swan event in the cryptocurrency market was on March 12th, US time. On that day, various assets around the world fluctuated widely, including encrypted assets. Bitcoin’s biggest drop on the day was 50%. Itay Malinger said that Curv suffered the largest transaction volume since its establishment on the same day, but it never went down. He also added, “Extreme environments like Black Swan Day show the need for market participants to quickly transfer funds to the market or counterparties. Our multi-party secure computing wallet service achieves optimized transactions without sacrificing security. Operational capabilities have not been affected.”
How does MPC spread to more users?
Although Curv has always been serving large institutional-level customers, these technologies will ultimately benefit the institution’s own end customers. For example, the Franklin Templeton Fund provides financial management services for nearly 10 million investors. Curv recently launched API Key-based MPC solutions and Blackbox wallet solutions that are expected to further extend the popularity of MPC technology and open up more application scenarios in non-Curv wallets and non-Curv platforms.
The API Key Secure Multi-Party Computing (MPC) solution uses the same security and policy enforcement functions as Curv’s institutional-level wallets, and focuses on helping customers smoothly transfer encrypted assets between various non-Curv wallets.
In the Blackbox wallet solution, customers can use Curv’s distributed signature mechanism to ensure the security of all their encrypted asset transactions, regardless of whether these transactions are conducted on the Curv platform.
In addition to Curv, there are many projects that are studying MPC technology and exploring other application scenarios besides asset custody. For example, ZenGo implants MPC technology into end users’ cryptocurrency wallets and provides wallet solutions without private keys. The vision is similar to Curv, but the customer’s positioning is different. As for public chain projects such as PlatON or NuCypher, MPC technology is also applied to privacy data processing, privacy security and other scenarios.
MPC Alliance List
These institutions launched an organization called “MPC Alliance” last year to jointly promote the development of this technology through academic research.
Although the concept of MPC was born about 40 years ago, it has not been until recently that MPC has received great attention from the industry, which has also brought some new challenges. Driven by these institutions, perhaps we can see more practical applications and landing scenarios in 2020.
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