Article by Dr. Oluseyi Akindeinde, Chief Technology Officer of Digital Encode Limited
When FTX collapsed last year, I wrote about how and why people needed to move their digital assists off centralized exchanges to a wallet they controlled the signing keys aka non-custodial wallets. I recommended a few software wallets but there was a problem. Seed phrases.
Somehow people either wrote down their seed phrases or stored them electronically and were lured into inputting their phrases on bogus sites which led to wallet compromises like the compromise reported in the first image below.
It led to my conclusion. Everyone WILL be hacked – eventually.
I invariably started recommending cold storage or hardware wallets. However a basic, entry level hardware wallet runs over 100k. This is rather expensive for mass market in these parts. Plus the fact that most are also difficult to setup and use.
Late last year I spent some time looking at this problem to see if there could be a way to have a simple to use hardware wallet that was also relatively inexpensive.
During that time, I found an unlikely solution in the technology used for contactless payments – NFC.
You see, most mobile phones (android and iOS) for the last 5 or so years come equipped with NFC technology. I then set out to design a secure smart card system based on NFC, which when paired with a mobile app, would allow anyone have a secure hardware wallet using the NFC chip as secure, encrypted storage – and best of all you wouldn’t need any seed phrase.
I called the hardware wallet the Keymaster VAULT (second image below) It’s a non custodial Web3 Smart Security Module (W3SSM) for digital assets protection. It can be used to safeguard crypto, NFTs and any digital asset compatible with EVM blockchains.
It is a direct replacement for expensive, traditional hardware wallets that are difficult to use.
This also has the benefit that it can be used for secure, passwordless authentication into DeFI, DAO, NFT, Metaverse platforms and any traditional web based application that wants to leverage Web3 auth through the WalletConnect protocol.
And best of all, the Keymaster VAULT costs only N3750 or $5
The general hope is to onboard 1 million users of the Keymaster VAULT in Africa in the next 10 years and introduce Web3 Internet security to enterprises and corporate organizations to combat hacking and electronic fraud.
We are of the opinion that the blockchain can be used for much more than cryptocurrencies, it can be used for Internet security, authentication, identity and access management and we think we’ve cracked the code.
More to come….
[N.B.: This piece was first published on Dr Oluseyi Akindeinde’s LinkedIn page]
#security #blockchain #web3 #hardwarewallet
