Looking for input on new crypto storage product

3 points by DerekRodriguez 5 years ago | 3 comments

For the past six months, I’ve been working with a few other developers building a safe new way to store cryptocurrency. Our goal is to make personal crypto storage easy and secure while maintaining full control of assets at all times.

The secret is using multiple storage devices rather than just one. You do this by creating a network of friends and family to help protect your crypto. This network allows you to protect your stored assets from both loss and theft since any single device is not enough to access held assets.

We are releasing soon and want to make sure we are building the best product possible. Do you think this will be useful? What features do you want to see included?

Explainer video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlJbA1KRePw&t=1s

Check our website - https://hi.gridlock.network/input

Chat with us on Discord - https://discord.com/invite/ssmstTSNWJ

quickthrower2 5 years ago |

Hi from what you wrote (didn’t watch the video) it sounds a lot like keys.casa and I think it’s good to have more competition in this space.

I think it’s very useful to have solutions like this especially if there is a security scale based on if you are storing 100, 10000 or 1M+ dollars. Personal and corporate requirement might be different but I am guessing you’d focus on personal.

For larger amounts people want to think about if their possibly less technical relatives inheriting their estate can access the funds after their death.

kleer001 5 years ago |

Interesting. I'm always happy to see innovation in crypto space. Here's some questions off the top of my head:

Who is your target demographic?

How is this better than a paper wallet?

What happens if Gridlock disappears?

Do you have plans for a security audit?

Where's the code? Is this going to be open sourced?

How are you going to make money?

Who are your direct or close-enough competitors? I think Tresor does MofN Multisig wallets.

DerekRodriguez 5 years ago | |

Great questions! I've answered them below and am happy to expand if needed.

Who is your target demographic? -

Our target demographic is males between 20 and 50, mostly because that's the value majority of crypto users. A smaller subset of that would be lighter blockchain users, just starting to explore the space.

How is this better than a paper wallet? -

Gridlock is better than a paper wallet because each storage device is not critically important. If your paper wallet is lost, destroyed, or stolen, then you lose everything. With Gridlock, the loss of any single (or even multiple) storage devices does not affect your stored assets. If someone can compromise your storage device, they get nothing unless they can compromise multiple devices...on different platforms...in different parts of the world.

What happens if Gridlock disappears? -

If Gridlock disappears, you will have to collect encryption keys from your storage devices manually. The security of the product remains intact with or without Gridlock. The initial product uses a centralized communication layer because decentralized communication is tough, and we decided to focus on security over the very small chance of a service outage. That said, the move to a decentralized communication layer is on our roadmap. Once complete, the system will be secure and 100% available without Gridlock servers.

Do you have plans for a security audit? -

Yes, do you have suggestions on the best company?

Where's the code? Is this going to be open-sourced? -

Yes, the code will be open-source and available once we release it. We don't want people judging our mess while we are under construction. :)

How are you going to make money? -

The core product will be free for life. We are looking to monetize with premium value-add services as well as commercial use licenses.

Who are your direct or close-enough competitors? -

Argent is a good comparable that provides enhanced security with built-in usability. Unfortunately, they can only support Ethereum+. Trezor does have key sharding capabilities (I use this personally). However, it is very much a recovery-only solution, and it's not very usable (much like the rest of Trezor's model). For example, if you don't have physical access to your Trezor, you can't do anything. This restriction isn't great, and I have a painful recent experience with this in particular. cough SEC and XRP over Christmas cough