Hello and welcome to an all new episode of Deciphered right here on the CryptoCast network.
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It's going to be really, really fun talking Bitcoin all day long.
So with that aside, let's just introduce our, stop the screen share here and introduce our
amazing panelists and guests today on the show, Jameson and Alena joining us from Casa.
How are you guys doing, Alena?
We'll ask Alena first.
How are you doing, Alena?
Hi.
Hi, Vortex.
I'm doing very well, especially being you, with you here.
Awesome.
Yeah.
We love to have you.
Yeah, we love to have you on the show.
We love to have you here, Alena.
I was talking Bitcoin.
Of course, long storied history in Bitcoin.
We'll get into a little bit of that a little bit later, but let's also introduce Mr. Jameson
Lopp.
Jameson, how you doing?
Not bad.
Just trying to keep up with these nodes that we started shipping out and getting feedback
from the customers and making them even better.
Yeah, that awesome.
Yeah.
Looking forward to that.
We're going to talk a little bit more about that as well.
Really interesting stuff, guys.
But before we get too much into the node and other things like that, into too many details,
let's get some high level questions going on before I ask you guys what you individually
do for the company.
Let me just ask you guys individually, one by one, we'll go with Jameson first.
What really is the idea behind CASA and really, I want to know what drives the passion behind
you guys and the team to create this product?
I guess you could say that it's kind of a sovereign individual thesis.
We're trying to bring about the world that we believe is possible where we've always
talked about Bitcoin enabling people to be their own bank, but we think that there is
a big gap in the market with the products and services that make it possible for you
to do that without having to be a super nerd that spends days, weeks, years learning all
of this stuff to do it yourself.
We, at least with our vault product, we're trying to recreate a private banker relationship
where we're helping people manage their wealth, but the difference of course being that we
don't actually have control over anyone's wealth.
We're going to help them manage their own wealth.
It's really about building tools and services and great user experience to help us get to
that next level of adoption.
Awesome.
Really great to hear.
I'm excited to talk more to get into this, Jameson, every time you start talking about
it, man, I get excited.
Let's ask Alena here.
Alena, what drove you to join CASA?
What do you see CASA as?
I'd like to hear from your own words.
What do you think CASA as?
Again, same kind of question to you.
What's driving your passion to be behind this project?
Besides an amazing team in the first place, there's also a big overlapping in the ideas
on where we should go or where we could take this when we met with Jeremy, the CEO, for
the first time.
We kind of spent some time over a coffee discussing the future as we envisioned and we basically
realized that we overlapping in pretty much most of it.
At the same time, the work that I started with Trezor is great because it kind of laid
the base of private ownership of crypto.
Moving forward in time and developments and adoption, we also saw a lot of new problems.
We basically tackled the digital risk and the third party risk with the hardware wallet,
but then we either have the extreme of being completely on your own with the hardware wallet,
having to protect your recovery seed and having to eventually protect multiple recovery seeds
if you decide to go into a multi seed or being on the other scale where you just basically
take and give away access to your crypto to a custodian company.
There was nothing in between and even Bitcoin and crypto still being very early, I still
consider Bitcoin very early, where we see a lack of some customer approach or some higher
level, let's say, customer services such as advisory, something that could help people
just have and manage their crypto without fear, without fearing of losing access, without
fearing of compromising their seed, without fearing of what happens if I die, stuff like
that.
As Jameson said, the crypto of private money comes at some risk, so we want to help people.
Basically, we want to hold their hands, making it easier.
Really great.
Yeah.
I actually just tweeted something out about this this morning.
Some people still don't seem to realize how early days we are.
They're trying to look for the new Facebooks and the new Googles and it's like, we're still
kind of building out the fundamental protocols, we're still building out the rails, like with
lightning and continuously optimizing Bitcoin as the base chain.
It's really interesting to see how really early we are.
There's a whole lot of, I think, opportunity coming up.
It's very early days, as you guys say.
It's the difficulty in doing some of these basic things.
It gets really, really crazy with command line interfaces and having to hold your own
keys and things like that.
Before we get more into Casa, I'm going to ask just quickly, just really briefly for
both of you, Jameson, first, what is your role within this company?
I've brought over my three years of experience from running infrastructure at BitGo.
Doing high level management of the infrastructure and general advising of all of the engineers
who this is their first time in crypto and they may not know some of the little gotchas
under the hood when it comes to configuring things or using certain libraries or just
general best practices and methodology for building crypto wallets.
I'm not doing as much deep diving coding stuff these days, I'm more trying to just let everyone
else be a sponge and soak up all the stuff that I've learned over the past few years.
Awesome.
That's a great place to be in.
I know you did a lot of heavy handed work at BitGo, especially with the user activated
software class here.
There were some pretty awesome, of course, pictures that you were writing or that you
were tweeting out there about writing some of that code.
That was pretty great, especially when people were starting to get really worried about
if Bitcoin was going to survive or not.
We had the people that were deep in Bitcoin like yourself making sure, writing the code,
whatever it took, and of course, in your case, writing the code to make sure that everything
goes smoothly with the user activated software, making sure that 2X doesn't destroy us.
Crazy stuff like that.
Awesome work there, Jameson.
Let me ask Alena this question here.
Alena, answer me this, Alena.
Why is CASA better than a Trezor?
It's super compatible.
It's not that it's better.
It's a continuation for me.
I'm a business developer, and I usually like to just pick up a project from zero to one.
When it's successful and profitable, I'm like, okay, what's next?
CASA is a very natural continuation.
We are still very close with Trezor.
What I hope to bring to CASA is not just the long term vision, but also some business common
sense and product development and helping with partnerships and general partnerships
and so on.
That's what I'm working on.
I'm officially the head of strategy, if you want it short.
Head of strategy.
Now, of course, that was a bit of a loaded question.
Why is it better?
Because CASA is different.
It's for a different tier of cryptocurrency holder.
It's more for people who hold a little bit more than maybe just a couple hundred dollars
that they want to store on their Trezor.
CASA is sort of helping people store larger amounts.
Is that right, Alina?
Yes, that's right today, but that's not the ultimate goal, of course.
We are focusing on, we are basically offering a premium level service.
Imagine a white glove type of service for crypto wealthy, if you will, but eventually
I would like to expand and offer the features as we perfect them and as we are basically
building up the entire system to also open up to, let's say, lower tiers in the product
management slang.
One of the steps that we want to, we want everyone in the crypto space to be secure
and safe and self-confident.
So having to think what to do is not where crypto should go.
It should be everything like next button style, right?
So eventually we will trickle down, but right now we basically made another step.
We launched a CASA node and that's something that's basically open to anyone for $300.
So our premium level service, when I step back, is priced at $10,000 a year and you're
right, you have to have a certain amount of crypto to justify that, but you know, eventually
I've seen this with Trezor as well when we started and people will ask me, so how many
bitcoins do I have to have in order to justify a purchase of a hardware wallet?
And I said any amount because in a few years your crypto may be worth 10 times as much
and I was wrong because it was way more.
So that depends, you know, the risk perception of everyone is different, but yeah, you're
right.
Right now it's not just for small holdings.
It's also interesting, I think, to look at this from a business standpoint where a lot
of the consumer wallets that are out there are free and it's very, very difficult to
compete in that space because a lot of your competition is not putting a price tag on
their product and what are they doing instead?
Well, in at least some cases they are selling data or doing advertising or basically doing
some sort of surveillance on their users and we are kind of philosophically opposed to
doing that really even to the point that we're being very conscientious about not putting
any sort of standard developer debug logging and other types of tools that are helpful
for us because we don't want to accidentally surveil our users and have data leaks and
run into the issues that we're seeing crop up in a lot of large technology organizations
these days.
So from a business perspective, it does kind of make more sense to start out top tier because
we can get a lot larger profit margin and then figure out how to compete more on the
smaller profit margin services later.
Yeah, it's interesting because we see so many of these large companies, not even tech companies,
but tech companies too get hacked and have all their users information leaked.
Then of course we have social security numbers leaking like crazy from the credit companies
and crazy stuff.
So it makes sense that people are forward thinking companies like you guys, especially
in the crypto space, need to start thinking adversarially, right?
More adversarially to not do these debugging procedures or create these honey pots that
hackers can just come along and take it.
Now, another interesting point you guys made is that, so you are starting with a specific
type of people, right?
So I guess you could say the crypto wealthy, but that's because I believe that's where
you feel you guys can make the most impact right now.
But the idea is to sort of trickle that technology down to the average person in the future as
well.
Is that right?
Anybody can take that?
Go ahead.
Well, yeah.
I mean, it's very hard to sell security.
This was something that Bitco was good at well, and also even at Bitco, there was a
learning lesson where when I first joined in 2015, we were actually trying to decide
whether or not to also target the consumer market.
And so Bitco had about a one year period where we were trying to onboard a lot of small users
and get a like 10 to 30 or $50 a year service out of them.
And really what we found was that A, it's very difficult to sell even the $10, $20 service
because most of the others are free and B, you end up having a huge overhead with customer
support and ending up having to do a lot of handholding and basic user education.
So I am, as much as people hate on services like blockchain.info and Coinbase and various
large providers, I think that they are providing some interesting services, at least along
the user education front where they're essentially subsidizing a lot of the onboarding and customer
education for new entrants into the system.
But just from a ability to sell security to people standpoint, it's a lot easier to sell
security to someone who has a lot more to lose.
And so that's another reason why it makes sense to target the folks who have millions
of dollars worth of crypto that is in many cases we found causing them to have issues
even sleeping at night.
And so really what we're selling is peace of mind.
And we found a number of users once they've gotten onboarded with us have essentially
told us that they have much greater peace of mind and they're not worried about some
catastrophe happening that causes them to get completely wiped out.
Yep.
That makes a lot of sense.
Great points, Jameson, on that.
You have to serve the people that need it the most.
And of course, people with the largest amounts are going to be the ones that tend to need
that the most right now.
So let me ask you this then, Jameson.
Why should we trust CASA?
Well, yeah, you shouldn't.
We're going to be making some posts- I'm going to ask you too, Alena, after Jameson.
I'm going to ask you too, but let's get Jameson's comment first.
Sorry.
Yeah.
So we haven't said anything about it yet, but we're currently working on formalizing
our open source policy and deciding which parts of our infrastructure get open source
so that people can have better peace of mind of the security of the code itself.
But ultimately, at least for the Vault product, the fact that we're actually building on top
of these other hardware key management device platforms is very interesting from a kind
of separation of ability and partitioning, I guess, of the security of the system.
Because what it means is that even if CASA and our code or our database got compromised
in a way that it tried to get you to create a transaction that went to an address that
didn't belong to you, you would still have to manually verify that that address is going
to receive some amount of value.
You have to verify that on multiple different hardware devices and platforms that CASA has
no control over.
So that's kind of like the ultimate stopgap of CASA doing anything particularly malevolent.
And of course, I didn't even talk about the theft of private keys.
That's actually a complete non-issue because we only have one out of the five keys.
All of the other keys are on completely separate hardware.
So really, the biggest threat or attack vector for the multisig Vault product is bad data
or bad code somehow getting out onto our servers and causing transactions to be formed in a
malicious way.
But like I said, you would have to be completely not paying attention to anything and have
to confirm multiple times on different devices.
So that provides a level of security that you don't really see even in other multisig
products.
Very, very interesting.
So you guys only keep one of the keys then.
You guys don't keep, for example, every single key.
So then let's ask Alena then.
So Alena, why should the average crypto wealthy person trust CASA?
What would they use?
What would they trust in CASA over a Trezor?
This is not about trusting Trezor versus trusting CASA because our clients are basically, all
of them are using both a Trezor wallet and a Ledger.
Some of them multiple and CASA is only one key of the five.
So as James already explained.
So it's more the entire setup as it's done plus our internal policies about protecting
user data.
We are very careful about not even sharing customer names within the company and stuff
like that.
So we have really policies internally to protect our customers.
I don't want to give more details because why?
We don't want to expose all the security.
Exactly, exactly.
We don't want to teach our competitors.
But this is basically what James was explaining and the entire multisig setup does not allow
us to move the money.
And besides, we basically provide dedicated client service to each of our customers where
they know each other, they've seen each other face to face.
So there's an additional basically hand holding, but that's it, no Bitcoin holding on CASA
side.
Very, very cool.
So let me ask Jameson this.
Jameson, what happens if the CASA servers get blown up?
Yeah.
So we have outlined a what we call sovereign recovery process where when you initialize
your CASA wallet, we send you basically the public key data that's associated with all
five of those keys.
And when you have that pub key data and you know a few other attributes about the wallet
itself, you can then use that to recreate the wallet using other open source software
that is compliant with the various Bitcoin improvement proposals out there.
And as long as you then have your hardware devices, you can plug them in and do the actual
signing to create a transaction.
So it's a lot more manual process and not nearly as user friendly as using the CASA
software itself.
But we have a proof of concept that you can go and we actually encourage our users to
test as part of their onboarding process to show that nothing that we're doing is fully
reliant upon CASA as a single central server.
If anything, our server is only really there to help facilitate the partially signed Bitcoin
transactions.
We even have on our longer term roadmap various plans to move more and more of that facilitation
and queries and stuff off of our server and to things such as your at home node device.
So this is all part of a very long term roadmap to make the user as sovereign as possible
and just make us be a software service provider that doesn't have the ability to block anything
or censor anything or steal anything even if we went rogue or disappeared off the face
of the planet.
Awesome.
That sounds good.
Lena, do you want to elaborate?
Yeah.
CASA also makes steps towards where our clients don't have to trust themselves so much either.
So by that, I want to say we came up with something that's called seedless setup.
And that basically is a protection against human creativity or forgetfulness or against
some criminal minds because we came up with a multisig setup where basically we did completely
away with the recovery seed with those 24 words.
Our clients do not store them and that makes them, in my opinion, more secure because having
four keys to protect or five keys to protect and five different recovery seeds actually
increases your risk exposure.
So that doesn't work.
The traditional way of setting up a multisig on your own and then ending up with these
10 items that you need to protect and you need to know on top of the five pins or maybe
even passpages.
So it's a bunch of data and a bunch of items to protect all of a sudden.
So the way for us was to completely get rid of the recovery seed and that, I think, brings
a huge piece of mind to a lot of users because before that, even during my CEOing of Trezor,
people would ask this a lot, like, what do I do with the recovery seed?
What if my house burns down?
Should I copy it?
Should I divide it?
What should I do with it?
It's a completely new paradigm for people to all of a sudden, all their wealth depends
on a piece of paper.
So there's that, you know, so you don't have to trust yourself anymore that you've stored
it well and nobody's going to steal it from you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
See, it sounds like, so it really sounds like you guys are trying to merge sort of this
usability of a mobile app, simplicity of something that people are familiar with, with kind of
like the infrastructure of what we used to come to expect to maybe of a bank, right?
So but of course, in that, in the previous scenario, the bank had all the power and everything
like that.
There was, of course, no self-sovereignty at all.
But with you guys, it seems that since you guys only hold one key, then it's trying to
combine the best of both worlds, trying to make sure that you have this cold storage
option, but that it's secure and that it's easy to use at the same time.
So speaking of that, Alina, maybe you can walk us through sort of the onboarding process,
because as you say, like the biggest risk to the user, right, is themselves.
And I think you guys are trying to eliminate as much as possible without actually eliminating
the user itself as much as you can before we eliminate the user.
So maybe you can just quickly walk us through an onboarding process with Kosovo.
Yeah.
What you mentioned about the user experience, the usability is a key component to everything
we do.
So you have the security of hardware wallets and the multi-sig and the multi-device, multi-location
setup, but you have the actual usability of Tinder.
I don't know.
Raise your hands, whoever is using Tinder.
But there's this swipe left and right and the super like, and we are extremely lucky
to have the actual designer of Tinder on our team as a lead designer.
So as you see, Scott Herve is his name.
He is the god of everything that gets out to the public.
So he is on top of the chain.
He doesn't have experience with Bitcoin, which is amazing because he quickly sees any weirdness
in the process and anything that may come up is not really user friendly.
So there's that, you know, the user centric design is really important component of CASA
and what we're trying to achieve.
And so the onboarding basically happens face to face with a dedicated client advisor who
sets you up with your hardware wallets, who sets you up with the application, explains
how it works.
And then we have a procedure where the client is testing everything.
We play with testnet coins first, you know, we do some disaster recoveries, stuff like
that until the client is completely comfortable with onboarding his entire crypto wealth.
And that's basically for the beginning.
Then we continue to be there available 24 seven on call.
You know, you wake up at night and you realize you don't have your treasure.
So who do you call your ghostbuster from CASA, right?
So that's there.
We try to educate our customers a little bit on the security, but mainly keep up to date
with what's going on and what's relevant to them in the market.
Jameson, maybe you could tell about your Faraday bag and all that stuff.
You know, we like to also play and to bring things into perfection.
And Jameson has a perfect dawn for that, I think.
Yeah.
So, you know, the actual technical steps of onboarding is really fast.
I think the part of onboarding that takes the longest is if you're using a ledger and
it still forces you to write down those seed phrase so that you can confirm it before you
continue.
And of course, we tell them to destroy the seed phrase that they temporarily wrote down.
Trezor is streamlining that with the seedless option.
But the actual process of getting your wallet set up is pretty much as simple as we create
an account for your whatever email address you want, you set the password, you download
the mobile app and then log in and start walking through the process.
And it's basically, you know, we generate a private key on the mobile device.
We then suck up the extended public keys off of your three different hardware devices and
each one of those steps only takes a matter of seconds.
And then once you've got that last hardware public key, then everything is ready to go
and you can set up well, we automatically have a test net account that's created and,
you know, we'll send you some test net coins and then you can start playing around with
creating transactions or with rotating keys or with doing the sovereign recovery process.
Just getting completely familiar with all of the available options and the product.
But as Alina was saying, we have gotten rid of the need to figure out how to securely
store the seed phrases.
And now instead, I think it's easier for humans to visualize just having, you know, these
three different devices and keeping them safe.
And so the only thing we really need to worry about there, we don't need to worry about
like physical theft or access of any single device because they're being kept geographically
separated and they're pin protected.
We really more have to worry about keeping them safe from natural events happening, you
know, whether it's a fire or like electromagnetic pulse or what have you.
And so we also have as one of our little products that is available is a CASA branded EMP proof
bag.
That's the perfect size for your treasure, ledger, what have you.
You know, we've also talked about maybe potentially fireproof bags and stuff like that, but I
haven't settled on anything yet.
But it's this is kind of part of the service offering is that CASA has experts who are
thinking about all of these crazy edge cases so that you don't have to.
And all you have to do is, you know, follow the instructions that we're telling you, follow
the instructions that are on the mobile device, the mobile app, and you'll have a level of
security that's arguably even greater than anything that you'll get at a single bank.
Yeah, it's just it's really interesting.
You know, I like the point, Jameson, where, you know, I'm with you, I've been in the space
almost as long as you, Jameson.
And I'm, you know, I remember the days when we were talking about we wanted everybody
to be their own bank, right?
Like this was this was the goal.
But of course, as for the viewers listening to this and, you know, the audio listeners,
you can sort of sort of grasp how difficult it actually is to be your own bank.
Like, it's really not as easy as we wanted.
And it's going to get it's going to actually continue to evolve and to get easier, thanks
to companies like CASA that is thinking about processes to make it easier and providing
services to do that.
But we're just not there yet.
It's very, very early days again, with the word command line interfaces, you know, it's
very difficult to use, actually tweeted out a picture of an old modem where you had to
actually put the phone on the modem and have it dial out.
It's pretty crazy, you know, trying to have people go out and buy a modem, configure it
to their ISP, and then download software to make that work after that.
And, you know, that's where we are right now.
And so I think services like this are going to help us get to where we need to be with
people being able to hold sovereignty over their own funds, you know, as opposed to the
previous solution, which, of course, was 100% trust in a third party like a bank.
Now, you guys, you guys are kind of pioneering this this this best in class key store with
this this really great customer service of like being able to handhold people through
the whole process.
But let me ask you this, Jameson, what happens if I lose all my keys and all my devices that
you get?
What happens?
Yeah.
So ultimately, what we're trying to do here is find the balance between sovereignty, security,
and responsibility.
And you know, this is arguably one of the reasons why a lot of people like banks.
It's because banks have experts that are thinking about all of these edge cases.
And you know, that's basically what they get paid to do. And really, from an even higher
level, like, this is how society has evolved, right, is specialization of tasks.
It's like nobody out there is humanly able to be an expert in everything.
And in order for us to be more efficient and more productive and able to do something really
well and get compensated for it, is that we we delegate responsibility for certain things
to other providers.
And we're willing to pay them some certain amount of resources for that.
So you know, ultimately, everything that we've done at CASA is it's possible for anyone else
to do themselves if they have the technical expertise, if they have the time, if they're
willing to to scale the steep learning curve that is required, which, you know, is arguably
months or years of deep experience in this field.
So because we are a company that is focused on users being more sovereign and us as a
company not having control over the user's funds, it ultimately means that if the user
screws up enough, then it's game over.
So we we try to strike the right balance when we were thinking of like the multisig setup
and combining it with hardware devices and combining it with, you know, having geographically
separated key material that if you lose a device when you have a CASA wallet, it's actually
extremely simple to recover from that.
You just you can go buy your own device off of any website or store if there is a cypher
punk store available near you, or you can call us and we'll overnight one to you.
And all you have to do, you don't even have to call us up on the phone to do a key rotation.
It's actually built into the mobile application itself.
You go into the app, you click on that device and the key shield and you say, I need to
replace this.
And then we walk you through a very simple setup where once again, we suck the extended
public key off of that device.
And we then walk you through creating a transaction that sweeps your your old wallet and basically
sends all of the value to your new wallet, which is the same four out of the five, you
know, key sets are the same.
But just doing that all in a very seamless process so that the user can then once again
see their key shield and have it show that everything is all right.
Now if you lose two devices at the same time before you can replace one of them, which
I guess could happen, especially if you don't have your keys geographically separated far
enough and there's some sort of major disaster, then at that point, you are going to have
to call up CASA and that is when the key that we are holding comes into play.
So basically, you will have to go into the recovery mode to to sign a recovery transaction
where you're getting your remaining two devices and then asking CASA to co-sign the third
set of keys.
And of course, we are not going to do that in an automated fashion.
We're going to require strong like voice and face identification.
And actually, this is also where the end of life scenarios come into play, where if if
you have passed and your family needs to get access and they don't have enough devices
to sign a transaction themselves, then they might come to us, you know, bringing various
legal documents, you know, death certificate, et cetera, et cetera, and at that case, CASA
would also co-sign to release the funds.
So that, of course, is the the boundary condition.
If you lose three devices at the exact same time and you're not paying attention or for
whatever reason you were keeping them all in your house and it burned down, then it's
game over.
And unfortunately, you didn't follow instructions and you have to suffer the consequences.
And this is, of course, the the tradeoff that anyone in the system is making is that in
order to have more power over your own assets, you have to be willing to take the responsibility
for them.
Yeah, very interesting.
I mean, this is this is this is what this is what personal individual sovereignty means.
It means taking personal responsibility.
So very, very good points, Jameson.
Let me ask you, Alaina, you know, it's it's it's funny because, you know, a lot of these
a lot of people don't understand the traditional financial system about how many layers deep
it is just built after a century, you know, decade after decade of trust and all of this
craziness.
You know, it's interesting that it gets so complex.
Even with Bitcoin, people that all the people that I've known about Bitcoin really didn't
start investing until like a year or two after they started learning about it because this
stuff is so complex.
So let me just ask you this, Alaina, you guys are talking about targeting, you know, certain
threshold of user in the beginning, but maybe you can share some of the the free security
stuff or some of the tools that you guys have released so far or are willing to release
in the near future for just the average person to sort of, again, help the whole ecosystem
raise its security awareness.
Yes, we have we've noticed that a lot of people in the space still, you know, struggle with
some very basic security principles that don't even have so much to do with Bitcoin and crypto,
but they're like basic security hygiene, let's say.
And so recently we released a free tool, which is a security checklist or you can call it
the security health check, where you can just go to our website, keys.casa.
And there's let me open that real quick.
And there's this button, I'll go to screen share it to for the for the viewers.
There's a button that says improve your security.
And basically, you you create an account that's free of charge, you do your own security health
check and you go through very basic questions.
And we will expand on that tool in the future.
So we kind of keep the crypto space a little bit more educated and being able to check
on on the different, you know, attack vectors that they're facing.
So we're asking.
Yeah, exactly.
You can click through a little bit if you want to what you do.
Yeah, it's everything that you will see from Casa coming is a simple click next.
There is just no answers, you know, questions like do you use a password manager to factor
authentication?
You can see that.
So this is something that I'm super excited about, because we want to, you know, just
open up these these questions and make it very, very simple and easy for people to go
through.
Yeah, this is really great, you know, for the for the audio listeners, we are screen
sharing the website here at app dot keys dot casa.
And it's really interesting to be able to get your own report here because they do do
a nice walkthrough of everything that you need here.
So for those who are want to check this out, definitely go to casa was the website here.
What is your case?
That's what it is.
And we're at keys that casa.
So yeah, definitely check that out.
It's very, very helpful.
And I'm looking forward to more of these types of these efforts from the ecosystem itself
to help the whole ecosystem.
Like, you know, we have the Optech newsletter now, right?
I really I know a lot of people that are enjoying that.
Yeah, exactly.
And so these types of efforts, this grassroots is what I really, really like to see us all
together, you know, sort of building this new financial system together and open financial
system.
So really, really great to hear.
Let me see.
What was the next question?
Yeah.
So actually, I want to ask Jameson this because this is pretty this is pretty interesting.
So Jameson, let me ask you this, you know, you've because you've said this in the past,
you've said that casa is more of a Bitcoin first company.
So maybe you can talk a little bit about that, elaborate on that a bit.
Yeah.
Well, the the thesis is that if Bitcoin fails, then it's likely not going to be good for
the rest of the ecosystem.
And we also believe that a lot of the innovations are happening in Bitcoin.
And so, you know, it's been interesting to see some of the other companies in the space
kind of eschew bothering to to add support for for latest features and best practices
in Bitcoin and rather are focused on, you know, adding as many different crypto assets
as possible.
They're kind of doing it like a spray and pray approach, I guess, like everybody is
doing that, by the way, everybody just focused on adding new assets.
That's all they care about.
I hate that.
And, you know, we were doing that at BitGo as well.
And the the complexity of of the infrastructure at BitGo grew by orders of magnitude as we
were doing that.
And it made my life a lot more complicated.
And I didn't really appreciate having to spend a lot of time working on these other things.
So admittedly, I learned a lot about a lot of these other networks.
And if anything, what I learned ended up strengthening my conviction that I believe that Bitcoin
is on the best technical road map, if you will, of being conservative with the changes
that it's making.
And so we think that like as a network that is very narrowly focused on what it's trying
to do, that it has a very good chance of continuing to succeed at that, as opposed to a number
of other networks that are more like kitchen sink protocols, still trying to figure out
what they can best facilitate for people.
So for us, it's simplicity over complexity, I suppose.
And that ends up rearing its head in a number of different ways.
But it makes life easier for everyone.
Absolutely.
I really like that term, Jameson.
I'm stealing that now.
Kitchen sink protocols.
Can we get that hashtag going, people?
Hashtag kitchen sink protocols?
No, this is just what we're seeing in this space.
That's the only way that people can compete against Bitcoin, right?
Is asymmetric information is preying on people who don't understand this technology.
And all they have to say is, we're Bitcoin plus.
And it just kind of gets crazy.
So it's really great to see companies like yourself understand that that is not the right
approach.
Understand that because Bitcoin is so focused, the approach that a Bitcoin company needs
to take is focused.
This is I think what Trezor has taken approach as well.
And it shows Trezor is still super, super secure.
And there's people that are passionate about keeping it secure.
So there's people in the community that are constantly trying to hack it.
And when they find something, they expose it.
And then everything gets fixed.
And this is what you get when you focus as opposed to the kitchen sink with something
like Ledger that, man, they support everything.
It's getting really crazy.
And so what we've seen is that we've seen it be a little bit less secure.
No knocks to Ledger.
But of course, we've seen that they have had issues in keeping their device secure.
So to be completely fair, Trezor is also releasing a lot of new crypto.
Just today, I saw a list amongst them is, I think, Monero coming, Cardano and Lisk and
a few more.
I think even Ripple.
But again, those protocols have been out for a while, though, right?
They're not just adding new stuff like exchanges and other things on.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
And that's true.
And Trezor has always been Bitcoin first.
And at Casa, we basically have the same idea around security, Bitcoin first.
If our clients come to us and they say, oh, I have a bunch of Monero and I have Zcash,
we will honor our client because in the end, the goal is a sovereign and secure individual.
That's the vision of Casa.
But saying that, we always be Bitcoin first company.
Of course, customers will request additional assets and that's fine and everything.
You want to make sure that they are taken care of.
But of course, it's a balanced approach.
You guys just don't add it because a couple of people want it.
You add it if the protocol has been already tested and sort of in the wild for a while
and you have a big enough demand for it.
It's not just one or two people.
So let me ask you this then, Jameson, and maybe to Alena, what are some of the new features
coming down the line for Casa that customers who are already are familiar with Casa can
expect?
Yeah, we are expanding towards Ethereum.
We already have, let's say, single SIG ether support.
We are, you know, the multi SIG in Ethereum is kind of a tricky deal.
So we are kind of waiting and working with the Ethereum community on finding like what
is the best protocol for the smart contract.
By tricky, Alena, do you mean non-functional or sorry, multi SIG every time I get a chance
to, sorry.
There are several points to the tricky in Ethereum and it comes like, but basically
it's more about there's no consensus, general, at least a community consensus on a smart
contract for multi SIG in Ethereum.
Of course, in the ideal world, multi SIG would be native, but I don't know if that's coming.
I think this is something maybe Jameson can elaborate a little bit more, but yeah, this
is what we're hoping because to introduce in a full, full beauty, just like for Bitcoin,
I don't want to actually give up too many more future plans, stay tuned.
You guys are always working on something new, I would assume.
Yes.
Yes.
And this team is working really fast and I, an unprecedented speed, I would say we basically
released the node in just a few months of work with a beautiful interface and you'll
see more news around the node coming as well, but as I said, I'll keep you waiting a little
bit.
Cool, cool, cool.
Maybe some kind of integration with Liquid or something like that down the line, you
never know, since they're releasing their full node and stuff lately.
Let me ask then Jameson the same thing, go ahead and comment, what are you guys looking
at for new features and maybe you can comment a little bit about what Alena said on the
multisig.
Yeah, so this is all an iterative process on the vault side, we are talking with various
customers and various developer teams about other popular crypto assets that could potentially
be added.
The Ethereum side, I went through that with BitGo with doing a multisig smart contract
and it was a real nightmare so we wanted to get more standardization around multisig on
Ethereum and thankfully at the recent DevCon 4 there is an effort towards standardizing
and formalizing I think around the Gnosis contract.
So the main thing is like we don't want to put customer funds into a multisig contract
unless there's like such consensus around it that if it failed that Ethereum would basically
bail it out.
And otherwise, I am interested in continuing to add more best practice guidance into the
vault product itself, there's a number of things there like automated health checks
and other types of guide rails that we could add in to the app to help basically help the
user not shoot themselves in the foot, just thinking about more of the ways that users
can accidentally harm themselves through negligence or ignorance or what have you.
And then of course the node product is very, very new and we're getting a lot of feedback
on that and iterating and this is only version one of the node product.
It's just an emotional note that it's super exciting and one thing is to release an app
and a service, it's kind of non-tangible but when you release a hardware product it's kind
of exciting because you see your babies traveling with the mail and then people getting excited
over unpacking and unboxing and sharing.
So it's like it threw me back a little bit to the moments when we were sending out Trezor
wallets and getting the first feedback and people, some of them reporting I saw working
on these very early days, so it's kind of a lot of excitement and also anxiety around
that of course because we want to, you know, everything goes smooth and perfectly well.
But no, right now we are collecting a lot of feedback as Jameson said, we have a private
channel for our first node users where we really basically interact with them and see
what's going on there and we'll be iterating on the node software in the future.
The tricky thing with this device is that we're basically asking the user to run their
own server and we want this to be a server that someone can run without having administrative
like Linux experience or networking experience and so we knew that we were going to run into
issues around networking and network security and stuff like that and so that's one of the
reasons why at the moment it is only accessible within your local network.
We have plans for ways to be able to open that up in a secure fashion because ultimately
we want this to be like your own personal data silo and, you know, using it for any
number of different decentralized apps, if you will, so that when you're out and about
doing things in the real world, you can basically phone home to your node to have it give you
an additional level of security because it's been sitting there, you know, validating all
of your information and keeping it safe.
Yep, very, very cool.
So let me just ask one final then question for either Alena or Jameson.
Are there any other competitors?
Are you guys seeing any competition coming up with basically like this idea of multi-sig
with sort of off-the-shelf key signing devices?
Are you guys seeing any additional competition coming up for CASA?
Alena?
For the node or for the…
For CASA.
For CASA, the multi-sig.
Well, you know, first of all, I think there's a big demand coming up not just from the,
you know, Bitcoin OGs and not just actually we were quite surprised to see the variety
of customers that are coming to CASA.
So we have people that have had advanced multi-sig setups and they even studied Glacier Protocol
and all that kind of stuff, but still when they, you know, saw CASA offering, they chose
to go with CASA.
And then we, on the other hand, we have, for example, CASA node users that have never run
a command line and they are super happy, you know, to just being able to plug and play.
I would say that, you know, there are some multi-sig solutions that are coming out there,
but none of them seem to be the type of multi-sig that we're doing.
I'm seeing other solutions where it's like multi-sig for enterprises of like sharing
amongst, you know, larger groups of people.
And I've also seen some that are like in this like social recovery multi-sig where it's
like going out there and instead of you having all of the keys yourself, they're getting
distributed amongst like random groups of people.
But I haven't seen anything like us where it's multi-sig, but you have all of the devices
yourself.
Very powerful.
Yeah.
And that's, I try to look around too, like for some type of competition for CASA, but
really nobody seems to do exactly what you guys want to do, which is not only, of course,
give you the best in class security, but still provide the ability 100% to have sovereignty
over, you know, your keys and your money.
So that doesn't seem to be a big focus for other companies, of course, you know, things
like Coinbase and of course all the institutional investment stuff, they want to hold everything.
So that is really, really interesting to see.
Alina, did you want to comment on that too?
You know, there will be a scale between fully custodian or fully like institutional grade
of multi-sig services such as BigGo provides, and there's definitely market for that.
Although I'm of the opinion that even companies, you know, hedge funds, investment funds, family
offices, they should probably seek out rather CASA type of setup because all the custodian
services and you touched a little bit on that when you mentioned the legacy financial system,
you know, as it is like layered and very complex.
So all these custodian services have been developed because the traditional system is
difficult to secure.
So we have specialized companies doing that.
In Bitcoin, actually, if we do that, we introduce more risk, right?
That's very brutally said, okay, it has nuances and then of course you have very elaborate
setup somewhere.
But in general, I would always prefer even like small medium sized companies that don't
need, you know, high volume trading and do moves often to just choose type of CASA environment
because of eliminating the third party risk.
That's it.
Awesome, awesome.
Those social multi-sig apps that Jameson touched, there are some that are trying to basically
use a circle of people you trust.
And I wanted to talk about that a little bit because that may sound as a good idea, but
I'm not sure it is, you know, especially when, you know, a life ends.
People change.
I can attest to that.
People definitely change.
And generally, of course, there's even been studies where like every 10 years or something,
a person is like entirely different.
You see, and so having the common knowledge or distributing the power unwisely amongst
your close circles may not just like have them, you know, try to abuse that situation,
but also being them an attack vector because if you know that, you know, you're using a
certain type of setup, then you can potentially with good social hacking skills, you know,
find out who those people are trying to, you know, kind of get this information and social
hack the money.
I don't know.
So I don't know, Jameson, what you think about this, but there is a tendency towards these
type of setups.
I would be a little bit careful about that as well.
It seems like they're way easy to be social engineered, but go ahead, Jameson.
Yeah.
Well, you know, ultimately, you probably don't know what the best practices are that these
other people are going to follow.
And so it's more of like the unknown and lack of control is where security vulnerabilities
can come into play.
So we do think that if you're controlling all of your own keys, then you know the exact,
you know, configuration and you have this additional peace of mind, whereas and, you
know, I've done this in the past with some of my cold storage recovery backup stuff for
like in case I get hit by a truck and I have trusted executors and friends and family who
have pieces of encrypted data, but I've never been able to be fully sure that, you know,
they're keeping that data intact and that if something would happen, that they would
be able to, A, like remember it and find it and then, you know, be able to come together
and reconstitute it.
Yeah.
To me, it just sounds like it exacerbates all the issues.
I mean, just the whole social thing.
So that does not seem wise to me, especially when, you know, it's not like they have a
support team around them.
Like Jameson says, you don't know what these really what these people set up are, but go
ahead, Alina.
I would be way more, I would be actually much more comfortable to trust a lawyer, for example,
you know, because he's a professional, he is liable by law, he, for example, your inheritance
lawyer, right, your wealth estate or how do you call it in English.
I would totally be fine with having such a person, some access or some data or some information.
I would, I'm less also fine with entrusting one of my keys, for example, to a bank.
A lot of people think that, you know, having a security deposit, like a deposit box in
the bank is a smart thing to do, little they know that in case of any crisis, at least
that comes into play in the European Union, the state can basically take away whatever
is in the bank accounts and in the bank safe deposits that comes to your documents, whatever.
So there are, you know, certain, it's very difficult to generalize and say, okay, this
is the role, it's not, you know.
But for sure, the idea is not to ever give them more than one key, like sure, a lawyer,
sure, a bank, sure, but only one of my keys will they get, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Very interesting.
Well, I think we had a great discussion, guys.
I don't want to keep you too long.
I usually try to keep these to an hour, so I think we can close it out here.
I just want to say really, really again, appreciate you guys being on here.
Just a quick recap, you know, we did talk about this new company, Casa, but with Jameson
and Alena here, what they have here is a best in class key management system with a three
of five multi-sig.
And of course, they only ever keep one key just to make sure that you still have sovereignty
over your own money.
They do have a premium service that is available for 10,000 a year.
And then again, they just released their new Lightning node, which is pretty cool.
I think that's around $300, which will give you access to the Lightning network and the
ability to run a Bitcoin full node with just one click, pretty much plug and play, right?
So that is pretty awesome, guys.
I still got to get mine, but that is, I got enough nodes, I don't need any more.
But again, just really, really thank you guys for being on.
I had a great time.
Alena, where can maybe you could tell us where can we find out more about you?
About me?
About you, Alena.
Okay.
Just Google.
I don't know.
Just Google my name.
There's some blog about me joining CASA, themedium.com of CASA.
You can go to Twitter and see the crazy stuff I'm tweeting at Alena Satoshi.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Everybody follow her.
Old school Bitcoiner, guys.
Of course, if you don't know, you got to know, you got to find out who she is.
She's been involved in Bitcoin for a number of years now.
And again, you guys can find the website at keys.casa for that.
And then Jameson, why don't you go ahead and tell everybody where we can find out more
about you, sir.
Well, you can find the compilation of pretty much everything I've ever done in this space
on my website.
It's lop.net.
Lop.net.
Yes.
And of course, we put that in the video description of every one of our videos, lop.net under
more resources.
And of course, we also have that website linked on cryptocast.network because it is Jameson's
still to this day, one of the most trusted sites in my opinion, to find out new information
about Bitcoin.
So definitely check that out, guys.
Lop.net.
Very, very awesome.
Thanks again, guys, so much for joining.
We really appreciate everybody in the chat.
If you guys missed the show, definitely join us in the comments below.
We put out shows like this all the time, guys.
Of course, we're going to have a crypto Q&A show tomorrow and then the Bitcoin news show
as we do every Sunday.
This was the first show back from a bit of a hiatus.
So really, really, really glad to be back and really appreciate everybody for the time.
So until next time, guys, just keep talking Bitcoin.
We'll see you later.
Thank you.
Bye.