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PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv
- staticelf 6y agoCool, never heard of it and visiting their website it is not exactly clear to me what their product is. I have never quite understood how companies just have a single landing page with no publically available product or service (as it seems) and still get bought for several hundred millions.
- monkeydust 6y agoIt is odd but then I remember many years back working for a fintech, the founder was against putting up any proper marketing materials online, we had a crappy website. Its now a multi $BN company. The website is a 'bit less' crappy.
- dazc 6y agoBerkshire Hathaway being a classic example of this ethos. https://berkshirehathaway.com/ https://berkshirehathaway.com/
- monkeydust 6y agoYea exactly! TBH I like their website, no faff, straight to the point. I am sure there are some web designers on here, curious if the simplification, minimalist design is a trending theme, I feel it is.
- Graffur 6y agoThis page https://berkshirehathaway.com/message.html https://berkshirehathaway.com/message.html is even more surprising. It's like a bad sales pitch.
- wslh 6y agoIt is an decentralized exchange / automated market maker. A comparison with Uniswap and Balancer here: https://blog.coinfabrik.com/automated-market-making-mechanisms-and-issues-in-uniswap-balancer-and-curve/ https://blog.coinfabrik.com/automated-market-making-mechanis...
- rawtxapp 6y agoBecause you're not their target market, they are going after institutional investors who need crypto wallets.
- nassycheezy 6y agoI've built a similar product for a well-known company in the space (and competitor to this company & Coinbase) and co-led the development of the crypto custody at Novi (Blockchain subsidary of Facebook). Happy to answer more questions though they do not provide much insight into their technology publicly. Curv provides MPC-based crypto custody solution wi. I'll be over-simplifying but they allow private keys that protect large sums of cryptocurrencies to be split in encrypted portions called 'shares'. These shares are both created and used in a fully distributed manner (just like threshold signing / or 'multi-sig'). You generally define a threshold 'm' out of 'n' that's mathematically required to get a valid cryptographic signature. An attacker would need to compromise a sufficient quorum of these keys simultaneously in order to sign blockchain transactions that would extract the funds somewhere else. As you can imagine, the complexity of such attack is highly correlated (and actually tends to grow exponentially due to several factors) to the quorum threshold 'm'. Curv seems to allow financial institutions and all kind of institutional investors to create the shares, manage them and use them securely to sign transactions. The argument they provide which makes little sense to me is that there is no 'private key'. They just seem to play with jargon as the shares are pretty much equivalent to individual keys in a multi-sig system, or at least hold the same power and have same results in compromise scenarios.
- maayank 6y agoThe difference between multi-sig and no private key is that the former is an implementation of the blockchain protocol (e.g. different in Stellar and Ethereum) while the latter is a generic algorithm/service. Different layer.
- nassycheezy 6y agoYes, I just meant that in practice the risks are the same from a security perspective (and most legit blockchains support multi-sig at this point), especially for the shares so I wouldn't call it 'no private key' :D
- thebean11 6y agoHeh, the $150 Trezor Model T supports the "m of n" key thing. Repackaging the tech and selling it to business is really not a bad startup idea.
- maayank 6y agoDisclaimer: I work for a competitor. Multi-party computation (MPC) enables you to participate in public key cryptography with shares ("parts") of a private key divided between multiple participants from the get-go, i.e. without ever having the private key in memory at any point in time. So for example, if you divide the shares between mobile devices and servers then all of them would need to communicate with one another to sign a message without any of them knowing the private key. There are variants (e.g. 2 out of N, etc.), but that's the gist of it. Connecting it to cryptocurrency wallets, you can then use this scheme to create accounts where the control is shared between multiple devices and "mathematically" it doesn't matter then if one of the devices is compromised - it could never do anything on its own.
- jcpham2 6y agoLike my children’s m of n trust fund hopefully I didn’t typo the priv key amirite. That might suck for them after I die.
- G3rn0ti 6y agoWhat’s the advantage over a „multi sig“ wallet?
- sneak 6y agoMultisig needs to be on-chain, and involves multiple disparate signatures. MPC creates a single signature offchain without any one party having a complete private key.
- hahla 6y ago$500m for what I understand to be a crypto bank account?
- nikanj 6y ago"Board says we need to invest in crypto. This is crypto."
- rawtxapp 6y agoAre you implying that a company that processes hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume is thinking of acquiring this company for the hype alone?
- freeone3000 6y agoIs that a bad strategy? We've seen billion dollar IPOs on hype alone. In 2021, it might even be the winning strategy.
- rawtxapp 6y ago> We've seen billion dollar IPOs on hype alone. Can you give some examples? I would expect a company of this magnitude to have done a proper research before paying out half a billion dollars for an acquisition that's not based on hype alone.
- freeone3000 6y agoInstagram. C3.ai. Uber. Heck, Tesla. Curv has the advantage of actually being profitable.
- rawtxapp 6y agoThese all had and continue to have enormous amount of users. I'm not sure how you can argue that these all got their valuations based on hype alone.
- jyu 6y agoRemember that there are people behind these decisions and they are largely rational actors. Someone at PayPal is getting a big promotion and bonus from pushing this deal. If crypto goes nowhere and they shut down this project, then it can be rationalized as "getting in too early" or some other "unforeseen externality" that happened, totally out of their control. But the promotion and risk taking executive will have solidified his/her position with headcount and other markers of success. There are always things we don't know going on behind the scenes for these types of moves. Remember when Marissa Mayer was poached from Google to run Yahoo, and the first big move she made in a series of bungles included buying Tumblr for $1.1bn. Then she termination the option for employees to wfh. Then was later revealed that she had consecutive bad performance reviews at Google and was not going to get further promotions there before she jumped ship. Edit: I'm just bringing up Marissa Mayer as an example and maybe misremembering the specifics since this was 8 years ago at this point. There are plenty of other examples of executives doing weird stuff that seem nonsensical from the outside. Jamie Dimond proclaiming bitcoin is a fraud while consecutively JPM buys a hefty investment in bitcoin. Or Bill Ackmann crying on CNBC while financially positioned for the exact opposite.
- seibelj 6y agoCrypto has been around for 12 years and has gone from zero to well over $1 trillion mcap. I doubt it will go back to zero.
- janandonly 6y agoYou misspelled “bitcoin” there. Bitcoin has existed for 12 years now and gone over 1 trillion dollars.
- loceng 6y agoIt's all artificial value. If the actual money people paid was destroyed/transferred into Bitcoin instead of just transferred to whomever you bought it from, then the value would be real - but it's not.
- G3rn0ti 6y ago
- qeternity 6y ago$500m to hedge a $300b business. Could it be done cheaper? Perhaps. But this seems like a pretty obvious transaction. In 5 years if crypto is just a flash in the pan, nobody will even remember $500m. If however crypto is the future, then Paypal remain relevant and $300b of market cap is defended.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoI have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoCryptocurrency isn’t going away, but it’s dishonest to pretend that it’s not without major problems such as the energy consumption issues. The popular narrative has also become almost indistinguishable from a pump scheme, where we’re all supposed to buy and home (never sell) until we’re all rich. If cryptocurrency becomes commonplace, it likely won’t look anything like our current crypto infrastructure. The problem is that this isn’t what all of the current holders want to hear, because they only want people to buy into whatever crypto they personally hold. This makes it difficult to have honest conversations because so many of the participants are biased toward convincing others to buy into their investment while ignoring anything else.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoLots of things have environmental problems. I don’t understand why Bitcoin mining gets singled out for it. If the benefits of using it outweigh the downsides, then I don’t see the issue.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoThe other wastes of electricity are also problems we should address. The difference is that while regulations and tech advancements are improving power efficiency everywhere else, proof of work systems incentive ever-increasing wastes of electricity. What other system is designed to get increasingly less efficient over time, while paying people to be inefficient, as a core principle of how it operates? Cryptocurrency almost stands alone in this regard.
- 6y ago
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoThis seems like a clear “sell picks and shovels” play. With more and more companies rushing to add crypto to their services offering to capture some of the highly profitable exchange rate and other fees, it makes sense to provide services to securely hold crypto for these companies.
- ffggvv 6y agoagree though i’d say they usually don’t make much money from selling shovels. but their stock soars when they announce they are selling shovels
- justjonathan 6y agoIn case you were confused by the headline... no relation to curve.fi
- bobkrusty 6y agoCompanies Buying bitcoin is a trend. As people bought btc. I think this is kind of marketing. Haha
- distribot 6y agoI've recently been reading a bit about the history of Israel and the prolific tech industry there. Funny enough the founders are Israeli (company was in NYC), and one of them had a leadership role in the Talpiot program--something akin to the Navy seals for science and technology in the IDF. Really remarkable country, seemingly overflowing with human capital. A population smaller than New Jersey but so much innovation and startups.
- NorwegianDude 6y agoCan we just take a moment to appreciate how insanely garbage the linked to site is? The first thing you see is a large floating ad in the middle of the screen. Then there's a huge banner at the bottom of the screen asking for permission to send you notifications. Then there's a large banner at the top asking you to subscribe to a newsletter, and right under that there's an ad asking you to download (in my situation) curve. Once you close all that out, there are more banners underneath telling you that the site uses cookies. A perfect example of how not to do things.
- flibberaloo 6y agoBTC is the energy saviour to the USD. USD is the largest energy suck of any currency ever known when you actually start adding up the system to keep it's value in place (i.e. militaries, central banking system, wars, oil, etc.)
- mattfrommars 6y agoWith Coinbase going public and another crypto start up to be acquired. Anyone else here believes that "dumb people buy crypto, smart people make marketplace"? To me, it seems that is the main money maker and not 'day trading bitcoin/eth/ and alt-coins'? Unless you the founder of a brand new coin and make truck load of money from ICO only - which has been the case so far.