4 ms·

Cool, 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

Cool, 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 ago
It 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 ago
  Berkshire Hathaway being a classic example of this ethos. https://berkshirehathaway.com/ https://berkshirehathaway.com/
  - monkeydust 6y ago
    Yea 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 ago
    This page https://berkshirehathaway.com/message.html https://berkshirehathaway.com/message.html is even more surprising. It's like a bad sales pitch.
wslh 6y ago
It 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 ago
  curve!=curv, unfortunate naming.
- hi5eyes 6y ago
  paypal cosigning a dex is a really strong signal for Lps to look at this over uni/other dexs
rawtxapp 6y ago
Because you're not their target market, they are going after institutional investors who need crypto wallets.
nassycheezy 6y ago
I'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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Yes, 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 ago
  Heh, 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 ago
Disclaimer: 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 ago
  Like 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 ago
  What’s the advantage over a „multi sig“ wallet?
  - sneak 6y ago
    Multisig 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.

monkeydust 6y ago

It 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 ago
Berkshire Hathaway being a classic example of this ethos. https://berkshirehathaway.com/ https://berkshirehathaway.com/
- monkeydust 6y ago
  Yea 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 ago
  This page https://berkshirehathaway.com/message.html https://berkshirehathaway.com/message.html is even more surprising. It's like a bad sales pitch.

wslh 6y ago

It 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 ago
curve!=curv, unfortunate naming.
hi5eyes 6y ago
paypal cosigning a dex is a really strong signal for Lps to look at this over uni/other dexs

rawtxapp 6y ago

Because you're not their target market, they are going after institutional investors who need crypto wallets.

nassycheezy 6y ago

I'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 ago
The 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
Heh, 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 ago

Disclaimer: 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 ago
Like 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 ago
What’s the advantage over a „multi sig“ wallet?
- sneak 6y ago
  Multisig 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.