“What I love about the vision for Entropy is that it’s designed for everyone, secured with advanced cryptography, cross-chain, and uncompromisingly decentralized. We’ll be able to set spending limits, time-locks (with notifications), and use other neat access control features that enable non-conventional authorization methods--all while keeping our private keys safe and untouched.”
--Gavin Birch (@Ether_Gavin)
Web3 needs decentralized custody--I’ve said it a few times:
Entropy is answering the call for decentralized custody:
I’m excited to be an angel investor in Entropy’s pre-seed round 🥳 Here’s why.
It's not easy to be secure AND have a good UX in crypto because of key management. The challenge is to make using your tokens easy, while making it hard to have your assets lost or stolen. Introducing Entropy: a non-custodial custody protocol 🤔
Using a threshold signature, you split your private key and delegate part (ie. a shard) of the signing rights to Entropy. Now you can keep your entire private key in cold storage, while you actively use your partial key with Entropy to send whitelisted transactions.
This means you will be able to transact using your main account to manage daily token staking, voting, borrowing, and lending functions without exposing your private key. You’ll be able to whitelist accounts, set spend limits--any number of things you may want to do, while having restrictions that prevent catastrophic outcomes.
I anticipate using Entropy with whichever wallets and interfaces that I currently use. Entropy itself is not a wallet. The team has their sights set on integrations to become a new standard for how people manage their private keys.
And it won’t just be for one ecosystem. We expect that Entropy will support Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, and assets of other ecosystems as well.
Everyone. It's not easy to be secure AND have a good UX in crypto. I could especially see the need for decentralized custody for foundations, founding teams, and institutional investors. Why?
They’re whales 🐳
They own non-trivial percentages of the entire token supply, which must be protected from unwanted transfer or loss. They also need to easily stake, vote, and manage their tokens in various other ways--something that has historically been challenging with third-party custodians.
https://twitter.com/Ether_Gavin/status/1331349235447574541
There are any number of problems that can arise from having dominant centralized custodians.
But Entropy isn’t aimed at whales. Entropy will be designed for everyone, secured with advanced cryptography, cross-chain, and will be uncompromisingly decentralized. It can be tempting to appeal to the whales, but time and time again it’s we who validate decentralized tech, and long before the big players will touch it.
People like you and me will use Entropy first. We’ll be able to set spend limits, time-locks (with notifications), address whitelists, and use other neat access control features that enable non-conventional authorization methods--all while keeping our private keys safe and untouched. Tooling for DAO collectives shouldn’t be far behind 👀
It’s still early days at Entropy, but it’s a passionate and talented team, and they’re undoubtedly having a lot of fun pushing things forward.
Even if Entropy’s decentralized network fails horribly and gives up your key shard, the attacker will still need your portion of the key to make a transaction happen (something that Entropy will not have). If your key shard is compromised, then the attacker is restricted to your Entropy transaction policy (whitelists, time-locks, spend limits, etc), and even then, there should be a way to have Entropy disable the compromised part of the key.
Ultimately you’ll still need to secure your private keys. And that’s not so bad, as long as you can keep your keys secure and out of reach while doing your day-to-day crypto stuff with ease.
If it does its job well, we should see DAOs, wallets, exchanges, and chains themselves adopting Entropy. What’s more is the potential for Entropy to usher in the next phase of key management gold standards, paving the path to a better Web3 user experience without sacrificing sovereignty or security 💪