At Ramper, it is our paramount priority to enable our users with wallet signing operations at scale while guaranteeing the security of the private wallet keys. We have designed and implemented our data management system described below according to those parameters.

Data management

When a Ramper user is created, a number of things happen on the user’s local device (mobile/web browser):

1. A new wallet (public address + private key) is created

2. The private key is encrypted with a machine generated high entropy Data Encryption Key (DEK), and an envelope encryption is performed (detailed in #3 and #4)

3. DEK is sent to a third party (currently AWS KMS) to be encrypted with a Customer Master Key (CMK)

4. The encrypted private key (encrypted by DEK) and the encrypted DEK (encrypted by CMK) are then stored in Ramper’s cloud infrastructure (GCP/Firebase)

Signing transactions

When a Ramper user needs to sign a transaction, the following operations are performed on the user’s local device to facilitate it:

1. User is authenticated by Ramper

2. User retrieves the encrypted DEK and private key pair from Ramper DB

3. User sends the encrypted DEK to the KMS, which verifies the user’s credential against Ramper’s infrastructure via AWS Cognito + Firebase Auth before using the CMK assigned to the user to decrypt and send back the DEK

4. The private key is decrypted by DEK

5. A transaction is signed with the private key

Third-party KMS

The involvement of the third party (KMS run on a separate AWS account) introduces the following characteristics:

1. There is a clear separation of encrypted user information and the method to decrypt it. It would take both of the industry leading cloud infrastructures (AWS and GCP) to be compromised, as well as our authentication system, for a user’s data to be exposed.

2. KMS is configured in a way that only the authenticated user is able to decrypt a given private key. This means Ramper, or anyone at the company, never has the ability to reconstruct a user’s private key, therefore being able to sign transactions on a user’s behalf. This makes our wallets “non-custodial”

3. There is no private key information stored on a user’s local device (such as Metamask or Terra Extension) or a piece of paper (mnemonic key) that need to be “recovered” in a loss event. If a user has forgotten their auth credential, one would be able to recover their account access through a familiar method, and as long as a user can authenticate their identity against Ramper, their private key will be there in the cloud.

Performance

One of our core areas of focus in implementing this design was performance. Our system supports up to 15+ million (signing) transactions per day with plans to rapidly scale this further.

If the first step of web3 onboarding is to “connect a wallet” — we’ve already introduced a major friction. This is the state of web3 today. It’s a jarring experience for people that have never interacted with decentralized applications. At Ramper — we are building solutions to make web3 intuitive & user-friendly, removing frictions that get in people’s way.

$3M Pre-Seed

To pursue our mission, we raised $3M led by Hashed. Full participants include Terra, Polygon, Goodwater Capital, Samsung NEXT, Golden Ventures, R7 Partners, 500 Global, Maple VC, and other angels.

Removing friction to unlock 1b customers

The first phase of web3 was about “buying” crypto through centralized exchanges. We are now shifting to “using” crypto as decentralized applications like DeFi, P2E games, NFTs, and DAOs create a new wave of crypto-native use cases. We believe the next wave of users will be onboarded directly from these applications.

Problem

To use decentralized applications (DApps) today — users new to the crypto space are forced to take multiple steps elsewhere just to become eligible to sign up. There is a hurdle to download the right wallet client, install its supporting browser extension, store the private key, then transfer crypto into their wallet through an exchange, which they will need to create an account for separately if they haven’t already.

Access to web3 shouldn’t be this complicated.

Solution

Users should be able to log in & authenticate into any blockchain applications seamlessly.

Ramper MVP

We are releasing a SDK/API solution for DApp developers to enable a frictionless user onboarding flow:

1. Let users log in via FaceID or email (or any other familiar login methods)

2. Let users convert local currency into crypto directly in-app

Seeking beta partners

We are seeking DApps built on Polygon and Terra to integrate our SDK/API solution. We will be providing our solution for free, and customize against their needs in exchange for product feedback. We plan to support other chains shortly.

To become our partner, please sign up here: — Polygon DApp & Terra DApp.

For more info — visit our site: ramper.xyz

Market opportunity

There’s an immense opportunity to drive the adoption of web3. Of the 5B active internet users that’s growing, only ~20M MAUs are using Metamask, the world’s largest non-custodial wallet. Coinbase, one of the world’s largest centralized exchanges, only has ~9M MAUs. We imagine a world in which web3 is just like any other web applications — you just go and start using it seamlessly. To get there, we need solutions to make web3 user-friendly & accessible to all — enabling experiences that make digital ownership and identity truly human-centric.

Team (We are hiring!)

We are a team of three co-founders (Sisun, Hoa, Karl) with collective engineering and product experiences from Facebook, Uber, Tesla, Google, Apple, Compass, and Goldman Sachs.

We’re inviting builders (remote-first) who know how to design and architect for scale, but can still move fast — making the right tradeoffs for speed and efficiency in the early days. If you enjoy brainstorming, 0 to 1, touching every part of the business, and care deeply about the user journey from UX to support, let’s chat: Twitter, Discord, Telegram.

VIEW OUR JOB POSTINGS