Using public-private keys to manage digital assets works well enough for individual traders, but it’s the stuff of nightmares for compliance officers tasked with planning for bad actors and worst-case scenarios.
That’s where Qredo, a decentralized custodian, governance and blockchain interoperability solution comes in, said Anthony Foy, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
“I mean that’s where this dichotomy comes out, right. You have this amazing decentralized, programmable money, but the fact that there’s this private-public key pair necessitates this behavior of assets being siloed into these repositories,” Foy told Crypto Investor. “And, you know, it not only introduces attacks from internal and external malicious actors, but it also makes it very difficult to initiate transactions and put audit and compliance over the top of that. It’s the source of why so many things go wrong in crypto.”
Foy joined the company in 2019, after spending years as a serial entrepreneur at VC- and private equity-backed software companies including Interxion, Workshare and CloudSigma.
He took over as CEO, replacing 20-year cybersecurity vet Brian Spector. The two previously worked together at Workshare. Spector has since become Qredo’s chief product and technology officer.
To date, Qredo has raised a total of $14.5 million over an angel round and three seed rounds, the latest an $11 million round in May.
Among its lead investors in the latest round: Spartan Group, co-founded by former investment bankers turned VCs Melody He and Casper B. Johansen; 1kx, a fund focused on early-stage, tokenized projects; and GSR Ventures, a firm founded by former physicians and engineers with $3 billion under management.
Earlier this month, the company started selling its utility and governance token, QRDO, raising an additional $35.5 million in funding – about half through private sales and the rest once the sale went public.
The executive team also includes Josh Goodbody, chief operating officer, who used to head up EMEA operations for Huobi Global and Binance before joining Qredo earlier this year.
Qredo’s entering a crowded market, competing with the likes of tech service providers BitGo, Ledger Vault, Aegis and Anchorage and custodians Fireblocks and Metaco. A May report from enterprise blockchain analytics firm Blockdata estimated that 20% of the bitcoin supply had already been lost or stranded in wallets.
“Self-custody is certainly possible, but the demand for professional services is high,” Blockdata wrote in its report. “This is especially true with large amounts of digital assets being moved around by enterprises that are looking to get their first exposure to blockchain technology and digital assets, and usually quite specifically, to bitcoin.”
Foy and Spector’s solution for making public-private keys more secure was replacing them with smart contracts that manage governance policies. They have built-in security measures to stop bad actors from…
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