Published Feb 3, 2023
By Qredo Team
What Qredo Has Been Building through the Bear
We've been busy during the bear, with a nine-month marathon to enhance every aspect of our service offering and take it to the next level. In fact, we've rebuilt the whole stack.
Today we want to share with you what that process has been about.
First of all, though, let's put Qredo in a very clear context - because our defining purpose has never been more relevant than it is today.
The second blockchain revolution: secure distributed self-custody
The original revolution of blockchain – the distributed ledger – turned the world on its head, though many are still to realize it. This was truly world-shaking because, quite simply, it allowed trustless verification of transactions through distributed networks for the very first time in human history. The significance of this is still playing out and will do for many years to come.
At Qredo, we are busy building the second revolution in blockchain, and one that the industry is in desperate need of. Blockchain security has just not kept pace in any way with the proliferation of service offerings and investment opportunities, and the result has been chaotic, to say the least.
What we must remember in such times is that innovative, disruptive tech is always chaotic at first – just look at the printing press or the Internet!
What the blockchain is still crying out for is truly secure infrastructure, an enterprise-grade solution for seamless, secure custody of your digital assets.
Rapid growth requires a strong foundation: Qredo’s mission for blockchain security
At Qredo, we are proud to be at the forefront of blockchain security, building the very best-in-class solutions to make the entire blockchain ecosystem more secure.
The crypto market developed incredibly rapidly back in 2021, but the security infrastructure needed to support that growth simply did not keep pace. What is truly required is a revolution in blockchain security to support growth at scale for the whole sector.
This is where Qredo steps in.
They say bear markets are for building, and at Qredo, we have been building with heart and at pace all crypto winter to ensure the future of blockchain security for all.
Now that winter is almost behind us, we are ready to support you to spring into action, with the most robust security solutions on the blockchain.
How we’ve rebuilt the Qredo core stack this crypto winter
We’ve been building and growing fast through this cycle. We’ve expanded our team to north of 200 people strong, powering forwards with Qredo’s protocol and platform development.
In the past nine months we have rebuilt the entire Qredo stack, and rewritten almost every line of code within our innovative self-custody platform, as well as significantly enhancing both the security and scalability of our protocol.
What makes the Qredo protocol so powerful?
The Qredo protocol is an enterprise-grade solution designed to support institutions of all scales to gain unprecedented security of their digital assets, whilst maintaining complete control through our unique self-custody technology.
The key to Qredo's robust security provision is the decentralized multi-party computation (dMPC) technology at the heart of our protocol.
This means that the computation which takes place when your team members access and sign for a transaction is distributed across the network – a powerful step which removes the single points of failure still endemic in current wallet technology across the wider crypto sphere.
Our dMPC technology means that at no time during the signing of a transaction is a private key ever held in any one geographic location – eliminating the risk of that key being obtained or hacked by any third party.
Understanding the three layers of the Qredo protocol
The three layers of our custody protocol; dMPC, QredoChain and our client-side custody stack come together in a multi-layer security protocol used to secure your keys and digital assets without the need to rely on any central counterparty or mutable data layers.
All of this whilst maintaining self-custody and control of your digital assets at every single step.
QredoChain solves the centralization problem of traditional digital custody solutions. We've all seen how well centralized control played out with FTX! Now other centralized exchanges (CEXs) are scrambling to adjust their business practice, as billions are drained from exchanges by disillusioned and frightened investors.
But Qredo's solution is already here, battle-tested and market-ready. We have always designed our services with one underlying purpose – to leave you in full control, in the true spirit of decentralized blockchain technology.
By using a Tendermint chain for access control records, we are actually able to use state transitions on-chain as the authorization mechanism for dMPC, bringing the utmost security and transparency to the process of signing transactions.
The Qredo platform: Unparalleled flexibility to govern your digital assets
We've been enhancing our platform, too, refining the customization available for you to create either simple or highly sophisticated policies to define the rules governing your digital assets.
No one has access to your assets in a Qredo Wallet, except the team that you choose. Not Qredo, not any third party, and certainly not any malicious actors.
With Qredo's groundbreaking technology, we've been able to turn the geographic distribution of your team into its greatest strength — ensuring that you can govern policies such that no single member can ever lose, expose or grant access to a third party. This is because you can set the requirements for multiple signatories to grant the permissions needed to move or access your digital assets.
This provides built-in backup as well as infinite flexibility to Qredo users, allowing you to be agile, and to operate in full confidence with the rock-solid security that comes from knowing that you have full self-custody of your assets.
Our Qredo Custody Platform is built on two core primitives of our protocol: first of all, our Web3 Wallets, which grant you the ability to securely store and govern signatures for keys. Secondly, we present the Qredo Vaults, which bring the ability for you to securely custody and govern the movement of your digital assets.
Through these provisions, we are able to offer enterprise-grade self-custody services to everyone, from global institutions to individual investors.
The fine detail: What’s changing at Qredo this year?
A major move forward in hardening our protocol in recent months has been securely transitioning our network of multi-party operations by having our validators run in cloud-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
This has allowed us to maintain the utmost level of security whilst also increasing our agility and ability to scale, as well as our resilience and overall throughput. We know how fast things can grow in crypto, and we are now poised and ready to scale up our service offering frictionlessly.
The new Qredo custody platform is built around the needs and feedback of our users. This will provide a brand-new user experience, providing an enhanced user interface which puts governance and policies first - allowing you to control access to your assets with infinitely customizable precision, and providing enhanced protection for your digital assets and private data.
Our improved stack has been coded to allow the easy future implementation of new micro-services and to allow parallel development of new features – giving us the agility we need to be event-driven and to serve the evolving needs of our users in a rapidly-advancing technological landscape.
Our new protocol is designed with all of this in mind – to allow new products and partnerships to be built on top of it seamlessly, allowing us to adapt rapidly to growth in the crypto sector and to build on top of the Qredo protocol along with the entire expanding ecosystem of which we are a part.
Qredo stands in support of blockchain security for all
We've always been very clear in our mission at Qredo – we provide cutting-edge blockchain solutions which take blockchain security to new heights.
With our recent groundbreaking partnerships with WalletConnect and with MetaMask Institutional, we now have the reach to integrate your Qredo Web3 Wallet with dApps and services across the crypto sector, allowing you to do so much more than just hodl your digital assets, all whilst maintaining secure self-custody of them.
Qredo also provides an amazing facility for the builders of the blockchain ecosystem, keyless smart contracts.
Developers are able to deploy smart contracts without ever exposing a single private key – protected within the dMPC network, these smart contracts can then be controlled by specific account holders on Qredo.
Trustless digital asset security solutions you can rely on
At Qredo, we know that without robust blockchain security systems in place, what's built on blockchain simply cannot scale and grow as it should. We recognize that this is the only way for blockchain technology to earn and deserve that trust, and to achieve its staggering potential.
That's why Qredo is here – to provide that security and support to you and your team – so that you can get on with building and investing in the future of decentralized financial technology.
We provide best-in-class trustless security solutions for your digital assets, which means that you can always trust where you stand with Qredo. So that together we can build the future of finance.