Company Name: Casa
Founders: Nick Newman, Jameson Loeb and others
Establishment date: Late 2017
Headquarters location: far
Website: https://casa.io/
Public or private? private
Being self-sovereign isn’t easy – especially if you’re not into technical matters.
The team is in Casa You get this and for this reason, the company has been helping customers for over six years secure their bitcoins in multi-signature wallets (also referred to as multi-key vaults).
The company was the first to offer an easy-to-use version of this product that also comes with customer support. It was Casa’s plan from the beginning to be there for its clients, as this type of support was lacking in the broader cryptocurrency industry.
“It was the service element that was missing in a lot of the solutions out there,” said Nick Newman, co-founder and CEO of Casa. Bitcoin Magazine.
“People need help doing these things, especially for large amounts of money. The plan was always to support customers, because it was impossible to get support from exchanges or hardware wallets,” he added.
“So, we just took a very support-driven, user-experience-focused approach to everything.”
Casa’s approach has paid off, as the company has become a household name in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency space, and has come a long way since Newman first had the idea for a company like Casa seven years ago.
How did Casa start?
It was during the latter part of the 2017 Bitcoin bull run when Neumann, fed up with his previous work in finance and technology, found himself down the Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency) rabbit hole. By February 2018, he had an idea for a company and entered a hackathon himself to try to bring the idea to life.
“I participated in my first ETHDenver hackathon,” Newman said.
“I came up with an idea I called key splitting, which was basically taking a private key using Shamir’s secret sharing and creating a social recovery mechanism,” he added.
“I recruited a couple of people into the hackathon to build the project with me, and we ended up winning.”
Newman quit his job and set out to found a company centered around this technology he and his team had created. But word got out about his win at ETHDenver, and the former CEO of Casa, who was president of the company before it pivoted to offering multi-signature wallets, reached out to Newman and asked him to join him.
That was after I learned that Casa had just been recruited Jameson Racea self-described “professional Cypherpunk” and now Casa’s chief security officer, Newman decided to join the team.
“I was like, ‘Well, Jameson’s going to be an unfair advantage,'” Newman recalls with a laugh. “Instead of starting my own company, I will join.”
Shortly after Newman joined the company, Casa discontinued its then-leading product,… House of knotsand the company shifted its focus to easy-to-use multi-key safes, a product in high demand at the time. Before CASA, multisig software was so complex that Newman himself had difficulty using it.
“There was the Armory multisig wallet and the Glacier protocol,” Newman said.
“Glacier wasn’t even software. It was like a giant GitHub repository that you had to follow to set up your cold storage. The armory was pretty crappy, too. I remember trying to use it once, and I couldn’t figure it out,” he added.
“We were the first to create a multisig that was usable.”
How does Kazaa work?
Casa offers users two main settings. The first is a five-key vault, which includes three keys on three different hardware wallets, one on the user’s phone (securely backed up in the cloud) and one held by Casa.
This was Casa’s first multi-signature product, which was introduced while the company was primarily focused on serving high-net-worth clients with Bitcoin. Casa learned an important lesson while serving these clients, which is that even if developers create software that’s easy to use, people still want an expert there to support them as they use it — especially if they’re getting a lot of value.
“When you’re dealing with millions of dollars worth of bitcoin, you really want to have an expert there helping you make sure you don’t make a mistake,” Newman said.
Casa’s other flagship product is for those who may not have a Bitcoin whale-type fortune, but still hold enough Bitcoin that a less-than-ideal security setup could keep them up at night.
This product is the Casa three-key vault, which the company brought to market in early 2019. It includes a key on the hardware wallet, a key on the user’s phone (which can be replaced with another key on the second hardware wallet if the user prefers) and a key held by Casa .
Casa started offering this setup because it “always wanted to be able to provide as much security and ease of use to as many people as possible,” according to Newman.
New Casa services and features
In the past year, Casa has expanded the range of services it offers.
Two weeks ago I announced this Enterprise planwhich enables businesses to secure their Bitcoin vaults more easily.
“We’ve had businesses using Casa for self-conservation for years, but they’ve always used our retail plans and made it work,” Newman explained.
“We changed that, because I think corporate treasuries that hold bitcoin have been popularized by MicroStrategy,” he added. “We actually see that as a growing trend worth taking advantage of, and we’re hearing from more bitcoin companies that store bitcoin on their balance sheet that they need To help with security.
This summer, Kazaa also began enabling users to replace the hardware wallets used in their vaults with YubiKeys.
“We see people struggling with hardware wallets all the time, so we were like, ‘How can we make this simpler?'” Newman said. “We combined two new pieces of technology that had passkey and YubiKey capabilities and were able to build something that had never been done before.”
In March, Casa launched Casa Inheritance, a service that makes it easier for loved ones of Casa users to access Bitcoin secured in vaults in the event of a user’s death.
“With Inheritance, we hear from our customers all the time, ‘Okay, I feel good about setting up my Casa, but I’m worried about what will happen if I die,'” Newman explained. “So, we built this feature to make it very easy for their family to redeem Bitcoin in the event that Death of the main account holder.
Multisig normalization
Despite all the work Casa has done in the last six years, some still experience an emotional block when it comes to switching to a multisig setup. Whether it’s because this type of wallet format was difficult to enable years ago or because it’s understandably worrying to make changes to your Bitcoin’s security, people seem to be holding back when it comes to using a multisig setup — even if they really want to — according to Newman.
“They hear the word multisig and say, ‘This is too hard,'” Newman explained. “What they don’t realize is that to get started with multisig with Casa, you use the same amount of effort as your hardware wallet, but you are dramatically improving your security by doing so.”
Newman believes more people will come along and that multisig will be more widely adopted, especially during a bull market.
“It takes a rise in the price of bitcoin where people suddenly have more value to secure it,” Newman said. “And it takes people hearing from their friends: ‘Yes, I’m multi-tweeting, and it’s not as hard as it sounds.’
For those who have the desire to try Casa, the company allows people to do so Try the service for free For a month.
Newman feels that as more users join, it will not only benefit them, but the industry as a whole as well.
“If we can get out of this bull market without another massive explosion like FTX because we help more people hold themselves in a way they feel good about, then that feels like a real win to me.”
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