Ruben Merre on NGRAVE's hardware wallet security and private keys

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have ruben mara co-founder and ceo of engrave reuben welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thank you ashton great to be here how are you let's dive into all things metaverse nfts big brands continuing to enter the space and make a name for

0:26themselves in the blockchain world and grave is working on some really cool initiatives as well tying into all of that but i know that you have special expertise in this and there's an interesting backstory to this so let's start reuben by hearing a little bit just about yourself and your background and digital assets and then why you started engrave

0:50yeah so i'm sort of the lifelong learner type meaning i'm constantly trying to soak up new knowledge in my studies i studied civil engineering with a major in business and after that one once i started working mostly as a strategy consultant slash external entrepreneur for hire so to say i kept studying so i kept doing the postgraduates about every

1:14year for like six years the first one was in financial markets i did one in factory optimization which at the time wasn't very relevant for my life but obviously today with engrave we have the whole supply chain set up so i was sort of doing that with the future inside my background in digital assets apart from being a consultant in the space for

1:35a bit i also i'm very let's say passionate about these big mass problems such as financial empowerment so my one of my first big projects i did was i started and scaled the first other made investment platform in belgium the reason behind it was purely that i wanted to give the same wealth management services that let's say the richer echelon of the society has to

2:02give that to the joe next door and that was something that went really well in the u.s it's known as robo advisory and i scaled that into luxembourg into switzerland and not long after it's when i fell in the rabbit hole of crypto and immediately was faced with these security issues especially with my co-founder xavier who was in the space since 2012 2013 and

2:29who experienced a massive hack 44 000 ethereum of the project he was working for at that time so yeah at some point three of us sort of collided me him and edward the three co-founders of engwave and we decided to solve this security conundrum for good for the for the full space of digital assets wow very cool background and yeah that is a large hack especially

2:56when you know it's one of your co-founders and you personally feel the pain from that and that's part of the entrepreneurial journey is you know you have a problem and now here you are to solve it so with that said let's dive into engrave you can just start by talking about those specific solutions and how you're utilizing this technology to bring that into the world

3:18yeah sure so after the after xavier experienced attack with his team they actually took the time immediately to figure out what the vulnerability was that was exported it was a smart contract written by gavin whitta the actual inventor of solidity the ethereum programming language language and once they figured out what actually was the vulnerability was they basically

3:39drained all the other each projects at that time at 2017 500 projects 200 million dollars in it and they then send all of the crypto back once they figured out how to how to fix that issue and it's i think it's important because that was sort of what drove me him and edward together to fix a simple problem at least if you instead in words and that was that we

4:05wanted to find the wallet where we were able we were confident to put 100 of our crypto and be able to sleep at night and i think even today if you don't look at our solution we still don't see it in the market so we spent about four years since 2018 to build it to set up the supply chain of the factories for the hardware wallet we've built and to

4:25actually provide easy to use maximum security to everyone in the space very cool and i'd love to know more about that in terms of you know what there are a lot of different hardware wallets out there but what specifically did you see the need to implement it and what makes engraved special yeah so we take a real end-to-end view at security and i haven't seen that

4:50to this to this day done by anybody else so what i mean with that well step zero so to save your decentralized user journey is how do you create a strong c trace and when we started with that first problem we actually noticed that there was not a single key out there not even in the traditional banking space that was created correctly so we actually had

5:11to reinvent the key generation process and that led us to the engrave perfect key which is a patented key and we set so step 0 is create a good key and step z yeah so to say is what happens to your crypto once you pass on to the next life and your children need access to your bitcoin again a problem that was that's still very difficult today so we try to

5:39fix those two end points but also every step in between like how do i do safe transactions how do i interact with defy solutions and yeah so we sort of built in my view the first end to end solution and we focused on two things in particular one we would never compromise on security so that meant that we actually built an offline solution a zero or hardware wallet is 100 air gaps

6:03100 offline because as a hacker once you can make that online connection you can start an attack and that is obviously the beginning of the end and we also focused a lot on the easy to use aspect and so hardware wallets today are typically usb flash drives they're not that easy to use so we set no cables no hassle just on and off button and everything needs to be swipe and tap so

6:28it needs to be a touchscreen experience something at the 21st that is worth the 21st century and yeah you could mostly the comparisons are here is to apple so it's sort of an apple product whereas the existing solutions typically remind us more to towards the nokia phones wow very cool and there's a lot of different variables with the hardware wallets you

6:54mentioned the touch screen and air gaps which i think is great but also in and you also mentioned the amazing reinvention of creating the private keys which is obviously important but holding actual assets on a hardware wallet there's different blockchains you have to support different software what approach have you taken towards making sure that there's important

7:19digital assets but it's also a big burden to put in every single blockchain and every single software onto the hardware wallet yeah so i think my team is extremely experienced in building let's say our zero hardware for example is the only financial product in the world today that actually has the highest security certification so there are seven levels

7:41in the evaluation assurance level criteria yal in short generally hardware wallets have five out of seven the best bank platform is six are one of the seven and so we built this device from scratch we integrated all the relevant cryptography so to say to actually derive the right blockchains and so on for us this is not really the challenge the challenge

8:03was to build this solution so today we already support a few of these blockchains like ripple dash dosh knight card z cash bitcoin cash b and b and so on and we intend to support let's see the major all the major ones that people actually want in their wallet by the end of the year so every every few months we will add a few significant ones

8:26But i think if you look at the 15 000 plus by now cryptocurrencies there are many of them are either debt or don't have real community committee behind them some of them are because of that quite challenging when it comes to having stable apis in the back end so to if you have erc20 tokens you typically support most of the relevant ones today you also have like web 20

8:50based on violence so if you support those kind of chains you support in general 99 of the coins that people actually would want to store on a hardware wallet so yeah it's more a question of which ones are relevant which ones make sense i see some other wallets actually going back to the basics and say we only do btc and eat so yeah it's more a question of is it

9:12actually relevant to put a coin on there and then keep support on going for it over time so if you look at the existing what you'll typically see that they also don't support more than two thousand coins so to say definitely yeah well that sounds like a pretty exhaustive list of the major blockchains so that's good to know and now i to talk about just the success

9:37so far from what i've read it sounds like there you know there's a huge demand and not enough supply you know how has it been going with the sales and with the growth yeah so it's it's sort of going faster than we expected but i think that's sort of a typical narrative in crypto anyways right if you look at last year in a single year 2021 200 million new unique

10:02crypto users joined the space which is something you only see once in a decade maybe you started with mobile phones in the 20 00 2010 periods you saw it you did the internet but so it's it's something like beyond most people's imagination especially if we look forward they think that there will be one billion uni equip the users between 2023 2026 at the

10:26latest so yeah that obviously drives the demand for our product a lot and we recently were able to we obviously were very proactive on setting up a supply chain thinking about the supplied blood that might at some point come so actually next week we are opening so next week i don't know when you publish whichever say tuesday the 29th of march 2022 we

10:52launch our webshop we will open it up again it has been closed for a few weeks because we actually were out of stock due to the demand but we will be open again same way delivery more or less maybe two weeks stops so yeah actually we have quite an inventory coming coming in but i do it's still first come first turf it's still not millions of wallets

11:13that we're pushing of course we're still early yeah yeah well sounds like it's going well so far and yeah with those numbers in the coming years i'm anticipating you're probably gonna need a lot more hardware while it's produced to prepare for that yeah hopefully so now i was reading something about the metaverse and nfts as well and

11:38i'm guessing with the erc standards you're able to store nfts on the device and maybe you can touch on the metaverse play as well yeah sure so as of the next quarter we will support nfts i think ft's and the metaverse obviously sort of an ongoing trend for a bit at least underneath the surface and so i think first time i wrote about the ftc

12:05was in 2020 that was for me like the year of defy 2021 was the year of actual nfd breakthrough and then the end of 2021 2022 sort of the breakthrough for the metaverse and yeah i think one very important thing that typically everybody forgets once it becomes a sort of a hygiene factor for the industry is that security is at the essence of blockchain at the essence

12:32of the metaverse at the essence of the metaverse you have blockchain at the essence of blockchain you have cryptography and cryptography relies basically around the single simple concept which is the private key so you need to create your private keys well and like i mentioned we actually had to reinvent the private key generation process because there are

12:54quite some pitfalls with the ones used today so yeah we are the ones who want to protect everybody in the space as everybody sort of converging or let's say moving forward into having a true digital life with the digital avatar and so on and everything you own is then also digital so how do you protect that's the parts of your life that we actually take care of

13:18incredible reuben and what are you most excited for as you continue to grow out engrave and you know just anticipating more demand just throughout the rest of 2022. i'm not sure if i get your question it's like what are you most excited for in terms of the functionalities and growing engrave you know obviously you're going to be increasing sales but is there anything

13:43else in the pipeline that you're looking to implement yeah i mean we are we are working towards an ecosystem right so we don't want to remain a product-based company where we just sell a heart reward and then tell you goodbye we actually have plans in for the next 10 years to really build out an extensive and exhaustive ecosystem where we can actually help you

14:05with every single typical issue you have in the in the in the digital world and the metaverse obviously opens up an endless amount of possibilities if you even we just talk about hardware you have like this typical motion tracking technology cybernetics hardware that makes makes that basically makes for extended reality so that you can actually be completely immersed

14:30in that digital way of living and yeah it comes with so many so many let's say issues that you might look past that are so important so our idea is to solve several of these so that you don't have to think about them great well i'm looking forward to seeing the ecosystem growth now for the viewers you mentioned next week there will be more available

14:57what is the best way to get involved with engrave and to be able to acquire some of this hardware yeah so our website is a engraved.io so it's that straightforward if you would go on it maybe yeah right now you would be able to go to our metaverster store in decentraland and if it might be closed by the time you actually visit it the webshop will be

15:23open so it will be right there for you to order and yeah also have a look through our website we have a lot of articles on how to actually protect your crypto not just in the defy space but also in what you have to left you have to think about when you go interact with the metaverse very cool thank you so much ruben for taking the time to explain this all

15:45i'm impressed with you know the reinvention of private keys i think that's super important and you know private keys are everything in crypto if you don't have that you have nothing so thank you for your great work and contributions to the blockchain ecosystem all the best with engrave moving forward i'm going to go check out the metaverse store and i'm looking forward to seeing the

16:07the next release of the hardware so let's follow up in the near future amazing thank you ashley