Company name: Casa
Founders: Nick Neuman, Jameson Lopp and others
Date of establishment: End of 2017
Location of the head office: At a distance
Website: https://casa.io/
Public or private? Private
Being self-sovereign is not easy, especially if you are not technically minded.
The team of Casa understands this, and it’s why the company has been helping customers secure their bitcoin in multisig wallets (also called multi-key vaults) for more than six years.
The company was the first to offer a user-friendly version of such a product, including customer support. Casa’s plan from the beginning was to be there for their customers, as this type of support was lacking in the broader crypto industry.
“The service element was what was missing from a lot of solutions out there,” said Nick Neuman, co-founder and CEO of Casa Bitcoin Magazine.
“People need help doing these kinds of things, especially when large sums of money are involved. The plan was always to support customers as it was impossible to get support from exchanges or hardware wallets,” he added.
“So we took a very support-oriented and user experience-oriented approach to everything.”
Casa’s approach has paid off, as the company has become a household name in the Bitcoin and crypto space, and has come a long way since Neuman first came up with the idea for a company like Casa seven years ago.
How Casa started
It was towards the latter part of the 2017 bitcoin bull run when Neuman had grown tired of his previous work in finance and technology and found himself down the proverbial Bitcoin (and crypto) rabbit hole. In February 2018, he had an idea for a business and entered a hackathon to try to bring the idea to life.
“I participated in the first ETHDenver hackathon,” said Neuman.
“I came up with an idea I called key split, which was basically taking a private key using Shamir secret sharing and creating a social recovery mechanism,” he added.
“I recruited a few people at the hackathon to build it with me, and we ended up winning.”
Neuman quit his job and started a company around the technology he and his team had developed. But word had spread about his win at ETHDenver, and Casa’s previous CEO, who was the head of the company before it focused on offering multisig wallets, contacted Neuman and asked him to come on board come.
It was after he heard that Casa had just recruited Jameson breeda self-described “professional cypherpunk” and now Chief Security Officer at Casa, Neuman decided to join the team.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, Jameson will be an unfair advantage,’” Neuman recalled with a chuckle. “Instead of starting my own company, I’m going to get involved.”
Shortly after Neuman came on board, Casa discontinued its then flagship product, the Knoophuisand the company shifted its focus to easy-to-use, multi-key safes, a much-needed product at the time. Before Casa, multisig software was so complicated that even Neuman himself had trouble using it.
“There was the Armory multisig wallet and the Glacier protocol,” says Neuman.
“Glacier wasn’t even software. It was like a giant GitHub repository that you had to follow to set up your cold storage. Armory was also super janky. “I remember trying to use it once and I couldn’t figure it out,” he added.
“We were the first to create multisig that was usable.”
How Casa works
Casa offers users two main setups. The first is a five-key vault, which contains three keys on three different hardware wallets, one on the user’s phone (which is backed up securely in the cloud) and one that Casa keeps.
This was Casa’s first multisig product, which it rolled out as the company focused on serving customers with high net worth in bitcoin. Casa has learned an important lesson in serving these customers, which is that even when developers create easy-to-use software, people still want an expert to support them in using it, especially if they are securing a lot of value.
“When you’re dealing with millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, you really want an expert to make sure you don’t make any mistakes,” says Neuman.
Casa’s other main product is for those who may not be sitting on bitcoin whale type wealth, but who still have plenty of bitcoin in their possession while a less than ideal security setup has the potential to keep them awake at night.
This product is Casa’s three-key safe, which the company launched in early 2019. It includes a key on a hardware wallet, a key on the user’s phone (which can be swapped for another key on a second hardware wallet if the user prefers) and a key that Casa holds.
Casa started offering this setup because it “always wanted to provide as much security and usability as possible to as many people as possible,” Neuman said.
New Casa services and features
Over the past year, Casa has further broadened its services.
He announced this two weeks ago Enterprise planallowing companies to more easily secure their bitcoin treasuries.
“We’ve had companies using Casa for self-management for years, but they always used our retail plans and just made it work,” Neuman explains.
“We changed that, though, because I think corporate government bonds hold bitcoin was popularized by MicroStrategy. 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 sheets that they need help with security,” he added.
This summer, Casa also started making this possible for users replace hardware wallets used in their vaults with YubiKeys.
“We see people constantly struggling with hardware wallets, so we thought, ‘How can we make this easier?’” Neuman said. “We put together some new pieces of technology that provide access to passkeys and YubiKey keys and were able to build something that hadn’t been done before.”
And in March, Casa launched Casa Inheritancea service that makes it easier for the loved ones of Casa users to access the bitcoin secured in the vaults in the event of a user’s death.
“With Inheritance, we kept hearing from our customers, ‘Okay, I feel good about my Casa setup, but I’m worried about what happens when I die,’” Neuman explains. “So we built that feature to make it super easy for their family to get the bitcoin back in case the primary account holder dies.”
Normalize multisig
Despite all the work Casa has done over the past six years, some still have an emotional block when it comes to switching to a multisig setup. Whether it’s because this type of wallet format was harder to enable years ago or because it’s understandably daunting to make changes to bitcoin security, people seem to be hesitant when it comes to using a multisig setup – even if they really want to. to – according to Neuman.
“They hear the word ‘multisig’ and say, ‘That’s too hard,’” Neuman explains. “What they don’t realize is that to get started with multisig with Casa, you can use the same hardware wallet, and it literally takes the same amount of effort as using a hardware wallet, but you significantly improve your security by doing it doing. ”
Neuman thinks more people will come and multisig will become more widely adopted, especially during a bull market.
“It requires the price of Bitcoin to go up, allowing people to suddenly secure more value,” Neuman said. “And it takes people hearing from their friends, ‘Yes, I do multisig and it’s not as hard as it sounds.’
For those who feel the urge to try Casa, the company allows people to do so try the service for free for a month.
Neuman believes that as more users come on board, it will not only benefit them, but potentially the industry as a whole.
“If we can come out of this bull market without another huge explosion like the FTX, because we helped more people maintain their composure in a way they can feel good about, that feels like a real victory to me.”