Jan Pecinovsky on securing cryptocurrency with Trezor hardware wallets

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Yan Petrov ski the head of business development at Satoshi Labs yan thanks so much for being on the show it's a pleasure to have you here today and thank you having me you're very welcome let's kick it off by talking about your

0:22team's crypto hardware wallet the treasure if you could start by explaining a little bit to people that are entering into the cryptocurrency space why is security so important and offline storage using products like the treasure well it's a very good question cryptocurrencies as any other assets they can be stolen and or you can easily lose access to them but unlike in the in

0:49the fiat banking system there is no central authority which would help you to regain access to your funds in case you lose access or would help you to retrieve back the money in case of somebody somebody stole it the in the crypto spender is saying not your keys not your coins and it's very true so when you start to think about how to secure your your keys you come to

1:20you find out that there are multiple options there are paper wallets which are nice but there are difficulties penned there are software bullets software applications mobile applications but they are running on on your computer which you cannot consider secure because it's not open source or so they are running on the operating system so they are good for keeping a

1:48little amount of money but you can't trust it with your full stack sorry there are also centralized services such as exchanges the problem with them is they tend to be a target of hacking attacks because there there is a plenty of money concentrated in one space or the hikers don't need to focus on and they need to hack many individuals but you just need

2:18to just need to hack on service also like there is a risk of potential or the service is shut down by the by the provider and then you lose the access to your coins so the founders of our company they've seen people losing access to to their coins too many too many times before and it's worth why they came up with the idea of a hardware wallet which is basically a simple

2:43computer we generates the private keys and sign the transactions for you so um yeah that's great and so you know as you say there are many different ways to store crypto currencies but they all have unique risks involved with them now with the treasure Hardware wallet is the main focus I'm guessing is security but does that sacrifice convenience and is

3:09it just as easy to use as it would be some of these convenient ways but they may be more risky well no no of course like you don't want to sacrifice the security together-together ease of use some some projects might do that but we definitely don't we are trying always to to find a way how to improve the security while keeping it

3:36easy to use the treasure was a first very first Hardware bullet so we've developed many new standards along the way and which has been adapted by by the whole industry and by our competitors as well as well Tresor is open source so you can actually check what what it is with that it does what we say it's

4:05supposed to do also we use a we are focusing on small things such as such as transaction and address labeling so for example you don't have to you don't have to keep like an excel sheet in order to track the transactions you can label receiving addresses so you know who who send you this money and what you the money on mm-hmm and you

4:36mentioned that you guys were the first crypto wallet but there are other competitors as well which is great to have you know variety and diversity when you're choosing how to store your crypto but what would you say is the competitive advantage or the main reason that treasure is one of the most popular options well as I said already we are first so basically when you create an

5:02industry then you you have a good name already because as I mentioned we developed the new standards so we we have this like a good name in the community already and yeah being open source that's definitely important another important thing is we are driven by the community and we focus on the community so we just really listen to

5:31what what do people want um we focus on make it easy for them to see to use it and well we have over trades or supports over over thousand coins and if yeah we recently treasure became became like a multifunctional device really is so in except just storing the coins you can

6:00also use it to as a password manager or for a secure authentication token while the u2f or our 502 standards we have we have a in wallet built in by Bitcoin and exchange features which is really convenient for the for the users and so on that's great and I was just gonna ask you you know if there were more features than just being able to store your your

6:26coins and I know you guys have expanded the variety of coins which are on different block chains and brought more compatibility so you can store a bunch of different coins now you know mention you have like a thousand coins which is great but on the security side you mentioned open source and for a lot of people just to break it down into layman's terms I believe you know the

6:50competitive advantages of open source is that you can see the source code in which the treasure application you know everything on the source code to ensure that there's no backdoor to ensure nobody else is getting your your codes and that you know nobody has access to to view what your what your amounts are or what your codes are is that right and could you elaborate on the other

7:12security features which which protect people's funds okay although the Oh being open source means the source code of the of the product source code of the product is open source and everybody can check that the product does what we say it does so independent researchers and security experts can verify that it's really doing what it's supposed to do

7:42that's that's very important question you don't you don't offer people a black box which they have no way how to have to check how their money are secured and regarding the the security I would say it's um it's always balance between the safety and the usability we try to make treasurer versatile so it would offer an

8:11options for everybody it offers like basic security features but also the more advanced ones for for the for those people who want to take an extra care and it always depends on what is your potential risks and what are the scenarios which which can put you in in danger in your money so I would say the basic the basic feature is a pin which

8:41protects your device from from physical misuse for example if you are at the cafe and you leave your trace or connected to your computer and it just lifts a bathroom so nobody can come and and misuse your your treasurer while while you are not present there is a passphrase which protects your treasure from remote attacks so let's say that your recovery seat is compromised the

9:10attacker would need to know this additional information in order to be accessed to be able to access your your funds and the most recently added edit feature is is a Shamir back hub which basically protects the physical security of the recovery seat during the initialization process of the tresor device when the recovery seat is created it will give you an option to create

9:38multiple shares of the seed and then you need for example three out of five in order of them to in order to recover the funds otherwise one of the one of the interesting interesting features is of course like the hardware words most of them have a hello screen which works in a way that even if your computer is is infected with the malware and it would

10:04anyone send money somewhere you create a transaction on your computer and it will look like that you are sending it to the address you want to but on your on your treads or on the other screen you will see that that you are actually sending it somewhere else so that should give you a heads up and and information that the transaction is not not what you want

10:25definitely yeah I've seen when people transact with the treasurer you you know the screen is is sort of the failsafe you know you can see on the screen if somebody has manipulated your computer screen and changes the address there's a copy of the address that you're sending it to on the treasurer and as well when you're typing in the pin you're looking

10:45at the numbers on the treasurer screen and you know you're not typing in the numbers on on the keyboard which if somebody was hacking into your computer they would be able to see your keystrokes but they can't tell what the numbers are on the screen so that's very secure and that's been implemented since you know the very first treasure and I did use the treasurer myself a few years

11:07back when you guys originally created it and ivory I recently grabbed the new model right here which is the Model T which is the that you guys more recently came out with can you explain a little bit about the the upgrades that were made to the Model T and if the original treasure is just as good for everybody who's looking to get into cryptocurrency

11:28yeah definitely as I mentioned it offers like various levels of security the main difference between the treasure one and treasure Model T is that there is a difference of where stack are the most visible thing but that's in the background but the most visible thing is definitely the touchscreen you know that's a very very

11:56good point what you mentioned when we do the innovations and we try to iterate between the between the models we always try to focus on things and look at them from a different perspective so is there a way how we can improve security and usability at the same time that would be the best of course and the ice cream is exactly this kind of feature because

12:23it's not just it doesn't just like look but it also makes it easier to use because you can type in the things directly on the screen so like your your pin or even your passphrase or even you can you can do the recovery on the screen directly but it's also more secure because you don't have to type it on the computer like even on the tresor on the pin was always crumbled and like

12:49every time you've entered the pin it's shuffled randomly on the tresor t is the same but you even don't enter it on the computer are the same with the passphrase the same with the recovery CT just type it type it in directly on the on the screen and it's a big big improvement yeah that's super great and you guys are constantly working out improving the security and the

13:12functionality could you give a sneak peak on what does the road map look like for 2020 in terms of new products or new updates that you're making to the current products yeah it last year we've developed plenty of plenty of important and interesting features such as blog book the Fido to help sorry is it what do you guys come at for the 2020 roadmap

13:47updates you guys our products are you focusing on sales sorry sorry in 2020 in the in the upcoming months you will be able to see the treasure suit which is a standalone app desktop app which will allow you to manage your crypto without without the meat of actually using the the web Follet there there will be some more projects which I unfortunately

14:18cannot tell you much about now but stay tuned because it's it's gonna come in in the coming months and it's grab interesting awesome yen and if people are looking to follow along so they can hear about the updates right when they happen what's the best way to follow your guys's project and learn more information I would definitely recommend to you visit

14:41the treasured IO product page where you can find the link on the on the blog and on the wiki which are both really well-written and the visitors can learn a lot about bitcoin of all trades are about security you can also subscribe to newsletter there you can also check our social networks such as Facebook Twitter Instagram and so on great well I'll leave those links in the description box

15:09below for the viewers and thank you so much yen for coming on the show that's all the time that we have for this interview but let's follow up in the near future with Satoshi Labs thank you it was pleasure talking to you and have a good day thank you you