How companies should secure their crypto assets

0:00I'm ashon Addison from the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews with beny Rabbi the CEO of utila beny welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thank you you're very welcome let's just dive straight into it I'd love to hear what you and your team have been working on at utila uh if we could just start from the top on sort of what is

0:20the vision and mission of of the platform and then we could dive into all things web three yeah okay so uh so uh thank you for foring me and uh just a bit about utila so we came from a point saying that uh crypto is going to be a main part of uh every business in the world uh starting from Financial Services um and my background and also my co-founder is you know in the cyber

0:50security side we've been there for many years from our military service and after all and after that in the in the industry here in Tel Aviv and we've been in crypto for the last eight years think that when you think about crypto adoption organization uh you think about the mostly about the security challenge which is still a very big challenge for a lot of organizations on how you can

1:16actually you know manage digital Assets in a secure way right like and it can be in either ways it can be maybe you just all them you know as a payment that you get or as let's say some offering that you build uh maybe you want to build an application and wallet is just a very and and and the digital asset is only a uh the the backbone of it or something

1:37that even the end user is not seeing like The Cloud of the internet but the common thing for all of these cases is that there is a group of people from two to can be hundreds of thousands for huge organizations that need to manage digital Assets in a secure way uh in easy way and and utila was built for this Mission so we want to enable every kind of organization from small to big

2:06to be able to store meant move uh digital Assets in a secure and simplified way no I think that's great because I feel like the adoption curve for blockchain technology and digital assets is just exponentially growing I think the Bitcoin ETF public launch and just more adoption of traditional Finance into crypto as well is like that safeguard that more companies are seeing

2:33hey this stuff is on the stock market now uh I think it's that time when it's becoming more of a majority we better start figuring it out for our company otherwise we're going to be behind um and and you mentioned there almost every kind of company can benefit from this but Financial Services specifically um are what we're seeing at the start and of course they have a lot of capital

2:55that they want to protect and Safeguard as well and utilize now with utila and and the team are you guys focusing specifically on onboarding financial services companies or are you seeing all different types of companies from around the world you know what are the ones that are ready for adoption of this technology right now yeah so I would say that uh today the still the biggest

3:17adoption that we see is among trading firms um like still you know trading crypto um as an asset um and some of them they just hold it you know for the long term um some of them are holding it is some you know investment they did like you know a VC fund so it's invested in some token projects and they need like a secure wallet for that some of them they buil um let's say some sort of

3:46a trading operation system for digital assets for example OTC desks or market makers so I think today or an exchange of course so today we still see um most of the demand there and many of them they hold like large amount of assets they trade or settle in very large volumes and looking for an highly secured and easy way way to manage all these kind of operations uh so this is

4:15what we see today what we start to see is more about the let's Le in the side one moment the the trading side you know because the trading side has been always like I would say and and still right also the ETF is is another part part of it one of of the main use cases of crypto but I do believe that the future crypto actually lies on applications that you can build on top

4:40of the blockchain uh blockchain technology crypto assets is only one of them so I would say that two main things that we currently see one is every everything around payments and uh let's say dollar access so we start to see more and more applications um trying to solve crossroader payments um quick settlements remittances uh Etc all of them built on

5:07stable coins and for us it's you know as as I see it for mine it might be the first real world application of of crypto um and the same I would say very similar applications of source are can be also providing dollar access for example to latam or for Africa where it's very difficult uh to get an access to this kind of uh of coin this is only one example but there are more examples

5:33and um this is like one new use case that we see a growing uh um a growing you know some some growing demand for the second one is a tokenization of real world assets okay so think about um you know real estate think about t bills um think about options um that's why also Ina recently we added the the ability to tokenize assets and a securing compliant

6:04way through the platform so today we also serve token issuers that want to burn and mint um through the utila platform they can do it in a in in a way where they can you know manage access to who can bar and me and how much and to enforce policies Etc so this is another growing use case that that that we see recently mhm yeah that's very exciting and you know I

6:30mentioned that likely there's more adoption from the Bitcoin ETF going public and more companies looking at it but you would know best being in the industry and it's only been about a month or less that the the ETF has actually launched and I know large companies take a long time to make decisions even the ETF launch itself was 10 years in the making of all the

6:52legalities they had to go through so I'm I'm curious from more of an Insider perspective working with these companies since the ETF launch have you seen an uptake of interest of more companies coming in or what do you think the timeline is for that and after that you know maybe it takes a few months or half a year for more companies to realize that they should be getting on this

7:15train definitely I must say that already around the middle of November I started the feeling and I think Al when you when you look at the market right like the market you look at the graphs you see that already around 2 months before when um the general feeling was that we are going towards a um you know positive news I would say by the SEC so um the

7:40market started to eat up uh and I would say that uh uh especially after um you know the beginning of January when it was uh approved um we see I I would say you know we have a screen at the office and in the screen we can see total volumes running on the platform I would say say that since then we can see that the the numbers are growing very rapidly

8:03okay so this is uh I would say the best evidence to see um besides that we see even more traditional players um that we you know we never imagine talking to us you know last year showing interest um we get more inbounds from them so looks like it really influencing the market it makes people feel more comfortable uh mostly on the institutional side that's

8:28we are also targeting utila that's our bet um so we see more of them are feeling more comfortable and not necessarily around you know Bitcoin right the ETF was only for Bitcoin but in general it's just a uh a proof of acknowledgement I would say for the entire blockchain industry yes yeah I completely agree and for those companies that you haven't seen come in the door

8:54yet what do you think are some of the major barriers to entry in why some large companies and small companies haven't started adopting blockchain is it trying to find a place to make sure that the assets are secure or understanding how it fits into their business or other reasons yeah I would say a few things first of all is the the lack of some regulatory Clarity um I do think that

9:19it's still um you don't have um let's say specific simple procedures you know a good example is mic uh in Europe uh that soon will take an act so I think organizations are looking for uh the same kind of thing for example in the US it's still for example you know there was an SEC proposal for Ras to uh they must all the all the Assets in in

9:46qualified custodians it's still a proposal so no one knows exactly what to do some are using a QC some are not this is only one example right so I would say as long as we have more regulatory Clarity I think for the market uh for organizations it will make more sense to um to to enter uh the space second thing I would say privacy I I do think that uh

10:10you know the main uh one of the main advantages of crypto is is is the is the speed right you can do a payment uh from Brazil to Australia in 10 seconds I would say that the still one of the main challenges is privacy right where everything goes on the um public and open to everyone I think it's still um moving some organizations um from using it um due to privacy issues

10:39and I believe that if there will be like better Solutions of privacy preserving uh blockchains keeping you know the same level of speed um and decentralization on the but on the other side bringing more privacy I would say it it probably be an a driver and the third one of course and here I'm not so objective is security right like when you need to manage crypto assets um you need to be

11:08very careful this Market um can be sometimes not so nice if you lose your private key or you do any mistake uh in many cases you cannot re do any reverse here and you cannot return the funds to yourself so I would say that you need to be extra careful in this market uh you need to be very careful of Insider threats security policies um Etc and I think that this is

11:37another thing that uh um making organizations to consider um all the time if they want to enter this space I would say that if they will have easy ways to manage dig dig digital Assets in a secure way this will make them probably um feel more comfortable with entering the space and this is the mission that we are trying to solve mhm no I really resonate with that beny and

12:01I think the last two points there about privacy and security privacy specifically as well as more corporations come in they want privacy for competitive reasons for for many reasons um you know not because they're trying to hide something only from their competitors to gain that competitive advantage and all these different blockchain Technologies they have

12:20different levels of security and privacy and functionality and I feel like the ZK technology might be helping with that I do know there are some firm that are trying to introduce that into more blockchains to adapt it to uh overall in the industry to bring more privacy I feel like that would bring a lot more institutions in as well and now when there are new companies coming in

12:42there's so many different options for them for different blockchains assets that they can use you know I can almost count 50 different blockchains off the top of my head now and they all are slightly different from each other how does that how do you work with the companies when they come in uh if they want a private blockchain or public blockchain or they're looking for the

13:03most security or privacy do you recommend a certain technology or do you only work with certain blockchains yeah so the way we work at Thea is that we never give any recommendation when it comes to uh let's say Buy sell advice so which blockchain you should use uh we are trying to avoid it and focus only on the on the technology layer that's where we we good

13:27right so uh uh usually we just work just based on the customer demand of course if someone is coming to me and and we have it many times right and they want like a support for a specific sorry for a very specific blockchain that I never heard of so I would say there then maybe I will need to sorry to consider uh if I really want to support this blockchain but um

13:55generally speaking I would say that uh we're trying to work only with the major ones um and not to take some uh specific bets mhm great and beny I'm I'm curious more on the utila wallet how does the custody of the digital assets work you know is it self- custody are there vaults is there a hybrid solution um how exactly do the digital assets work in the wallet

14:22with utila yeah sure so uh the wallet is built on a multiparty computation the idea of multi party computation is uh that we take the private key um of you know of the of the of the wallet and we split it into X shards in the utila case we split it into two shards and uh we hold one one Shard the other Shard sits on the on the customer end um but we never have a full access

14:50to the to the private key okay so the customer is the only one who actually manage the full backup um of the of the private key and they can reconstruct regenerate all the wallets the addresses out of the utila platform uh I would say in almost every jurisdiction in the world is considered to be a non-custodial offering because we don't hold the full um the full private key

15:13just the part of it and the magic of NPC is that you can still sign transactions and act like the full key is is in one place but the actual truth is is that private key is never sitting in any point of time in you know completely on one place uh it's separated between different places but it still acts like it's it's in one place so that's the magic of this uh this kind of Technology

15:39it's not a new technology actually it's something that is from the 70s 80s in the in the cryptography world but it was started to be a part of the crypto world around 78 years ago and today it's becoming more like a mainstream especially for uh institutions mhm okay that's great great to hear I have seen some companies working in the MPC technology and I do understand it's more

16:05secure for a company that's getting started and they're like deciding between doing self- custody you know on on a hardware wallet and a USB stick themselves versus uh with within utila and with the MPC what are the major benefits to that is it that they require external confirmation to send transactions or if they have to lose part of the key you know what are the benefits of actually

16:32working with utila yes I would say besides of security that we provide a very high security level and um you know many times the the alternative will be let's say not so secured Solutions um I would say another thing is first of all the multi-chain approach so in utila you can manage assets on various chains under one umbrella you will not need you know like a wallet for

16:57Bitcoin a wallet for ethereum a wallet for Solana and a wallet for for Tron um you can do everything in UA which is a a great Advantage the second layer is the policy engine so in UA you can beside of the Fe management which is a very important part of our security stock is also the ability to manage users roles permissions transaction policies the ability to set rules in a very similar

17:23way to the traditional Finance world right like in your bank account when you are like an organization you can set you know transaction policies and say okay if it's more than $5,000 you need like two from this groups to approve it and if it's more than 10K you also need this person to approve it in utila you can actually Define the same kind of rules

17:42which is something that you don't really have in other wallets uh so would say this is another Advantage the third Advantage is the scalability of the solution okay so uh organizations who work with us are usually organizations that are building an offering or managing um uh let's say big amount of assets and I think for them it's very important to work on a a

18:05scalable offering there so so I would say that's the three main things uh that make you utila um a good solution MH that's really great to hear about the granularity of of the amount the size of transactions you know I can imagine you might be trading $5,000 daily with one person uh and then if you kick that up to you know the $100,000 portfolio don't allow them to to withdraw the

18:31whole thing uh without extra confirmations uh but of course they need to perform their daily tasks and you don't want to have to do a multi- Sig for every transaction it would just be just too much of a hassle so that's great to hear and and now is there anything else about the the utila wallet besides the security of it um there's so many wallets out there I feel like having a

18:55great user experience or user interface really helps with adoption or other functionalities um is there anything else that you and your team are trying to bring as a competitive Advantage into the wallet yeah I would say and you already mentioned it definitely Simplicity I do think that Enterprise great wallets um like the the lscape where we are also acting the most of

19:17them they lack of Simplicity and uh and I would say that the secret source of utila is to maintain the same high level of security um but on the other end to make things very simple so for example the onboarding time to utila is less than five minutes it's super fast um all the platform is very intuitive to use not only for crypto digion right like in the

19:42end our assumption is that the next people will use it actually people who are coming from the thread fire world and they are looking for a simple way an easy way to manage crypto assets I would say that's uh that's where we are trying to put most of our effort Al the policy engine and many other Solutions it seem like a very manual process um like the

20:05old days in youtil we built everything from Day Zero in a self serve super intuitive way besides that we are all the time trying to extend asset support which is a very important part of what we do um we are trying to add a lot of features to the product so just you know examples from the last few weeks one was the ability to um to selfs servicely um

20:30do a token Whit list or to track defy allowances we also have connectivity to exchange account which is a big thing for a lot of trading firms so I would say that utila is more than just a wallet in in a way we are building an operations platform for for an organization as we grow because we started from the wallet but all these Integrations all these features are

20:52making us much more than just a wet yeah it just opens a can of worms of all of the functionality of rebuilding the whole trafi uh ecosystem in into web 3 so I feel like there's a long way to go and I feel like there's a lot more adoption to come from companies uh that are you know late adopters or ear or major majority adopters uh hopefully throughout 2024 we see a continuance of

21:18more companies coming into web 3 and with utila I'm curious on what your team is focusing on throughout 2024 uh whether it's part of the major road map for expansion of the wallet or other functionality and anticipating more entrance into web 3 and how to lock them into your teams project yes I would say about three things one is extending asset support um so today we support uh

21:45Bitcoin major evm Solana Tron we are now also looking at Cosmos uh which is a very growing and exciting ecosystem we also look at stellar and some others um so so this is definitely one main thing for us and another thing is to add more capabilities when it comes to gas fee management uh I would say that especially as I said around payments and embedding um stable coins mostly in a um

22:14in applications uh for cross border payments for dollar access uh for remittances ETC there is still a big need for um better user experience when it come to gas fee management you know today you need to manually tap wallets uh whenever you are sending any crypto and we are building uh easy ways for organizations to actually pay automatically gas without the need to to

22:40add um crypto to these wallets uh enabling a much better user experience when it comes to that so this is like another big thing for us another thing that is more relevant for trading firms is um what's called off exchange trading okay so um especially after recent events with some exchanges in the crypto world and there is um a growing demand for a segregation between custody and

23:04trading or an exchange and many organizations they are looking for um an offering where let's say they can store their funds in the utila wallet while you know doing um trading in some exchange without moving the funds actually into the exchange itself right so avoiding a counterparty risk this is like another offering that we are uh working on and uh hopefully we'll have

23:30some exciting news later this year on very cool and if there are companies that want to follow along with these updates and and try out UT the wallet right now as well where's the best place for them to get started yes so I would recommend uh two places um one is a of course our website uh we are trying to update it all the time uh there are customer stories um

23:55more like security overviews Etc the second place is our LinkedIn or Twitter uh um we are trying to publish every week at least one product announcement feature announcement uh it's pretty up to dat so I would recommend them both sounds great and I can leave those links in the show notes below uh and a direct link to the utila wallet for everyone to

24:18check it out I appreciate your insights beny into the industry here and uh let's hope that it continues to grow exponentially post Bitcoin ETF into the having and uh into hopefully the biggest Bull Run we've seen and not just in the price of digital assets but the adoption of this technology into some of the biggest companies in the world so I'm really looking forward to it and I'm

24:40wishing you and the team at utila all the best moving forward thank you Ashton thanks for watching me