Censo, a cryptocurrency safekeeping firm, has recently come out of stealth mode with a new mobile-phone based self-custody offering for institutions and smaller organizations. According to CEO Andrew Lawrence, this new technology is easier to use and less expensive than existing technologies. Censo’s open source decentralized key management approach does away with the complex and expensive trappings of multiparty computation (MPC), a key-sharding technology popular in the institutional crypto custody arena.
Institution-grade custody for digital assets has traditionally been costly and not straightforward, employing new technologies like MPC that require specialized hardware and software. Censo’s model is to use the secure hardware enclaves present in today’s mobile devices, together with their biometric gating, to tightly bind cryptographic keys to real-world agents. This makes it an attractive alternative to MPC for organizations who want decentralized key management and self-custody, according to Brett Falk, a research assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Censo’s technology could be employed in any situation where at least two signers need to be coordinated, from hedge funds and market makers to Web3 firms and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). It allows organizations to control the key material and empower individuals to be signers without the signers themselves ever being able to have access to unencrypted versions of full pieces of private material.