Company Name: Home
Founders: Nick Neuman, Jameson Lopp and others
Founding date: End of 2017
Headquarters Location: Remote
Website: https://casa.io/
Public or Private? Private
Being sovereign is not easy, especially if you are not technically minded.
The team in Home understands this and that's why, for over six years, the company has been helping customers protect their bitcoins in multi-signature wallets (also known as multi-key vaults).
The company was the first to offer an easy-to-use version of such a product that also included customer support. Casa's plan from the beginning was to be there for its clients, as this type of support was missing in the broader crypto industry.
“The service element was what was missing from a lot of solutions out there,” said Casa co-founder and CEO Nick Neuman. bitcoin Magazine.
“People need help doing these things, especially when large amounts of money are involved. “The plan was always to support customers, because it was impossible to get support from exchanges or hardware wallets,” he added.
“So we took an approach focused on user experience and with a lot of support for everything.”
Casa's approach has paid off, as the company has become a household name in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency space, and has come a long way since Neuman first had the idea for a company like Casa ago. seven years.
How Casa started
It was toward the latter part of the 2017 bitcoin bull run that Neuman grew tired of his previous work in finance and technology, and found himself down the proverbial bitcoin (and cryptocurrency) rabbit hole. In February 2018, he had an idea for a company and participated in a hackathon to try to make the idea a reality.
“I participated in the first ETHDenver hackathon,” Neuman said.
“I came in with an idea I called key splitting, which was basically taking a private key through Shamir's secret sharing and creating a social recovery mechanism,” he added.
“I recruited a couple of people at the hackathon to build it with me and we ended up winning.”
Neuman quit his job and set out to start a company based on this technology he and his team had created. But word had spread about his ETHDenver win, and Casa's former CEO, who was the head of the company before it moved on to offering multi-signature wallets, approached Neuman and asked him to join.
It was after finding out that Casa had just recruited jameson careerself-described “professional cypherpunk” and now director of security at Casa, Neuman decided to join the team.
“I thought, 'Well, Jameson is going to be an unfair advantage,'” Neuman recalled with a smile. “Instead of starting my own company, I'll join.”
Shortly after Neuman joined, Casa withdrew its then flagship product, the Node Houseand the company shifted its focus toward easy-to-use multi-key vaults, a much-needed product at the time. Before Casa, multi-signature software was so complicated that even Neuman himself had difficulty using it.
“There was the Armory multi-signature wallet and the Glacier protocol,” Neuman recounted.
“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 very wacky. “I remember trying to use it once and I couldn't understand it,” he added.
“We were the first to create usable multi-signature.”
How Home works
Casa offers users two main configurations. The first is a five-key vault, which includes three keys in three different hardware wallets, one on the user's phone (which is securely backed up in the cloud) and one at Home.
This was Casa's first multi-signature product, which it launched while the company was primarily focused on serving high-net-worth bitcoin clients. Casa learned an important lesson while serving these clients, which was that even if developers create easy-to-use software, people still want an expert to support them while they use it, especially if they are getting a lot of value.
“When you're dealing with millions of dollars' worth of bitcoin, what you really want is to have an expert there to help you make sure you don't make a mistake,” Neuman said.
Casa's other main product is for those who may not have bitcoin whale-type wealth, but still have enough bitcoins where a non-ideal security setup has the potential to keep them up at night.
This product is Casa's three-key vault, which the company brought to market in early 2019. It includes one key in a hardware wallet, one key on the user's phone (which can be exchanged for another key in a second wallet hardware if the user prefers) and a key that Casa has.
Casa started offering this setup because it “always wanted to be able to offer great security and usability to as many people as possible,” according to Neuman.
Services and features of the new house
In the past year, Casa has further expanded the services it offers.
Two weeks ago he announced his Business Planwhich allows companies to more easily protect their bitcoin treasuries.
“We've had companies use Casa for self-custody for years, but they always used our retail plans and just made it work,” Neuman explained.
“However, we changed that because I think MicroStrategy has popularized corporate treasuries holding bitcoins. “In fact, we see it as a growing trend worth taking advantage of, and more and more bitcoin companies that store bitcoin on their balance sheet tell us that they need help with security,” he added.
This summer, Casa also began allowing users to replace the hardware wallets used in their vaults with YubiKeys.
“We see people struggle with hardware wallets all the time, so we thought, 'How can we simplify this?'” Neuman said. “We put together a couple of new pieces of technology that have YubiKey and passcode capabilities and were able to build something that hadn't been done before.”
And in March, Casa launched Casa Inheritance, a service that makes it easier for loved ones of Casa users to access bitcoins held in vaults in the event of a user's death.
“With Inheritance, our clients told us all the time, 'Okay, I feel good about my House setup, but I'm worried about what will happen if I die,'” Neuman explained. “So we created that feature to make it very easy for your family to get the bitcoin back if the primary account holder passes away.”
Normalizing 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 multi-signature setup. Whether because this type of wallet format was harder to enable years ago or because making changes to bitcoin security is understandably anxiety-provoking, people seem to drag their feet when it comes to using a multi-signature setup, even if they really want to. . a—according to Neuman.
“They hear the word 'multisignature' and say, 'That's too hard,'” Neuman explained. “What they don't realize is that to get started with multi-signature with Casa, you can use your same hardware wallet, and it's literally the same amount of effort as using a hardware wallet, but doing so significantly improves your security. “
Neuman believes that more people will come around and that multisignature will become more widely adopted, especially during a bull market.
“You need the price of bitcoin to go up when people suddenly have more value to lock in,” Neuman said. “And people need to listen to their friends: 'Yes, I'm doing multisignature and it's not as hard as it seems.'”
For those who feel the need to try Casa, the company allows people try the service at no cost 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 get out of this bull market without another massive blowout like FTX because we've helped more people self-custody in a way that makes them feel good, that seems like a real victory to me.”
