People involved in the blockchain scene generally agree that when it comes to holding your crypto safely, self-custody is the gold standard. By taking responsibility for your own crypto, you don’t have to trust a third-party to keep your funds safe. Many third-parties, like Celcius and FTX, have proven to crypto investors that they cannot be trusted with investor money, after losing it all to mismanagement, corruption and risky investments. Centralized solutions also go against the fundamentals of web3 and decentralization. That being said, self-custody also has its own set of security concerns, particularly when it comes to the seed phrase.
A seed phrase is a series of words (usually 12 or 24) that act as the key to your wallet. It’s often the only thing standing between your funds and a hacker. But seed phrases are vulnerable to phishing, theft, and wallet misplacement. In fact, over $100 billion dollars of Bitcoin has been lost or stolen in the last decade due to seed phrase mismanagement.
Enter ZenGo wallet – the only solution you need to store your crypto. ZenGo is a self-custodial wallet with no seed phrase vulnerability. They use a technology called MPC (Multi-Party Computation) cryptography, which has been used by institutions to custody billions of dollars of crypto.
ZenGo is the first consumer wallet to use MPC’s advanced security features, offering an order of magnitude more security than seed phrase-based wallets – even hardware wallets. And the proof is in the pudding: 0 ZenGo wallets have been hacked or stolen since its founding in 2018.
So, how does ZenGo’s MPC architecture work? It’s actually pretty straightforward. Instead of the traditional seed phrase, ZenGo is powered by two independently-created “secret shares”. One share (your Personal Share) is created and stored on your mobile device. The second share (your Remote Share) is created and secured on ZenGo’s servers.
Every time you initialize a transaction from your wallet, the two secret shares securely compute to create a signed transaction which interfaces with the blockchain. This approach removes the single point of failure found in traditional wallets – the seed phrase.
But what happens if you lose your device or need to switch to a new one? Not to worry. ZenGo’s 3FA recovery system has you covered. The 3FA process is combined by your email address, a 3D FaceLock, and the backed up recovery file.
Your email address is used to restore your account. You can also add a secondary email address of your own or a loved one just in case. 3D FaceLock is a biometric liveness scan that ties your ZenGo account to you. This mathematical representation of your face is encrypted, scrambled, and accessible to no one but you. ZenGo also allows you to add a backup FaceLock! Finally, the recovery file is securely stored in at least one of your cloud backup locations (iCloud/Google Drive and Dropbox).
Another feature worth knowing about is ZenGo’s built-in Web3 firewall – ClearSign – alerts, informs, and protects you against approving the most sensitive and vulnerable Web3 attacks. Sensitive on-chain transactions are classified into 3 risk levels, based on transaction sensitivity, levels of permission granted to the external systems, and known scams. If you’re about to sign a suspicious looking transaction that would, for example, drain your wallet or take all of the NFTs from a certain collection, ClearSign will alert you before you sign.
In a world where we see hackers creating new ways to steal your crypto on a daily basis, ZenGo’s self-custodial MPC wallet with no seed phrase vulnerability and built-in Web3 firewall is a game-changer.
