Meet Web3Auth: the Singaporean company shaking up crypto wallets
Crypto infrastructure company Web3Auth, previously known as Torus, has raised $13 million led by the aid of Sequoia Capital India, to support its ventures in providing non-custodial authentication technology for crypto wallets.
A non-custodial wallet provides full access to your crypto funds and allows users to own and control the private keys to their cryptocurrency. It is a solution to a growing problem that crypto owners face: lost wallets.
“We basically use off-chain multisig to split a user’s key up into multiple different parts, which are then stored in the user’s device and your social login. It’s a much more intuitive way of managing key pairs and it improves on today’s standard of seed phrases,” the Co-founder and CEO of Torus, Zhen Yu Yong, told CryptoVista.
Around 20 per cent of Bitcoin in circulation has been permanently lost due to privatised custodial wallets with many people being locked out or simply forgetting their access to their growing fortune, according to data by Chainalysis and cited by the New York Times.
Web3Auth new infrastructure seeks to rectify this issue to avoid the loss that has been occurring in this space: “it’s not a new problem. It’s been a problem that has existed in the space for a while… it’s actually quite embarrassing to be going out and saying like, oh, I lost a couple of hundred thousand on my wallet,” Yong said.
The adoption of non-custodial technology by native crypto users has been something of a community pushback and challenge that Web3Auth has needed to manage, Yong said, with many “hardcore crypto” users drawing comparisons to Big Tech companies such as Google: “Web3 crypto natives always tend to be a little bit more radical and a little bit more anti-big tech as well,” Yong said.
“On the forefront, when you take a look at like Web3Auth, the Torus infrastructure and the key management that we provide initially seems like we provide social logins, which are inherently and custodial in nature,” said Yu.
Yong said that as the Internet moves towards Web3, this technology will contribute to individual ownership of digital assets: “I think that’s the core reason of why non-custodiality loyalty really matters in the forefront. It’s this fundamental thing that provides the concept that you own these things yourself and you manage them yourself. It solves lot of big concerns that we have today,” Yong said.
