We just received some great news tonight. We are one of the winners of the John Pappajohn Startup Competition, organized by the Entrepreneurship Hub at the American College of Thessaloniki.

We are excited to be in the winners circle again, after being one of the winners of the NBG Business Seeds Competition last month.

We are prepping for the public release of our product, after putting in a huge effort to complete our private beta and get a lot of valuable input and feedback from our users.

Our goal is to free crypto users from all the worries of their digital assets being lost or stolen and give them the independence to manage their cryptocurrencies, NFTs, stablecoins and digital identity the way they want, without relinquishing custody, while giving them a simple way to recover their wallet.

We want to thank the competition’s organizers (George Kokkas) and judges, and NBG Business Seeds (Spyros Arsenis and Irene Sgourou) for letting us know about this competition back in March. Last but not least a big thank you to our team: Ilias Louis Hatzis, Kyriakos Lakkas, Nikos Tsiougkos, and Tamas Szabo

We are very excited that Kryptonio Wallet joined the esteemed list of past winners 😁  🚀 🏅 💪

Earlier tonight Kryptonio Wallet received an award at the 12th NBG Business Seeds Competition. Out of 250 teams, we made it to the top10 finalists.

We want to thank our team Ilias Hatzis, Kyriakos Lakkas, Nikos Tsiougkos and Tamas Szabo for their hard work and a very big thank you to Spyros Arsenis and Irene Sgourou, the NBG Business Seeds team, for all their support.

Kryptonio's mission is to make the world of finance accessible, secure, and easy, so everyone can thrive in the new digital economy. We have built a "keyless" cryptocurrency wallet that breaks the silos of complexity, freeing users from the worries of their private keys being stolen or lost and making the wallet experience safe, simple, and usable.

Today we are announcing that we are one of the 10 projects to make it into the final round of the 12th NBG Business Seeds innovation and startup competition.

The NGB Business Seeds is a program organized by the National Bank of Greece and supports innovative and outward-looking startups. In the last twelve years, the competition has become one of the most prestigious entrepreneurship institutions in the country, showcasing the most innovative startups from the Greek startup ecosystem, some of which have continued to become unicorns and raising millions in venture capital financing.

Our goal is to set a new standard. And that’s exactly what our wallet is all about.

The crypto-industry had reached a new stage, and the use cases for crypto go far beyond simply storing wealth and trading assets. Everyone deserves access to financial services that can empower them to create a better life for themselves and their families.

We are very excited for the opportunity to be in the final round of the NBG Business Seeds program. There is still plenty of work ahead of us, but so far it has been an incredible experience to participate alongside startups who are crafting the future of finance, health, agri, environment, science, and technology as we know it.

We thank the NBG Business Seeds team for their trust and we cannot wait to present our wallet.

Thanks,
Kryptonio team

As more people get into crypto and start buying bitcoin and other digital assets, one of their biggest concerns is to how to keep their crypto safe and never lose access to their funds.

A big percentage of them uses custodial wallets, because don’t require as much responsibility and are usually more convenient. But with custodial wallets another party controls your private keys. Most custodial wallets these days are web-based exchange wallets.

Custodial wallets may be considered less secure than a non-custodial wallets. Over the years there have been numerous hacks on crypto exchanges, which is why many people turning to non-custodial wallets. With a non-custodial wallet, you have sole control of your private keys. While non-custodial wallets don’t require you to trust a third party, they do require you to trust yourself to keep your keys and your wallet secure.

But people still make mistakes that can be lethal. In some cases they don't backup up their keys or are careless in how they store their paper wallet. If someone were to discover the your paper wallet or password, they could drain your funds without your knowledge.

For most people backing up private keys and safely storing backup seed phrases can be complicated. People have been locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. Out of the existing 18.5 million bitcoin in circulation, around 20 percent — currently worth around $150 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis.

Bitcoin owners who are locked out of their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they have tried to get access to their fortunes. Earlier this year, the NYTimes published "Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes."

Who needs this hassle and frustration? Who needs to manage one more thing... don't we have enough things to remember and manage in our lives?

Our team has spent months considering the most secure way for users to back up their digital assets. With our backup functionality, which users perform when they sign up to use our wallet, we make the cryptocurrency experience safer and simpler.

When you sign up and create your wallet we generate two secrets using a distributed key generation protocol. One is stored on your mobile device and the other on our servers. These two secrets are used to sign transactions. We encrypt and store your secret on your personal cloud and scan your face, which we use to authenticate you, when you need to restore your wallet.

When you restore your wallet, all you need to do is scan your face. We compare the scan with the one that was created when you signed up. If there is a match, the app retrieves and decrypts the backup from your personal cloud, and the wallet is restored.

This functionality is live and working in our app. If you have an Android phone, download our app and try it. Trust us, you'll sleep better at nights.  

Thanks,
Kryptonio Team

Bitcoin is based on a simple idea, that we can be our own bank. That idea might seem revolutionary and crazy, probably as crazy as the things we do now on Internet, that were science fiction before the Internet made them possible. (“hers’s to the crazy one’s…” link)

Because Bitcoin can be hacked, we’ve seen people build physical vaults in the Swiss Alps, like old-fashioned Wild West banks to store digital assets. Physical vaults to store digital assets… this hardly sounds like progress. In the digital era you need digital storage, not a bunker. certainly, this is not aligned with Bitcoin’s promise.

For Bitcoin to become a decentralized blockchain and achieve its revolutionary vision, we need to think out of the box and build something that is safe, yet simple to store and manage Bitcoin.

The future is being built on top of crypto wallets.

I am sure some of you remember the browser wars. The browser wars referred to a period of intense competition between Netscape and Microsoft over which web browser would dominate the market. They started in the mid-90s, when the world was just starting to come online. A lot was at stake, as the company which controlled the browser market could have a huge influence over its users. Search engines would bid to be the default search tool in the browser, while other companies would bid to be listed in the default set of preinstalled bookmarks that came with the browser. The browser was and still is a powerful gateway to the digital world.

Fast forward 25 years later, crypto wallets are the new gate keepers to future services. Crypto wallets are more than applications on a phone that hold your cryptocurrencies. They are future ecosystems that will enable access to a variety of services that include wealth management, trading, insurance and payments, identity and social media. Crypto wallets could end up being at least as important as the browser was for the web.

The most basic function of a crypto wallet is storing digital assets. A cryptocurrency wallet is a piece of software that keeps track of the secret keys used to digitally sign cryptocurrency transactions for distributed ledgers. Because those keys are the only way to prove ownership of digital assets and to execute transactions that transfer them or change them in some way, they are a critical piece of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

The problem of a “private key” exists from the first day of Bitcoin. Managing private keys is the Achilles heel of blockchain applications. The loss of a private key represents a single point of failure. Simply put, Bitcoin wallet private keys have a tendency to get lost. And once they’re lost, the Bitcoin in your wallet is lost.

So will digital wallets trigger mainstream adoption of Bitcoin?

Today’s crypto wallets have a range of capabilities, but the general idea of a crypto wallet is pretty simple. A crypto wallet stores the keys and addresses of wallets that live on the blockchains underlying each cryptocurrency. And wallets need to fulfill that basic promise well.

There are different  technologies  available that support user custody and recovery. The common alternatives are third-party custodians, multisig wallets, smart-contract wallets and even breaking up the private and storing the parts.

Using a self-managed private key, for most users, is far too complicated and a great responsibility. Most of us have heard nightmare stories of users losing their private key and consequently all of their crypto assets, never to be recovered. The problem with a long, top-secret alphanumeric string of characters is that it’s impossible to remember and easy to misplace.

While, third-party custodians look like a good solution from a user experience standpoint, most centralized services retain custody of user private keys, which users often access with a password, and don’t provide any insurance against theft. It is completely inappropriate from the side of counter-party risk, let alone that it contradicts the basic principles of cryptocurrency.

Multisig wallets is another good option, but you have to rely and depend on other people to access your digital assets. This approach is not simple. There is a level of complexity and in fact multisig wallets are rarely used by ordinary people. Also, very few blockchains support multisig wallets.

Smart contract wallets is an option to safely store crypto. However, if the multisig wallet contract is vulnerable to attacks, everyone that uses it can lose their assets. For example, Parity’s multisig wallet was hacked two times in a period of six months. A lot of people lost their money, including Parity itself. When it come to smart contract wallets, you have to pray that the source code is not full of bugs. Also your portfolio is limited by the Ethereum-based tokens.

Billions of dollars worth of crypto assets have been stolen using the very same cyber-bank robbery techniques. Current implementations of key management, where private keys are centrally maintained, negate the benefits of secure cryptographic access that they enable.

Advancements in custody technology for cryptocurrencies are creating new market opportunities. Until recently, there was a lack of both technologies and regulations addressing custody challenges, but new capabilities are on the rise.

Multiparty computation (MPC) technology is a technology ready for prime time. It uses clever and secure mathematical algorithms that can sign blockchain transactions without the use of a private key. Basically, the idea is that the private key is not even generated. Instead secrets are generated and distributed independently and when transactions need to be signed the secrets are used to compute a key, but without coming together on a single device.

Crypto’s wallet developers are in position to build simple and secure gateways to the decentralized web. The next stage for wallets will be to perform crucial functions with the ability to surf a directory of dApps, buy and sell tokens, manage collectibles, pay for things, verify identity and log onto social media sites, without ever leaving the app. We’re at an early stage now, one that is not well-defined, but crypto wallets are far more important than a browser or our mobile phone’s operating system.

At Kryptonio, we are working on a next generation wallet, a keyless bitcoin wallet that hides the complexity from the end user and provides a secure and simple non-custodial wallet experience.