The Winklevoss twins, famed for suing the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerburg as well as innovating a method of splitting up their private keys in different locations for security, may have just met their match. Gridlock, a blockchain startup, has developed a mobile app which automates this concept and makes it accessible for everyone.
Crypto hacks have been a common point of contention since the birth of Bitcoin. With billions of dollars stolen over the years, the need for security over your assets becomes more and more apparent. Despite the crypto landscape maturing with more investment in the space over the past few years, losses appear to be an even more common occurrence.
Gridlock has designed a crypto wallet that focuses on security. It works by splitting a user’s private key into five separate pieces, which are distributed between the user, Gridlock and two friends. This tech, inspired by the Winklevoss twins, is known as distributed key generation. It is designed as a multi-computational protocol, so that a key is never held on a single device, even on initial generation.
To put it simply: your wallet is theoretically unhackable because your private key can never be in one place at any time.
The CEO of Gridlock, Derek Rodriguez, shares how a personal loss of funds inspired him to start the company: “In 2013 I mined Bitcoin and lost what would be the equivalent of $3 million today.” He goes on to say “almost everyone I speak to has or knows someone who has lost their cryptocurrency. I wanted to design something that removes any single point of failure in security and Gridlock does just that”.
Gridlock is in its infancy and currently users can only store Ethereum in their wallets. This may pose a problem to new users joining, as competitors like MEW and Metamask allow users to store other ERC-20 tokens, NFTs and interact with Defi protocols. Gridlock will have its work cut out to attempt to compete with the existing wallets on the market despite some of those features currently in development.
With this free, secure and simple to use wallet easily accessible to everyone, it will be interesting to see where Gridlock goes in the future.
