Project Safety Net: The New Age of Multi-Sig Bitcoin Wallets

After using every major hardware wallet on the market and coming away unimpressed, Antidote started drafting up a new way of securing your Bitcoin. Project Safety Net. A multi-sig ownership solution on the most secure devices people already own, their Apple Products. This proposed multi-sig coordination layer will be built on Apple’s secure enclave devices and the FROST signature scheme. Antidote are also backing the project with a £100,000 (about 2.1 BTC) bounty to get it built.

Apply to join the ‘Project Safety Net’ team HERE, or email: build@antidotebtc.com

“why are we all making hardware and having this huge, crazy supply-chain paranoia when we could be piggybacking off devices that are incredibly secure, so secure that nation states go petitioning manufacturers, like, hey, let us in, we need you to crack these devices”

Subscribe now

Andy

Tell us, man, what is Project Safety Net?

Ben

Why, thank you, Andy.

Ben

I think the biggest insight we had, and we’ve been talking with Alekos [Filini] here today, and if you listen to his X Spaces just the other day it was a really good, more technical rundown into what went down with the Cold Card exploit. But we’ve been sitting around in the office looking at these hardware wallets, looking at what’s going on, and then looking at what’s bleeding edge in Bitcoin today in terms of what you can do with the protocol. And the major thing we landed on was this amazing irony that, after all of this thing of ‘you must keep your seeds offline’ blah blah blah, you would have been more secure had you had an old phone and your current phone in a two-of-two multisig in Blue Wallet (both seed phrases hot), but you would have been more secure. You just would have, right? And therefore, why are we all making hardware and having this huge, crazy supply-chain paranoia when we could be piggybacking off devices that are incredibly secure, so secure that nation states go petitioning manufacturers, like, hey, let us in, we need you to crack these devices so we can do anti-terrorism stuff. What I’m saying is: old phones, your iPhone, or your old Pixel, these have secure enclaves, these are ultra-secure devices. Nation-state leaders keep secrets on them, they have very heavy encryption, end-to-end encryption for how they communicate, they run in very elaborately constructed sandboxed environments. They’re secure, and definitely more secure than Cold Cards, and arguably just as secure as a Trezor. The only reason people get freaked out is they’re internet-connected, so your seed phrase is ostensibly hot, but that’s not the case if it’s a multisig. So what you actually need is not hardware. There are more than a billion phones out there, probably more devices than there are humans, so everyone can have a multisig, and what you actually need is the software coordination layer to bring in devices at will as keys and create quorums. So Safety Net is a company we are willing to fund to the tune of, right now it’s 2.1 Bitcoin, but a hundred thousand pounds, that will help with the incorporation.

Ben

we’ll help with the go-to-market, get free office space, we’ll help with talent matching and recruitment. This will help in many ways, not capital notwithstanding, as well as offering a really quite smooth path to further capital should the idea begin to take off. But the core concept at present is: we’ve narrowed down the MVP, we’ve been thinking of it as a hardware-agnostic bitkey.

Ben

Or another way we’ve put it, for technical people, is Tailscale but for keys. The MVP would concentrate exclusively on the Apple ecosystem and piggyback off it heavily, if you assume many Apple users have more than one Apple device, like a MacBook and an iPhone and possibly an Apple TV or an iPad or an Apple Watch, well, all of those devices have the secure enclave and are relatively easy to link up, particularly if you sign in with Apple, and you essentially default to two-of-three multisigs. Take the MacBook, watch, and phone scenario (probably one of the more common ones): you need your phone and your watch to verify before you send a defined amount of larger money, resetting thresholds on behalf of users deliberately so they don’t have to make these choices. Say it’s ten thousand dollars, you need two of three. Beyond that, maybe you need five of eight, and you have to get your wife’s phone, your mom’s phone. You build these quorums yourself, through humans, through people you invite and add to these networks of keys, these safety networks. And to deliver the user experience people need, you use what has been the amazing work done on FROST, one of the newer primitives for multisig. I’m going to pause there because there’s a lot we’ve just kind of rambled on about. Maybe you [Andy] have questions, maybe not, but that’s where we’re getting to at the moment.

Andy

Yeah, so if you’re a developer, a product manager, a designer, and this sounds like an interesting project, if you’re in search of a project and want to work on something in the space, please reach out, let us know, we’re putting the team together now. By the end of the week there will be a page on the website.

https://antidotebtc.com/ideas

Andy

Please reach out, because we think it’s a cool idea. We think for mass adoption you definitely need something that doesn’t really require you to buy specialized hardware; I think that’s a non-starter for a lot of people. And we’re just piggybacking off Apple’s four-trillion-dollar market cap.

Ben

you’re giving the average person extremely robust security posture without having to make them grow a large beard, move to a cabin in the woods, and wrap themselves in tinfoil. You can actually say, “hey mate, if you just grab your phone, add your watch to this”. “Okay, cool, now we can deposit funds there”, “okay great, now you’re basically good”.

Ben

Next time you upgrade your phone, remember to open the app and migrate to the new phone, or get your wife to help you. Super easy, and extremely leaning on Apple design philosophy for user trust and perception of quality. A standardised business model, a monthly subscription; emergency recovery provided by, potentially, Alekos’s secure enclaves in the cloud. This can also guarantee very robust user privacy for people who are into that in Bitcoin, but we’re thinking mainstream. Mainstream above all. And the big one is no seed phrases. Signature aggregation through FROST to bring your own keys across from any devices, and in the long term we would love it to be any device considered secure enough, so you could bring an old hardware wallet if you’ve got one to add more to the quorum. We would also love, in the long run, to explore the ability to export your seed phrase and reconstruct the entire thing in a truly Bitcoin way, if you’re that way inclined. But the product and the MVP is definitely not targeting that type of user to begin with.

Instead you rely on the magic of software to deliver a really understandable user experience for just keeping money safe, something far more in line with what you see in banking, and actually creator platforms. Think about when you get 2FA to sign into YouTube and it’s like, go open this other app or grab this on your tablet.

Ben

It works reasonably well, you don’t read about constant hacks for these folks, and it’s with good reason. There’s a lot more you can go into, and a lot more we’ve actually thought about. This is very surface-level relative to the amount of material we’ve pulled together. We’ve got wireframe mock-ups, we’ve got a product briefing, we have a pretty high-level roadmap and an idea of the kind of roles we need (Rust and Swift engineers, a PM). Obviously our robot friends can do masses nowadays, but ‘don’t-trust-verify’ on the back end needs real cryptography and proper professional human oversight. So, Project Safety Net: £100,000 up for grabs. Do you know what a hundred thousand pounds looks like?

Andy

I don’t. Then tell us.

Ben

It’s like a six-figure number, because everything’s digital now, so it’s on your screen. It’s six figures.

Ben

That’s longer than most people’s bank accounts, so that’s what we’re offering. And if you need it in Bitcoin terms, it’s roughly 2.1 Bitcoin, but we’ll pay in pounds first to keep our price volatility under control, though if the team taking this on would prefer to be financed in Bitcoin, that’s very doable. If you’re interested, more information will be on the website; if you join the Signal group you can get an early look, we’re sharing the doc around and taking comments right now, and we’re also opening up GitHub a bit selectively. We can also be reached via email.

build@antidotebtc.com