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Win favor from Luxembourg government, CYBAVO makes no one dare to steal your Bitcoins
Two cybersecurity veterans, former TrendMicro senior research manager Paul Fan and founder of Hacks In Taiwan Conference (HITCON) Tim Hsu teamed up together to establish CYBAVO. They aim on making cryptocurrency wallets secure and easy to use for enterprise users.
Cryptocurrencies start getting more attention as Bitcoin's price has surged crazily since March 2020. Recently Large firms like Tesla and Mastercard show support to Bitcoin which gives it a further boost. Tesla said that they bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin for accepting cryptocurrency as a payment for their products, and Mastercard revealed that they will open up its network to digital currencies. Bank of New York Mellon as well as PayPal made big moves to support crypto too. This shows that not only individuals but also enterprises noticed cryptocurrencies' applications.
When Satoshi Nakamoto brought up Bitcoin in 2008, Satoshi aimed to building a peer-to-peer electronic cash system where there are no intermediaries. People send Bitcoins to bitcoin addresses, and access their Bitcoins by their own private key. Because there is no banking institution in the middle, once people lose their private keys, they lose Bitcoin forever. "Bitcoins thrive from the blockchain community, and they have faith in returning 100% freedom back to people by letting everyone own their own private keys, but owning keys comes with great responsibility and great risk. CYBAVO wants to free people from taking care of the private keys," said Paul Fan
According to Fan, "without a doubt, blockchain is secure on data integrity, which means the data is hard to be changed, but it does not mean the private key is secure. There are lots of events where private keys were stolen. Whoever knows your wallet's private key can take control of your Bitcoins, so CYBAVO builds a private key management system to solve these problems."
Paul Fan, a cybersecurity veteran who has dedicated his professional life to developing advanced antivirus software, joined TrendMirco as soon as he graduated from school. He had been developing cybersecurity engines and transforming novel cybersecurity techniques into real-world products. When he went to a summit held by HITCON, he made acquaintance with Tim Hsu, who is the founder of HITCON. They have been exchanging ideas in cybersecurity since then.
Two years ago, when Paul Fan was thinking of starting a company, Tim Hsu mentioned that he was a consultant for a cryptocurrency exchange, and he spotted several challenges in managing private keys, for them can try to solve. As a result, CYBAVO was born.
CYBAVO aims to solve two challenges the cryptocurrency exchange and enterprise are facing. First is how to keep the private key safe. Second, how to manage the piles of cryptocurrencies that exchanges and companies own, specifically how to authorize different employees who can move the currencies.
To address both problems, CYBAVO developed the private key management system - CYBAVO Vault. It provides high-level security, and most importantly it can be like a banking system. "CYBAVO Vault lets users run the approval procedures for every transaction. Enterprise can open many wallets, and apply different approval procedures to different wallets," Fan explained.
Foreseeing the potential of CYBAVO Vault, Munich Reinsurance Company has provided the blockchain theft insurance for CYBAVO. If there is any customer who uses CYBAVO Vault but gets hacked, they will cover the loss. "This is a milestone for us. Munich Reinsurance Company spent seven months doing the due diligence, and they even hired engineers to review our technology. They decided to cooperate with us until they made sure our business model was profitable and our technology was trustworthy", Fan asserted
Besides the Taiwan market, CYBAVO has expanded the business to Singapore, Japan, US, Middle East, UK, and Luxembourg. They got selected as the top 10 startups to join the Luxembourg startup accelerator. Fan concluded, "we have established a branch office in Luxembourg, and we plan to expand to the Europe market more actively through Luxembourg.”
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