Alena Vranova, Head of Strategy and Business Development at the Casa cryptocurrency custodial service, and previously co-founder of Satoshi Labs and Trezor, discussed both the Casa custodial service, and the just-released Casa Node in a recent interview with The Bitcoin Podcast.
The Casa Node is branded as an easy-to-use Bitcoin Lightning node, with a pre-installed copy of the Bitcoin blockchain that gives it nearly out-of-the-box functionality.
Although Casa produce the Node hardware units themselves on top of Raspberry Pis, Vranova said the company concentrated most on delivering a slick and user-friendly software experience, emphasizing that the interface was crafted by Tinder designer Scott Hurff.
Casa’s other product, the Key Master service, is a custodial service with a twist in that Casa do not take full responsibility for their clients’ private keys, but rather instruct their users in the development of their own personal security panoply, and provide 24/7 assistance to that effect.
Casa help customers distribute their private keys into portions and store them in multiple locations. Vranova explained Casa’s hope that splitting the keys into many places will dissuade criminals from targeting high net worth individuals, hypothesizing that “he will think twice, or that’s at least [Casa’s] assumption […] that the cost of risk for the criminal increases exponentially, and is probably not worth the attack”.
Despite this, Vranova seemed to imply the existence of a master backup key held by Casa, saying “if you lose two, there is still Casa that has one backup key […] to assist you with that”. She described Key Master as a “concierge service”, decidedly a luxury at $10,000 per year, elaborating that hardware wallets had essentially responded to most other security threats.
Dr. Corey Petty, one of the hosts of the podcast, speculated that Casa’s custodial scheme is “in a sense […] the most secure way to store money, ever, generally”, to which Vranova responded, “Exactly”.
