Ahead of the launch of V2, CEO Anthony Foy – founder of the unique cryptocurrency custody protocol – Qredo shares his journey to the cryptocurrency market and the origin of the project. Let’s see what his fate with Qredo is with X1K!
The first time Anthony discovered Bitcoin was in 2011, when BTC was only worth a dollar and Satoshi Nakamoto was still commenting on the BitcoinTalk forum. However, unfortunately, he could not find a way to buy Bitcoin at that time.
After moving to Amsterdam, a friend of Anthony invites him to a mysterious bar in the red light district, all transactions there disappeared without a trace. This was also the day that brought Anthony into the underworld of the first online crypto brokers.
Although he saw the potential of crypto, he ignored it, Bitcoin was “on sale” and he had no idea he had missed another train.
Over the next few years, he calmly headed the leading technology companies and achieved much success with no interest in Bitcoin.
Until 2018, everything changed.
Inspiration
Around the same time, a former associate of Anthony – Brian Spector – observed the growth of Bitcoin and saw the potential of the cryptocurrency market.
He is a guy who is good at calculations, has experience working with RSA Security in the US before starting his own company. But after becoming an expert in providing hardware security solutions for banks and intelligence agencies, he began to apply his analytical acumen to the field of cryptocurrencies.
They had met a few years earlier when Anthony offered to buy Brian’s company, and although the deal was unsuccessful, they became close friends. When Bitcoin hit the headlines, they talked very early on about the potential of multi-chain.
The cryptocurrency market back then to this day has faced many inadequacies in transferring assets between different blockchains, making it difficult to store and manage them securely, especially for large organizations that have a huge trading volume.
To solve this problem, Brian has launched an initiative that focuses on Bitcoin’s core value: trust-minimization
He attributed the fragmentation of the cryptocurrency market to centralized private key management methods – such as hot wallets, cold wallets and databases – that tried to “stuff” decentralized assets into centralized boxes, losing the essence of blockchain.
Without a decentralized way of managing private keys, he argued, the potential of cryptocurrency files would be drowned out by the limitations of centralized infrastructure.
Soon after, Anthony invested in Qredo. Qredo has worked and learned a lot from Brian’s company team – MIRACL.
After that, the market started the cycle of the “bear year” and they started to have big ambitions to develop a decentralized crypto-asset custody protocol.
The first steps
Brian’s idea is to extend Satoshi’s ethos for private key management and completely remove third parties from the digital asset custody business.
However, easier said than done. After months of research, Qredo came up with a concept based on multi-party computation (MPC) – a cryptographic technique that helps computers in the blockchain network generate digital signatures without revealing the private key.
However, since MPC implementations were initially dependent on third parties, Qredo assumed they had to be implemented in a different, more optimal way.
So, at a time when everyone from IBM flocked to Kodak with the desire to change their lives from blockchain, Qredo focused on research and came to the conclusion that the immutability of blockchain is only truly secure when apply MPC.
By combining MPC nodes with a fast blockchain, they laid the groundwork for decentralized custodianship on a consensus-based MPC layer-2 network. From there, Qredo realized that it was possible to eliminate the private key to manage and store cryptographic assets, move assets quickly, and manage flexibly on blockchains without the need for additional intermediaries.
It wasn’t long before the Qredo team had grown tremendously and moved to its new headquarters in Shoreditch, London.
After that, Anthony was received a significant amount of capital and officially joined the company as CEO. Soon after in December 2019, Qredo launched its first tangible product: Testnet.
Related: About Justin Sun, the ‘little Jack Ma’ of the cryptocurrency industry
Breakthrough
With the working model, Qredo is ready to take on the next phase of the plan: demonstrate to institutional players including traders, custodians and market makers – that Qredo has the technology to unlock this new asset class.
During fundraising rounds, all the things that Qredo saw were blank stares and contemplative silences, some even denying that it was possible to decentralize private key management.
But after hours of hard work nonstop, Qredo’s bidding sessions have started to get better.
Qredo focuses on development and marketing for the project. Mainnet in September 2020, Qredo has received many positive responses from the community. Since the establishment of Qredo Ltd and successfully raised capital from a seed round with $2.9 million led by Gumi Cryptos in March 2019, the project continued to successfully raise $11 million in March 2021 from top VCs like Celsius, Deribit, Nexo and Coinbase Ventures.
The cardboard model is replaced by the hardware of real MPC nodes and is installed in financial centers around the world. Qredo will launch on Ethereum and Atomic Swaps.
To the finish line
One of the first people to really get to know Qredo was Imad Warde from portfolio management system HedgeGuard. He became one of Qredo’s first partners after a meeting by chance at the CoinDesk Consensus Conference 2019.
This has paved the way for many partnerships and integrations, including: HexTrust – the digital asset management platform, the X-Margin lending protocol, and also the Web3 MetaMask portal. Recently, Qredo has partnered with the Bitcoin Alliance (consisting of the Open Bank Project, API3, and local bank Banco Hipotecario) to increase Bitcoinization operations in El Salvador.
All in all, the activities promoted by these partnerships have helped grow the project’s statistics. As of November 2021, Qredo was close to $8 billion with 50,000 wallets and over 11,000 monthly active users.
From the start, Qredo’s vision was not only to manage digital assets for organizations but to provide everyone with access to digital asset infrastructure. Furthermore, the project is open source and operated by the community.
Qredo released its platform token in July 2021, which is a very important milestone as it will create a community that will accompany Qredo for a long time. Over the next few months, Qredo will open many more exciting events!
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Important Dates
- December 2018: Co-founders Anthony Foy and Brian Spector acquired Qredo shell.
- March 2019: Closed $2.9M pre-seed funding round.
- December 2019: First minimum viable product
- March 2020: Patents committed to Apache Milagro incubation project
- June 2020: Launched consensus-driven MPC network v1.0 Testnet
- September 2020: Launched Mainnet v1.0 with BTC support and instant transfers
- December 2020: Added Ethereum support and BTC to ETH atomic swaps
- March 2021: Closed $11M seed round with strategic investors including Celsius, Deribit, Wintermute, and Coinbase Ventures.
- March 2021: Launched support for USDT and USDC corporate accounts with multi-user controls.
- May 2021: Expanded ERC-20 token support
- June 2021: Announced partnership with HedgeGuard
- July 2021: Launched Qredo Token (QRDO) on CoinList
- August 2021: Released Liquidity Hub in open beta
- March 2022 : Mainnet v2.0
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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only, not investment advice. Investor should research carefully before making decision. We are not responsible for your investment decision
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