Lattice

Posted on Jan 25, 2023Read on Mirror.xyz

Investing in Tholos

We’re excited to announce our investment in Tholos, which is building the next generation of crypto-native financial infrastructure. Today most crypto-native organizations run their businesses on top of SAFE multi-sig wallets. Multi-sigs have become a mainstay of crypto - project treasuries, DAO’s, groups of friends all use multi-sigs to jointly store assets.

While multi-sig’s have become a key part of crypto financial infrastructure, they have draw backs. They are smart contract based and so they can be challenging to upgrade. This architecture also makes them single chain by design. Moreover, it can be challenging to interact with the ever growing universe of Web3 apps through a smart contract wallet (as app developers generally have to build a special connection).

What if I told you there was a technology that solved these problems but still provided similar security guarantees as a multi-sig? This is the promise of MPC (Multiparty Computation) which has seen adoption grow steadily over the last few years.

Tholos is building an MPC wallet that can be secured by an arbitrary number of owners and works on any blockchain. Their initial focus is going after the sub-institutional market. Tholos is betting that by making MPC technology easier to use and starting with a lower price point, they can take market share from projects that use multisigs today.

Tholos’s use of MPC represents a meaningful improvement for crypto-native organizations:

  • MPC is a flexible architecture whereas SAFE wallets are built on smart contracts, meaning you have to upgrade those contracts to change the wallet architecture

  • MPC allows you to easily connect to any Dapp through WalletConnect, this is not currently possible with SAFE’s

  • MPC is cross-chain from day one

  • There is a security improvement in that the private key is never stored or displayed anywhere

We think that Abraham and Peter are the right crypto native founders to go after this market opportunity. They understand this problem deeply, having previously founded ReidarDAO and Coterie Capital. They’ve also recruited world-class cryptography experts like Shalev Keren to help them bring this technology to market.

If you’re interested in using Tholos to securely manage your treasury, reach out and we’ll introduce you to the team.