Securing Self Custody with Maika Isogawa

Awesome. Hello. Hello, GM. I'm impressed you guys are all here because everyone I I went out with last night is like just arriving. So, cool.

Um, so today I'm going to be talking briefly about something that's super sexy and super important because I know all of you have some sort of self-custodied wallet or you have your own crypto and coins of some sort. So, we're not going to get dive too much into code, but it's going to be more of an overarching concept talk for today. Uh, but I'm going to be talking about self-custody, security, and then kind of overall protecting financial freedom. But before I get into it, who am I? Why is this girl talking to you about security up on stage?

Uh, so my background, I was actually a circus acrobat. So, the picture behind, you can't really see it, but it's an aerial picture. Um, I used to be an aerialist. So, anything in the air, many stories above the ground, usually flying around with no safety net, no securities. So, physical security was always a big part of my life.

Uh, and after that, I went to Stanford, studied CS, uh, specialized in AI, which is super hot right now. I know. And then went to Microsoft as a cyber security engineer with the Canadian government. So, that's cyber security, regular security, crypto background. Oh, I should also mention CIRC is when I was first introduced to crypto back in 2014.

So, I've been in the space for quite a long time and we I'm here because I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Webby, which is a company focused on self-custody and security. Uh, but Webby, we started primarily for well, there's multiple reasons we started the company, but one of them was that I got my wallet hacked. Um, and it it's embarrassing because it was actually two times that I got hacked. And I know that some of you might have gotten hacked before and maybe signed something that could have been malicious. So, we're we've all been there.

Uh, but my wallet got drained. Uh, and in that moment, I knew that web 3 UI and web 3 security wasn't where it needs to be for the next billion people to onboard into the space. Uh, so webcy was started. Um, and another thing I want to mention is that it's not just newbies that are getting hacked in the space. For all of the hacks and fishing scams that happen, the total value is mostly from bridge drains and giant protocol hacks, but the number like the the amount of hacking usually comes from individual fishing scamming mistakes, even just losing your private keys.

Uh, and so as we saw a couple weeks ago, even the best in the business, the people have been around for a long time can still get hacked just by doing something silly. So, WebC in a nutshell, I'll talk more about how we work, but we use smart contracts to secure your assets. So, Webby, the vision behind it is kind of how self- custody is a new form of financial freedom. It's kind of a new representation. So, we had banks traditionally, but now with crypto holding our own keys, we get the opportunity to take care of our own stuff.

We can stake our own coins. We can get the API that banks have gotten to have for hundreds of years. And it's kind of beautiful to think about this because if you think about securing your self- custody, it's kind of like securing financial freedom and securing your freedom in general. and we're in the states. So that's a very powerful concept here.

So for the bulk of the talk, uh I like every talk that I give to have people walk away with something that new concept you can talk about or something new that you can learn. So I know there's many dev and technical people here, but maybe there's a new idea they can walk away with. So I'm going to cover four ways self-custody can be protected better in the space. So the first concept is that protecting your digital assets is actually really like protecting your physical assets. So if you think of your house at home, you have a lock on the door, you might have a dead bolt, you have maybe an alarm system if you live in a fancy place.

Uh maybe you have a dog, uh you have a back door for emergency situations or just getting in and out. Uh but there's a lot of things we have in our physical lives that we don't really have a comparison to in digital assets quite yet. Well, we need to start thinking about it in the same way. And then taking this concept one step further, when you travel, for example, maybe if you live in a neighborhood, you give your neighbor a key to check in on your dog, to water your plants while you're away. Or if you have a maid, because I know some of you are rich, uh you can give your maid a key to your front door, but maybe she doesn't have a key to a closet or a key to your safe that you have in the house.

And so we have this u kind of like a separated augmented security system that you can change depending on who needs to access. So these are all things in the physical world that we have. We should start building these in the digital world. The second concept I want to talk about and I want to preface this by saying I love hardware wallets. I have multiple ledgers.

I have a couple arguluses. All of it. I really think it's a great idea for everyone to have a hardware wallet. And I tell every new person in web 3 to get a hardware wallet. But I think it's actually quite dangerous to tell people and to think that having a hardware wallet alone is enough for security.

It's not enough. And as we know, people with hardware wallets can get hacked. If you treat a hardware wallet like a software wallet or a hot wallet on your browser, you're signing stuff with your ledger. It's it's no longer really a hardware wallet. So, it's really a combination of hardware, software, and then better user experience and user activity and education that's going to be a holistic security cycle.

So, that's another piece of the puzzle. The third point I want to make is about employing unique measures to keep hackers on their toes. So sometimes we think that security is kind of this end goal, this destination, but it's not. So being in the security space for a couple years now, you realize security is this, it's like working out. Like you're never going to be at your peak performance or you always have to work out.

You have to diet and it's just continuous. And the same thing happens with security. So the reason you have to update your Chrome every once in a while is because there's new technology, which is great, but there's new vulnerability, new packs, patch fixing, all kinds of stuff. And so hackers because their hackers are super smart, they develop new hacking methods. So on the security side, you have to create new uh defense mechanisms.

So it's going to be a forever thing. But luckily, there's a lot of companies out there like Weby uh and our friends u doing really cool stuff to combat that. And it's kind of up to you as self-custody people to be responsible and responsibly trying new things in a safe manner. So trying out the new technologies that come out, applying it to your stacks. So some of the cool things we've seen recently uh go plus big security company there's uh wallet like transaction simulation before the transaction happens like wallet guard pocket universe uh you have kind of a social policing group like chain abuse there's chain analysis that does something similar and then the the infinity symbol this is gatekeep I think gatekeep's really cool it's like transaction frontr running in case that detects a malicious transaction or you're interacting with something you're not supposed to um and then there's weby so we are primarily focused on self- custody.

Uh but we utilize smart contracts to create new tools for users to use. So what do we build? We have a couple different services. We are really a a holistic suite of services and continue to build out a whole ecosystem of tools. Uh the very first one, this is called Wallet Watch.

It's the monitoring piece and this is something you can sign up in 60 seconds for. Totally free. It's really simple actually. It's real time notifications for anything that happens in the wallets that you want to track. So, imagine uh I could be up here and if my wallet's transacting somehow or receiving an royalty, trading an NFT, I'll get a text.

I can also get an email. But it really just brings blockchain transactions to the real world because we're not always glued to our phones. I mean, some of us aren't. I think some people aren't. Um other products that we have built, uh a lot of our products are built on smart contract mechanisms.

So, backup wallet and panic button, the two middle points here, one is for the use case of losing your seed phrase, losing your passwords. Uh, I kid you not. Yesterday I talked to someone who house his house got flooded and he was writing his seed phrase on a piece of paper in a safe in the house and this you think about the story as like a anecdote but he literally it happened to him and so he lost everything in his wallet because he just couldn't access it. So backup is for recovering assets in an original wallet. And then panic is the situation where you need to like oneclick red button emergency eject everything into a backup wallet.

So maybe you get hacked, maybe you're running for your life and need to transfer something. It's an emergency transfer, one click for everything. And then finally, uh this is a little bit more morbid, but it's actually where the company started. We have a crypto will. So a beneficiary onchain inheritance system.

What happens to your crypto when you die? It's a pretty important topic. I know most of you don't want to think about it, but 20 years from now, it's going to become super important. And one thing I'll mention on our services is that we don't take any seed phrases, no passwords, no private keys. you never give it to us.

I don't want to see it. I don't want to be responsible for it. It's all through smart contracts. So, you can rest assured that we don't have access to your crypto. Nobody really else does.

So, in closing, um, humans are always the weakest point when it comes to security. And when it comes to most things, we're kind of the worst. Um, in general though, make sure you're taking the time before anything bad happens to check which wallets like what does your wallet system look like, what are you using, are there any products out there that can enhance the transaction and the safety of your entire ecosystem and more. And most importantly, go sign up for WebC. Check us out.

Uh, left hand black, this goes to our website and our app. You can go to webcy.com and read more about it. And the right hand side is a new on-ramp that we built specifically for ETH Denver. works on your mobile phone, but there's no internet here apparently.

Uh, so take a picture and do it later. Um, happy to take questions, but that's it. Keep your crypto safe. Hey buddy, here you go. Repeat what he said.

Awesome. Oh, thanks. Hey, just wondering if you don't uh take our private keys and such, how do you secure the uh assets? Yeah, great question. So, wallet watch, this is the monitoring system that doesn't even need your private keys.

We just read your onchain data. The other stuff, it's through approvals. It's just through smart contracts. So, the same way you list something on OpenC for any buyer who wants to buy, you can set the same approval to maybe another wallet that you own or your beneficiary owns. And it gets more complicated than that, but essentially that's what it is.

Got it. Cool. Thanks. How does WebC prevent you from doing like what your friend did where you flood your seed phrase that you're backing up? Does WebC help with that or is that still on the user?

Well, we can't prevent natural disasters yet. We're working on it. Um, no. But the backup wallet, so the concept here is that you are setting up a backup before anything happens. So for example with him, if he had utilized Webby and backed up his assets, he could back up his assets to let's say another wallet, a hardware wallet that he owns somewhere else, maybe a wallet of his wife if he wanted to set one up for her.

And then let's say he lost access to these assets. This backup wallet can recover assets from that original wallet because you're essentially setting an approval on that asset to a backup in case of any kind of condition you want to set for it. So there's some level of multi-IG then it's similar to multisig but not exactly because it's it's like a second access to a certain asset like you can do it individual NFT you could do the whole wallet. Thank you. So I don't think the digital will thing was morbid at all.

That's something we should all be thinking about. Um, does that work the same way you just described though in terms of like if I'm dead, who's signing this this stuff over? How does that work? Yeah, good question. So, the crypto will piece similar approval, but it has a different mechanism for the condition.

So, condition is death and we don't take any off-chain data. We don't want a death certificate. We actually created like an onchain like proof of life. So, it based on it's based on your wallet activity. So every time you make an outbound, any transaction outbound that you have to be alive to make is kind of like a heartbeat.

And so as long as you're alive doing stuff, you can set whatever uh time of like life that you want. You can set it to a year, 3 years, whatever you want to do. Uh but if you're uh inactive for that period, that's when the dead man switch is triggered. And you can set multiple wallets. So you might ask, okay, what about my like cold storage wallet I'm never going to touch?

You can set a hot wallet to also be under your account. So that can be your heartbeat and it's associated with your cold wallet, too. Awesome. Thanks for the time. Check out Legacy.

Have fun. to the right.