Caravan Multisig Bitcoin Wallet

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. This is the Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. As you guys will know, my guests today are Parker Lewis and Buck Perley, from Unchained Capital. but just a minute, while I introduce the sponsors of the show. So firstly, there is Kraken Exchange, kraken dot com, one of the world's leading Bitcoin exchanges. They offer some of the best liquidity, they've got really low fees, they're world renowned, they've got an- A very, well-known a-and leading security team in the space, Kraken Security Labs. So make sure you go and check them out here. They've also got live support twenty-four seven, so you can quickly ask, ask questions in the chat and, get, get your questions answered. you can also check out some of their other platforms and businesses, such as Crypto Watch, which is crypto W A T dot C H, and that, that's a trading platform for those of you interested in trading across different exchanges, and you can monitor the price obviously there as well. Kraken also have Kraken Pro mobile app, which is a mobile experience, for Kraken, and that's also Kraken Futures as well, if you wanna find that app. The, those apps are available on the Google Play Store and the Apple, The Apple iPhone Store as well, App Store rather. so kraken dot com for that one. Next up is Unchained Capital, so Bitcoin financial services. this is obviously the episode today is with some guys from the Unchained Capital team, but make sure you check them out, unchained-capital dot com. You can find their services, multi-signature vaults, products, and also loans. So you can use Trezor and Ledger, and you can set up with a two of three setup, increasing your security and allowing you to di-geographically distribute your keys. So make sure you check them out, and also the loan products, so you can put up Bitcoin and get USD. So, friends don't let friends sell Bitcoin So check them out there at unchained dash capital dot com. Next is Swan Bitcoin. So, just, now just a disclosure, I am, I hold some equity in Swan Bitcoin and I'm also an advisor, but, Swan Bitcoin are one of the best ways, to stack bitcoins automatically if you are in the US. So if you've got a US bank account, you can link that up, you-- and Swan's service will pull the bitcoin and buy the bitcoin, and then you can withdraw that. to your ex- to your, wallet. And so that's very much the encouraged flow. This is the way that you can, encourage your friends, and family who wanna buy Bitcoin and do it regularly. I think the auto buy, Psychology is just so much better for you if you wanna just regularly buy every week or every month or whatever, whatever you wanna set up, I think this is the way that you've gotta look at it. So, Tell your friends and family to check out swanbitcoin dot com. last sponsor is CipherSafe. So if you have a hardware wallet and you need, you, you've gotta think about backups for that. So I think you've gotta look at the m-metal seed. So CipherSafe are offering the CipherWheel product, and that comes in a wheel shape. It's, you know, b-uh, been tested in terms of fireproof and waterproof and so on. So make sure you check that out. And essentially, it's got little slots that you- You slide in the tiles and you do four letters, for each of your bip thirty-nine word seed. So if you've got a treasurer or a ledger, make sure your family can access those bitcoins if an accident happens to you or if your house goes up in fire, you need a way to look after that. And so the website for that is ciphersafe dot io. Okay, so that's, the sponsors for the show. It's time to bring in the guests, Parker and Buck. Welcome to the show, guys. I think, just in terms of, for the listeners who aren't familiar, well, I think m-m-most of my listeners are all familiar with Parker. He's, he's in business development at Unchained Capital. He's a past guest of the show, and Buck is, newly working at Unchained Capital. so welcome to the show, guys.

Thanks very much. Yeah, thanks for having us on. excited to, to talk about our latest release, Caravan. Buck's, a new member of the team, but he hopped right in there and he was, you know, the lead developer on bringing us a lot of the upgrades that are in the latest edition of Caravan. So looking forward to that and talking about other things that we're working on at Unchain.

Awesome. Yeah. So look, I think for the listeners, I think my listeners are probably all very familiar with you, Parker, from your past episode here

A little bit about yourself. I know you've been around for a while.

yeah, sure. So just try and keep my, my Bitcoin history, the, the short version, but, I got into the crypto, I started learning about Bitcoin back when I was living in China back in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, I was actually using it for remittances when I was, working freelance and so trying to, you know, move money back and forth between the US and China and kind of just started diving deeper and deeper from, from there. My background is I'm originally in economics, but I've been doing, software engineering and web development for, I don't know, it's been a while now, so maybe a decade. And, Yeah, for after moving back to the States, I've been working in a few different Bitcoin companies, so I, I've, and primarily in open source. It's, I've been really fortunate to be able to, to work in building open source projects and for, for the community. I've done some stuff in-- I was working for a couple years on the, the Bitcoin team, which is a JavaScript implementation of Bitcoin. recently also was working on some, some Lightning tools specifically around L-Sats, which were, some, some new- It's been recently released, by, Lightning Labs. And, yeah, now working on, on right now Caravan, but also a bunch of the other stuff that, that Unchained has going on too.

Fantastic. So, look, let's get into a little bit around the context of this. So, obviously, we're all bullish on Bitcoin, right? We think the value is going up. We have to start thinking more seriously about our security. So, maybe, you wanna just lead us in a little bit and tell us, you know, why, why should we be considering multi-signature?

Sure, yeah. So, multi-signature is, it, it's a great way to both keep your Bitcoin secure while also maintaining control over it. And so the, the kind of the, the quick way to explain how it works, it's in the name, multi-signature, and it basically means you need multiple signatures in order to, to spend some Bitcoin. And that, that has a lot of benefits if you think about it kind of like a, a safety deposit box, where you need multiple keys in order to open it, the same type of thing, except you can even Multi-sig where you have, set up, which is what we use at Unchained Capital, two of three keys. So you can have a total set of three keys, but only two of those keys are needed to, to spend the Bitcoin. So this can be really great, for, such as in, in, Unchained Capital, our, our, our setup where you can have total control of your Bitcoin if you own two of those keys, and, you know, Unchained can have a backup. And what we're introducing with Car The browser. And so if the key is, the best way to do this is if the keys are stored on something like a hardware device. And in order to spend the Bitcoin, so the, the main advantage of this is, let's say your security is compromised somewhere, and you're storing your, your seed somewhere unsafe, it's on plain text or whatever, you shouldn't be doing that regardless. But if that happens, you still need one other key to spend from a two or three multi-signature wallet. And so that, that just kind of, it, it spreads out your risk a A lot more secure.

Yeah, and, and just one thing that I would add too is that, you know, I think most of us experience this individually as Bitcoiners, and then when we think about it as a company, and as we're talking to people that are adopting Bitcoin for the first time, the idea of facilitating self-custody makes sense. it, it eliminates counterparty risk, you're not relying on any institution, a-and potentially bearing the risk of the liability, whether the, the institution- is hacked or, becomes insolvent, and, and, and those, those ideas resonate, but then there is permanence to, to private key management, and I think, you know, one of the realities of self-custody, at least in a single key setting, is that even if you are backed up and you have, say, a hardware device and a backup, they both back up each other, but then they both also represent single points of failure, such that if anybody gets, any, you know, single device or a backup to that device they're, they're very close to being able to walk away with all funds. And as we think about, not only, you know, existing Bitcoiners preserving their own wealth as, as the value of Bitcoin increases, but as, you know, additional people come into Bitcoin and they're thinking about storing a significant amount of wealth, that as that wealth and the value of Bitcoin rises, the idea of, of being able to have that wealth be lost by a single mishap becomes, untenable. And that's really where the idea- The idea of multi-sig and especially commercialized for both the individuals and businesses to be able to hold their own private keys is really critical, that, that, the, the default doesn't need to be to go back to a co-custodian as value increases because, there, there's more at risk. It can be, we can solve this problem through diversifying that risk through multiple keys, having backups, having redundancy. And in our case, again, you know, people don't have to work With third parties, and that's why we've made, you know, there's a number of reasons why we've invested so significantly in Caravan. But, but if someone is working with, with Unchain, then we're also a backup, and we're creating diversity, not just in keys, but in, in who holds those keys.

Yeah, that's a great, point as well, because you might want to just have another entity, right? So you might yourself have like all this good backup and all that stuff, but ultimately having just another entity who's holding that other key, so in this case, if you've got two of three and Unchained has that other key, well, then that's another entity who's help-helping you kind of manage your keys, and it might be also good to just talk a little bit, maybe just historically, what have people had to do, They, they might have had to do something like Glacia protocol, or they might have, maybe they would have tried with Electrum to try and do, you know, multi-signature. what were some of the toolsets that people were trying in the past? and, you know, why is Caravan now, it's a step forward in that, in that regard? Can you guys, touch on that?

Yeah, sure. I mean, and it's funny too, like- If for anybody that's been in, been in the Bitcoin space for, for a while now, there's, you know, famous stories of people having, you know, thousands of bitcoins stolen off, off of them, that like, there was one story someone lost like seven thousand bitcoin just at some conference, and you, you can really see how important it is to have, multi-sig and, and easy multi-sig as well, so that, okay, I get some keys stolen off of me, but that doesn't put everything at risk. and one of the about multisig actually in Bitcoin compared to that we hear in some of these other blockchain protocols, is multisig is native to the, the protocol as well? And so you hear some of these hacks that happen in other, multisig setups, that's, that's, that's not a risk when you're, when you're doing multisig in Bitcoin. And so then the next challenge is, is like how to do this in a user-friendly way. There are some challenges with, just the complexity of how to set up, how to coordinate the keys that are involved involved in the devices, and there's been, you know, multisig has been around for years, and we're still as, an industry trying to figure out the easiest way to do it. And so Caravan is, is, is kind of our answer to that, and one of the things that we're really trying to focus on with Caravan is to do one thing really well, and that's essentially coordinating the, the keys with, for your multisig address or, or wallet. And so how that contrasts to, to kind of some, Glacier protocol is kind of like how to go through all these protocols, the, these steps to, to make sure that your private keys are really safe, and that you're not compromised at any step of the way. That's kind of like the extreme end of the security conscious spectrum. you, you don't have to go to such extreme lengths when, with, with multisig, especially because you're di-diversifying your risk, Electrum has been the primary answer, for, for, for many years now, and, and with good reason. I mean, it's a very robust, it's a, it's a battle-tested platform, it's got, you know, has a lot of, of experienced developers behind it. But from, from our point of view, and especially just as a company, about why we needed our own type of solution, there's, there's a couple answers to that. But what I think Caravan brings to the table is just a bit of a s-simplicity. So whereas Elect

server and part of this, this peer-to-peer network, and it has normal, normal key management, single sig, and it has multisig, and, there, there's just a lot of extra complexity, it also has state, and that's something that Caravan, so it like, you know, has the whole history of all of your transactions that's, that's located in the, the database of the wallet. And so with Caravan, this is a stateless wallet, so essentially you, you, import your keys from, from the, the, the Boot up, the, your, your wallet and the, the address history, you can generate new addresses, but it's not really stored anywhere. So you query the blockchain, whether it's to, an external, blockchain API or to your own private node as well, which, which is, is supported too. And so that just, that, that helps Caravan kind of be focused in its mission in terms of what it's doing, is it-- We coordinate the keys, you have your, your multisig wallet, we load up the addresses, and then you can receive funds You can very easily spend from, from it as well, and we have a couple different ways to, to, to manage that, which we can get into later.

Awesome. and maybe Parker, you could just-- I'll go on Parker.

Yeah, I was gonna say that, I like to simplify it down to say that it's, it's gotta be so easy that a business development guy can do it. and, you know, or, or, or me or my dad or, you know, any one of our parents that, not, you know It's designed to do one thing very well, and it's designed to make it easy to do in a browser. and, you know, from, from my own experience, and again, you know, I run my own full node, and, you know, I've been in, involved in Bitcoin for, for quite a while now, but still kind of, you know, seeing, you know, we had, you know, at our big Austin Bitcoin developer meetup, we had Michael Flaxman doing a demo of Electrum, and just seeing the challenges that someone as technically sophisticated as Michael struggling

A very powerful tool and, and Caravan isn't a replacement for, Electrum for all things, but for many people, it becomes an easier application to use. And there's many ways that people can use it. And, you know, when we think about it, you know, a few of the-- and we'll talk about a number through the conversation about why Caravan's so strategic to us, but, but one of those reasons is that it not only is an asset for Unchained Capital and its clients as a, as a recovery tool, it's, it's now a more Comprehensive tool in that regard, but for, for clients that rely on Unchain or Vaults and find value in having Unchain be a keyholder, we also design tools and that core principle tool being Caravan to ensure that, that Unchain is as trust-minimized an organization as possible, and one of those key elements is that if Unchain site goes down or if, you know, you, you are locked out of your Unchain account or for whatever reason Unchain is unavailable, that you have a, a tool And one that is easy to use with a very low bar for someone to be able to access their Bitcoin. But then in addition to that, we recognize that, you know, expanding multisig and creating solutions that are easy for the common person to use and, in which they feel comfortable with, that they will be more likely to hold their private keys with these type of applications, and that many people will not want to work with a third party. And the more people using multisig and making multisig ubiquitous as a form of- Of self custody is, you know, provides a, a tangible benefit to, to Unchained as an ecosystem, but also to, to individuals that, that, you know, don't value Unchained holding a key or, or for whatever reason, preserve their anonymity and be able to do that in a way that they don't, you know, have fear that they'll create some error that results ultimately in loss, that, that it, that, you know, by accessing multisig, it has to be in a way that, that you're actually protecting yourself and not potenti- potentially Make some error or then can't lose your funds when you

need to. Yeah, I think that's a great way to summarize it. I would say, maybe ju-just to summarize for the listeners, you might be somebody who is more concerned about privacy and you wanna run it yourself, well, that's, you know, you can use Caravan. you might be unsure about, okay, I'm only used to single signature, I-I'm, I'm not quite comfortable with multi-signature yet. Well, this is one way you can test it out and try,

just it can be a recovery tool, as you mentioned, and also, I think there's those broader points around the ecosystem, right? You're making self-custody easier, and that way, what you could arguably say, this is strengthening the ecosystem of Bitcoin, and also, w- and we can probably get to some of this later, is around helping build towards having multi-sig standards and just kind of commonly accepted ways and practices of doing things, just like how now, let's say, it's quite a common- thing that people use bip thirty nine seeds, right? And that's just a known thing in the industry, and so maybe that's a similar kind of thing, that can be built out towards, so, let's talk, let's bring it to Caravan then. So Caravan, up until very recently was a single address solution, and now it's got an actual wallet to it. So perhaps Buck, you can tell us a little bit about the changes coming to Caravan.

Yeah, so a, a big idea with this was to just expand Caravan's support for, xPub's essentially. And, and xPub's allow you to coordinate, a, rather than just a single multisig address, it allows you to coordinate between multiple, keys or key holders, a, a wallet. And what, so xPub's basically give you a, a path or recipe to generate, Acent, basically an infinite amount of, of addresses. And so that's, that's what a wallet is, at, at its core, in, in any situation, whether it's multisig or otherwise, it's a deterministic set of addresses that have balances, associated with them. And so that's what we're-- that's what we're introducing in this, in this release of, that's the main thing that we're introducing in this release of Caravan. And, and so the way that the process that this works now is we, we still maintain the, support That, that we had before, which, people might be familiar with, through the, the, the Twitter bet that was made and coordinated, using Caravan that was with a single address, and now you can essentially do the same thing with a whole wallet. So rather than just having a single bet, on a single address, you could, coordinate many bets, or, you know, you could coordinate a wallet maybe with family or family members. And so the pattern still is the same as we had for the single address, but now when you're coordinating the wallet. So you still pick, okay, what's the, what's the quorum look like? So you could do the default, the two of three, as, as I was explaining earlier, and you can go up to a total of, of seven, seven signers. And then you pick your type of address, you also pick which network, mainnet or testnet. So if you're not totally comfortable putting real funds on yet, you can also move onto testnet and, and get some, some Bitcoin from a testnet faucet and then just kind of see how it works and

Will be done from, hardware wallet. Right now we support Trezor and Ledger, you can also import them as, as plain text, but we have, oh, and Hermit of course as well, which is our own. wallet solution. It's all, all programmatic, command line wallet. And, we have cold card in the, on the roadmap, as, as another option soon, as, as we build closer towards this xPub, the extended public key, as you see in the, the demo there, is kind of the, the step towards getting full, PSBT support too. So once you've set up your, your wallet by importing the keys from your hardware, your hardware wallet, the hardware device Then the, caravan, which again, it's all, you know, a static website that's running in the browser, it'll call out to a node. You can, now this is something that we've expanded, we had, we had the ability to call out to your own private Bitcoin D node before, but we have, we have that still, and what we've expanded it by allowing the ability to actually import addresses. So this is important, so that if you're querying your own node, you don't have to, go through the command line or go through GUI, you can actually import the addresses that are in the wallet so that the, the node becomes aware of those addresses and can determine your balances and, and the total balance of your wallet. and yeah, and then, you know, you're basically, once, once you've imported those, those xpubs, you're off to the races. You've got a wallet, you can see your balances, you can generate new, new addresses, you can see spent addresses, you can send, send funds from it as well. And when you're sending, the, the trick is, you know, this is one of the tricky things with, with multisig is you have to coordinate the, the signers. So anybody that's familiar with, with using a hardware wallet for single sig On the device, but just still going through that process, and now you have to do that for each, each, key in the, in the quorum that is signing away, signing for the funds. And yeah, that's, that's all possible now through, through the wallet, which is kind of nice.

Yeah, one of the, one of the big, the big pieces there is, so if you, if you had used Caravan previously, thinking about, you know, generating a single address and, you know, then needing to, you know, in, in a single address role, we'd essentially export pubkeys, generate a redeem script, and then you could deposit Bitcoin to those addresses and save your BIP thirty-two paths, essentially the key paths that communicate to the devices where to find the keys to sign transactions, but you would also need to, to store that redeem script. But this also allows, in terms of just the, the functionality improvement, is by moving to a world of xpubs, it gives you the flexibility to basically, you know, store and save those xpubs, and then, you know, at any time in the future, you can recreate your wallet, and, you don't have to spend, you know, recurring to the same address, or, you know, conversely, if you didn't want to do that, you don't have to create a, a new address and then separately store a new redeem script to be able You know, one of the, one of the benefits of, of this model is, this really, you could have three devices, you know, if you choose to have backups, have backups, and really, as long as you're saving those xpubs, you'll be able to-- or, or you know the, the BIP thirty-two pads, you'll be able to recreate, you know, and, and spend from any addresses associated with that wallet, you'll be able to preserve better privacy and be able to, to send, you know, not, reuse addresses, and then be

Manage addresses, such that you're, you're only spending, you know, the UTXOs, or, you know, one of the, one of the pieces of feedback that we don't yet have, but we're, you know, con-contemplating adding or, or will plan to add is being able to l-label UTXO. So this really, you know, in terms of if you were wanting to operate in an independent way, a multi-signature wallet, today now Caravan is, is really truly functional to be able to do that and not overly burdensome, To reuse addresses and then more efficiently spend by being able to, to manually, manage UTXOs. That's, that's really a, a big improvement, and there are some others. I think in this, and maybe Buck, you can, you can speak to this. I think with the, with the Trezor, we can now confirm on device, w-which is, you know, something also that when we think about multisig and we think about multisig relative to single sig, we are still advancing down the path, you know, in many ways

One of the challenges within multisig is verifying addresses on device and then also allowing those devices to verify change. So one of those first pieces that we've implemented in this, in this implementation of Caravan is being able to, at least on the Trezor, be able to, to ver-verify addresses on device and then the next steps through would be able to then coordinate var- various different devices and keys to be able to, to verify or at least have the, the, the devices be able to verify change.

Great. and I think it would also be good to just compare and contrast, let's say, a Caravan multisig with, say, Electrum. would you be able to just highlight some of those differences there for the listeners if they've, if they've used an Electrum multisig, how would it differ when they're doing with Caravan from like, standards and like the pathways and so on? Could you, could you, outline a little bit on that, perhaps, Buck?

Sure, yeah, I mean, I think the, the, the big difference, again, is just what we were saying earlier in terms of Caravan only focusing on, on one thing, which is the, the coordination of, of the keys essentially for, for the wallet. And what that means is just, a much simpler, user interface for, for people to understand what's going on. So there's a lot more setup, I think, that goes on with, with an Electrum setup when you're coordinating the keys, and there's a lot more in the You, but when you're going to Caravan, there's one, there's one job it has, and that's to get your xPub and it's to create a wallet from it. So if you think about like one of the, one of the key, you know, one of the reasons you might be using multisig is actually to coordinate with other people, and, you know, as Parker was, was talking about, it's like your coordinating with, with a family member, for example, that's less comfortable, to ask them to spin up a whole Electrum,

setup

You can even send them a file that will open up in their own browser that's not even, live, on the web, and, you know, it'll set-- it'll walk them through the steps and how to-- so the steps essentially, as I was describing before, you know, you get the xPub, you-- there's even a config file that we have for the wallet, which is basically just the xPubs and the, the paths. So, one of the one of the difficulties, there are some standards around, how to generate, essentially how to generate addresses based off of certain, hierarchical HD paths for the, for the wallet, and we actually leave a lot of flexibility for that, so that means that whereas Electrum does have, they're pretty strict to some, to, to their own standard, which isn't, accepted in, in all, implementations, I should say, we leave it quite open, so if you know the path Of the wallet that, that for the, where the xpubs are generated, then you, you can generate it. So that'll, that allows us to kind of leave, be flexible to support whatever the different standards are, although we will default to the, the, the industry standard for how to generate it based off of your network, if it's a segwit enabled or, or not, for example, as well. And so, yeah, I think really the differentiator is just that, that simplicity and, and really being able to, to walk you through those steps.

Cool. And, can you just tell us a little bit about the address types as well? So you've got that option there when you're setting, when you're setting up your multisig, you can either go with P2SH, which is Pay to Script Hash, you've got the middle one, P2SH, P2WSh, and then the bottom one, which is Pay to Witness Script Hash, Pay-P2WSh.

Right, and yeah, as, as you were saying, like e-each one of these, has a certain standard about the path that is used to generate the xPub that you'll, you'll end up, using. And so, trying to explain without getting too technical, I guess, but so- These are different, script types essentially in Bitcoin. You have, pay-to-script-hash, which is a way to compress the data that, incorporates a, multisig address. So a multisig script is essentially has the rule set to say, in order to spend this output, you need to have two of three keys that match up with this set of keys. That's a lot of data, to just have in an address, and so- Pay to script hash is a way to compress that for when you're sending to that address, and it just, it, it just makes it a little bit more compact, it makes it a little bit more private as well. so that all three standards, the, the ones that you listed out have that, but what they, the way that they differ is moving towards these SegWit rules, and SegWit was a enhancement that was introduced to, to Bitcoin, a couple years ago now, to, essentially like, it, it, it effectively With a lot of other, benefits. And so these just have different signing rules associated with them and how a transaction is meant to be parsed and signed. And the reason why that's important when you're dealing with the generating of the multisig addresses is because you can, you can, Share information about what type of address and what type of script it is, and where a wallet that is receiving or try, sorry, trying to, to spend funds to or from an, an address like this, it, it tells the wallet how to, how to deal with it. And so P2SH in, both versions of the P2SH that you were describing, P2SH and P2SH-P2Wsh are kind of the legacy version, P2Wsh is the SegWit version, and the, it will generate addresses of the, type Fetch32, which the address itself is a little bit longer, but it means all the, signatures and input data is gonna go into, the witnesses are, are, are going into a separate data structure that will be cheaper to send actually. And, and, you know, in this time as we're seeing fees going up a little bit more, as the mempool increases, it's becoming increasingly important that we do try and use, SegWit native, from, from the beginning, as much as possible, because that's gonna help you save on fees, it the, the load on the mempool too. And so that, you know, I think that's also another advantage of having a tool like Caravan that, that kind of puts that choice front and center when you're creating your wallet. And so hopefully it'll help encourage people to be, be defaulting to that more and more because it's, it's, it's a common good, the, the mempool, it's something that we all have to share and, and we all pay the, the consequences of, of people that aren't using those more efficient data structures. Yeah.

So I guess just for listeners who, maybe you're not familiar with that, I would say if you're, if you're concerned about maximum, availability of being able to, you know, spend and receive, just take P2SH. But if you wanna be more, efficient and you want to be able to take advantage of having the lowest fees, then you wanna look for the P2WCH. but I guess not every exchange supports sending out to, the native SegWit Bc1 addresses. But But pretty much by now, most of them are supporting it because, I mean, SegWit was like three years ago now, so they, they should be, getting to that.

That's kind of an important disclaimer too, because you might, you might generate a wallet that's P2WSh because you listen to all the stuff I just said, oh, I wanna save on fees, and you, you generate a wallet that's P2WSh, and then you wanna withdraw from an exchange that maybe doesn't support, that Shari too yet, and they Stay calm and know that actually that's not what's going on. It's, it's just that they-- it's, it's not that your wallet is broken or it's a lost wallet or whatever, it's just that the wallet, the wallet that is sending needs to recognize the format of that address. And so if they don't recognize the format, you've, you could-- and you could do this all with Caravan, you could create a kind of intermediary. There are some wallets that'll do this for you that understand both. But if you wanna set up a wallet that is your kind of in-between step, you would do a, a P2SH-P2WSH. So that's basically hiding the new version inside of the, the old version so that it's in a format that older wallets will recognize. And so that's kind of how you can deal with compatibility issues.

Yep, yep. and let's talk a little bit about, multi-signature support amongst hardware wallets. So, I think, one interesting point that I've noted also, and just from discussions with you also, is that Having this toolset allows people to test their wallet against, these different, standards, if you will. can you tell us a little bit about that and, what, what your hope is for the space around multisig and potentially what they might do if more people start using Caravan?

Sure, yeah. So I think there's two pieces to, to that about what, what Caravan brings to the table, in, in that regard. And the first is just, you know, having another offering out there, having something that's user friendly, having something that we, you know, we hope users will really enjoy, and that will encourage more use, more eyeballs essentially towards, hardware wallets, and, you know, that just kind of gets the market involved. So, you know, if, if Somebody did want their wallet supported, it was like, "Hey, well, you know, you're not supporting this or that standard yet, or it doesn't meet our, our security, guidelines." Then, you know, you can add pressure to the hardware, manufacturers too. So just kind of having something out in the ecosystem, helping bring awareness to multisig and multisig best practices, I think is a, is a good step so that more people are using it, the more that you'll get market pressure, and I think that's a really good thing.

process of, of our own work at, at Unchained, which is this, testing suite that's included in Caravan, and it's not something that features super prominently in, in the user interface, but if you're on the landing page, there's a, a, a panel on, on the, the right side, and you can see this little button that says "Run, Run Test," and if you go to the "Run Test," it's, it's a testing suite for, the different-- Yeah, here we go, for the dif-different hardware wallets. This is a really cool thing, and, and it actually, it highlights, how important multisig itself is too, because if you notice at the, at the bottom of this page, we have a list of, of seed words. This is, this is a list that you can generate a Bitcoin wallet from, and, but importantly for the test, this is all testing in multisig, and so this is, one of two keys involved in, in the, in the wallet setup. So in our tests, what the, what multisig allows, and this really highlights how important multisig is to security, what this allows is that we can have real wallets with real funds, both in testnet and mainnet, that are still totally secure, even though we've publicized the seed. For, for the wallet. Now, if you can imagine doing that with a single sig, I mean, it's, it's, it's-- there's no possible way to do that. And I think a even cooler way to think about it is if you could think of, of that in a normal banking context, right? Like, imagine a bank putting up a, an API key to access their live, real US dollar funds in order to test how their API works. It's impossible, you can't do it. But with this, we have this pub, this public seed, and because we have a second seed that is, that is hidden, you can play with a real wallet, see real funds on it, and, see the addresses or There are some associated in, in these tests, but you won't be able to spend with it because it's a two of two. And so that's, that's just kind of like one cool aspect of this. And this allows you, what you would do is you would take this, this seed list, you would load it up onto a Trezor, a Ledger, or, or a, or a Hermit as well. And once you've loaded up on the device, you can run through these tests. And all these tests are, these are kind of like the main pieces of functionality that you want to ensure that your hardware wallet can support. And so you can run it with different firmwares, you can run it with, different, you know, the Model T or the Trezor One for the different, hardware and, and from a single company or you have the same, same thing with, with, with Ledger too, and run, okay, well, can I export, publicly? Can I A real transaction, and again, this is only one of the two signatures, so you won't be able to send anything, but we can confirm that the signature came out correctly because, our-- the test fixtures know what the signature should look like based off of the data based-- based off of the, the key list, the, the, the seed phrase, and we can test against that, and you'll get a thumbs up, thumbs down if that worked. This has been really useful in our own development. There were a couple bugs that we were able to, to find. One was just trying

Different ways of interacting or, just have different APIs, which is, you know, to be expected, and Ledger was a little bit trickier for, exporting their xPubs. And so as we were developing the wallet, we needed to export the xPub from the Ledger, and using this tool, I was able to, you know, iterate fairly easily to make sure that I was getting the information correctly and that I was doing it properly. There's, there's-- it's not, it's not an easy thing to do. Normally with software, when you're running tests Some file of data and it's like, I'm doing this function, I'm expecting this to happen. It's a little bit harder to do with hardware devices, 'cause each time you're running through a test, you actually have to press the buttons, you have to click confirm, you have to check your addresses. It's a little bit harder to automate, but having this test suite, while it's not fully automated, it gives you a standardized way to walk through these steps and very, easy to read visual cues about whether or not it's working in a, in a secure way as well

find and debug a, a bug that was in Trezor Connect 8, that we were unable to send to a P2WSh to the new batch 32 addresses, for multisig, and we have this in our test suite. If you scroll down on the, the left, you'll see there's a test for signing to, all the way to the bottom, there's signing to P2WSh, and using this test, we were able to say, okay, this is actually a problem. Should be at the very bottom. Yeah, so just for listeners,

because most of the listeners are on the audio stream, I'll just call out what we're looking at here. So this is on Unchained Capital. If, if you go to the caravan and then you go on the right, there's a test suite, and then if you scroll down, there's a bunch of different, tests here. So one of them is like export the public key, for different, derivation paths. And so what Buck is referring to here is,

the, there

Pay to witness script hash in a two of two multisig address.

Yeah. And so we were finding is that the treasure was working to sign to a P2SH, so we had the right keys, everything was working fine, P2SH, P2Wsh, it worked fine, but trying to send it to the, P2Wsh was not working. And, so- This, this turned out to just be a small bug, we were able to publish a fix and, and the Trezor development team, to their credit, they, they merged it in very quickly and we were able to get a fix and it was deployed to, to Trezor Connect and that was great. And so this just kind of highlights the importance of, of having something like this, is like there's a set of expected behavior that the, the hardware devices should, be able to, to, to meet. And going through a test suite, you can identify, this is also helpful

Else maybe in another application to say, okay, is this a problem with the application? Is this a problem with my hardware device? What's going on here? You can run them against these tests. And, for me also just like this was kind of useful for me, I've, I've, I've been at Unchained for a few months and just kind of onboarding and kind of like going through the workflows about how multisig really works, how the development workflow for multisig works, and how to use it with the different devices without any funds really at stake. And because there's See what's expected and what didn't come out and, and move forward from there.

Yeah, one, one thing to, to add on there, because, you know, as Buck was talking about, you know, when, when Treasure Connect eight was, was pushed and the, you know, P2WUSH, Signing flow or the ability to sign, had a bug. You know, when you think about how that impacts our business, if we have a, a number of, customers using multisig within our private application and then, you know, there's a, a push, you know, from one of the hardware providers and, and then our, our customers, our clients can't- Sign multisig transactions out of our platform, that creates disruption and, and it puts us into, a mode where we quickly have to not only identify what the issue is, but then react. And, and as Buck mentioned, we were able to identify what the issue was and, and Trezor did quickly then, patch patch the, patch the bug and, and we move forward. Our goal for this, and again, you know, we're, we're starting small and we don't have, you know, outsized expectation, but our hope is through this tool, and as multisig applications are being used, whether it's people using Caravan independently, people using Unchain and using our Vault product, or other people using multisig in a way that's compatible with Caravan, that increasingly the hardware providers, as they're working on updates, this will be a tool for them to be able to come and check Make sure that in, in a multi-sig setting, that, that nothing is broken. And so when we think about just, you know, a, a, a realistically, since we, launched Vaults within Unchain just over a year ago, our single, single largest investment has been this open-source project that has, is Caravan. And, and earlier I talked about, you know, the strategic rationale being providing a recovery path, you know, providing an easy-to-use tool for people that, that don't, don't want to work with a third party to be able to access multi-s In addition to that, you know, there's, there's the element that Buck was mentioning in terms of helping to drive standards, but then also just as it relates to, you know, interoperability or, with this specific issue for hardware providers to be able to interact with Unchain or to be able to, to be complements to, to companies, because we do view ourselves as partners to, to the hardware providers, whether it's Trezor, Ledger, Coldcard, you know, others to come, and this tool allows them, you know, not only to, to, Devices, if there are issues that, that we're having in the implementation, we have an open source, tool and something that they can come in and look at and help us troubleshoot and get to the answer faster. And so, so in that way, in many respects, it's also valuable to us because it accelerates our development cycle, because we do, and one of the things that we're working on now is to be using the same libraries that support Caravan within our private application, and if we can have this tool that is open source that allows us to better collaborate. and complement the hardware providers, that the experience for everyone that's using multisig should improve.

That's great. And, I'd also like to know a little bit more around how you're making it work from a hardware connection to your computer perspective, right? So people are probably aware of H-W-I, Hardware Wallet Interface by Andrew Chow. I'm wondering whether You know, there's any interaction there, with, Caravan and, whether that sort of takes a bit of work to kind of keep the, keep it working because, you know, maybe something changes, in a hardware wallet somewhere or maybe there's an update and, you know, that might break the way it connects in. How, how are you thinking about that kind of issue?

Sure. So, the, the way I think of, of the H W I project, it's, it's kind of like almost a reference implementation of how you're going to create an interface for how, the hardware wallets can, can or should communicate with your, with the software, the application of the users. And so, we're not using H W I at all in, in our stack. It's, it's not necessary, but just like everything else we've been talking about here, you know, having these types of open source projects to help drive standards, to Best practices is super important, HWI and a lot of the work that Andrew Chow is doing, since he, he has a lot of focus around wallets and hardware wallets, is, is super important around that. PSBT is, is like the, the real major example of that. So HWI itself isn't something in particular that, i-i-that we have to, to work with and, But, we have kind of our own, Parker alluded to this, we have two other libraries that are used under the hood in, in, in Caravan that really only developers or people that, you know, are curious about, about the underlying code would even be aware of, and that's Unchained Wallet and Unchained Bitcoin. And this is the same-- they have the same type of motivation as the HWI library, which is to, kind of help drive standards. It's also something as well that, why it's open source So it can be audited and used by, by the entire community, and it's also, so, but that we wanna use within our own internal applications too. And so this is what, what I really love, loved before I joined the team even about what Unchain is doing, is kind of like marrying this idea of how, open source and, and closed source can, can really benefit from each other. And so, you know, that's, that's kind of what AWI is doing and, and, and is available out there to, to kind of Wallets, libraries, they're doing the same type of thing. So, Unchained wallets, should just give some background, is a library to do basically the same type of thing as, as interactions between, different hardware, Wallets and, an, an application. So it, it creates a unified kind of interface so that the, the, for example, Caravan is an application that's using this, doesn't have to know what the specific hardware is that you're communicating with, but because it has this common language, it, for how to interface with them, it, it can do that. And Unchained Bitcoin is a set of, basically just Bitcoin tools underneath for dealing with keys, for dealing with addresses, that, again, and it includes the, the test fixtures There's two, two, so if somebody wanted to implement their own version of the test suite that we're looking at, that can all be done with just Unchained Bitcoin and, and Unchained wallets too. So you have the test seeds, you have the, the, the, the fixtures, which are essentially the transactions that you would be test signing and the xPubs that you would be expecting, and that way people can, can even test if, if Caravan is, is doing it, it right as well. And so having all this open is a really important part of this whole kind

To look at, it's open for people to poke at, it's open for people to use, and the more people that are using and poking and looking at it, the, the better off the whole community is, because it makes us stronger, it makes us more resilient, it makes us just more aware of, of how things work and how, how, and what's going on.

And how about, PSBT and the direction towards having cold card support?

Yeah, so the XPub, support and kind of just coming up with the mental models around how, how that works in terms of wallets and user interfaces was a big part of that, and, of the, kind of the first step because PSBT is creates this kind of uni-unified, and more complex interface for, for managing wallets that are, that are, based around that. So XPub was step one, and step two is Is gonna be moving towards PSBT and, and for those who are not familiar, it's a partially signed Bitcoin transaction, and it's, it's basically, it's really just this, a standardized format for how to pass around the information that's involved in the, in an actual transaction that you're trying to, to sign between many different parties. So in the case of multi-sig, a multi-sig transaction, because it has to be partially signed because you're waiting for the other signatures that are involved in the coin. So, We have, we're, we're a good portion of the way there, we're, we're gonna be building support first into Unchain wallets itself, so before there's even a UI, we're building it into this library that other people can use and interact with, that we can use in Unchain's own vault system, and then also there would be support for it within, Caravan directly. So those, those are kind of the steps, build it into Unchain wallets, and other, other people can use it, it'll be supported in, in Unchain as Cold card via PSBT, for that

too. Awesome. and how should listeners be thinking about backups, right? So let's say they have created, the wallet, what do they need to be thinking about backing up? I mean, presumably that JSON file with the, you know, the xPub's and the derivation paths, and then also they must be thinking about the backups on the seed for their- hardware wallets, and potentially if they've got, you know, a PIN on that or a passphrase on that, they need to, what other things they need to think about there?

Yeah, you know, that's a really interesting question because, you know, you were talking about Glacier before, which, which is, the Glacier protocol, which is thinking about just like every step of the way has as hardened security as possible, and that's important, it's just important as like a mental model about how to think about things. But, so what you're describing, it You're just working specifically with an address, or you're working with your wallet, both have, files that can be downloaded as backups. Now, the, that as a backup is very different from the, the seed phrase, for example, that you, you know, write down after you've generated a wallet in a, in a hardware wallet. And the reason it's different is that even if somebody were to get this file, there's-- they, they can't spend any funds. They know what your wallet looks like, so they can't actually see balances. You lose some privacy, Trying to think about, you know, how to deal with your security and where, where, where things are. So, you know, backing up, securely is always important because you, you don't wanna risk either security or, or your privacy. But in terms of, of how this is done, you know, it's, it's important. So one kind of, one thing I think that some people overlook when planning out their security is that complexity itself is a vulnerability, right? The, the real fear when you're setting these systems up is not that somebody else is gonna get your You lose your keys or you lose access to your wallet, it's no difference, right? And so you don't wanna be overly complex. And so that's also important when you're, you know, part of securities, well, how many keys do you wanna have? If you have, a multisig that you need six of seven signatures, that means if just two people in that quorum lose their keys, you can't sign anything. That also means that if, if two of those p-- if one of those people lose their keys and the other person wants to hold the rest of their group And thoughts about, about how to manage security. But yeah, I mean, you want each, each key should be, we, we believe should be backed up. You wanna have, backups of the, the, the, the seed phrase. You can split them up into different geographic locations. Again, with just backing up the wallet If you hide your se- if, if you're doing this as kind of a cold storage solution where you don't need to be spending very much, but you're doing it for like dollar cost averaging or, you know, spending to your addresses, you don't actually need access to your seed phrase or even your hardware wallet. You just need that JSON file that has your xPub's, and you can generate the wallet and check your balances, which is known as a, a watch-only wallet. So you can check your balances without having to expose your private keys to, to any sort of security risk. And So easy to do to create a watch-only, wallet with a, a multisig, and you can keep your, your, your seed phrase, your hardware wallet buried in a safe somewhere, and another one on the other side of the planet because you don't plan to spend it anytime soon. I think that's, that's really key, and that's, that's why multisigs really should be a, a part of any kind of serious, security plan.

Great, and l-also we've got, coin selection as well. I think we didn't really touch on that. It might be, maybe I'll, I'll just share the screen here and just go back to Will's, post. And, we've got use of UTXO, so maybe you just wanna talk to that a little bit around, you know, wallet management, change management, these kinds of things.

Yeah, so this is, this is a nice thing that, that's now available, because we have the wallet, we're, we're still in a place where you have to spend all the UTXOs associated with a single address, but the fact that you can now pick which addresses you want to spend from. We have these two views, what you're seeing here is, in, in the screen, there's a, a view of the, the spend, the spend view, and there's a little switch in the top right of that that says manual, and you can

Operates the same way as, as most other Bitcoin wallets that you might be familiar with. You basically, you know, you put in the address that you wanna send to, how much you wanna send to them, and then we do some coin selection in the background. We pick some funds until, it's, it's the, the transaction is, is, we pick some inputs until the transaction is funded. In manual mode, though, you can kinda mix things up a bit, and choose which inputs you want to, send. So this is really good for, It's kind of like a, a step above just doing auto-select, because one of the things that, you know, some analytics companies will do, chain analytics companies will do is they, they can, they can i-identify spends and where they're going to based off of coin selection. So coin selection is essentially which inputs you're using to fund a transaction and where they're going to or from. So you can use something like, this, this manual mode to, to pick certain inputs and even send to yourself, like that adds a certain amount. Again, it Full anonymity, but it does offer you a certain amount of deniability, which is an interesting concept when thinking about privacy. It also allows, for, let's say, you know, your, your, your wallet is getting pretty heavy with a lot of kind of small transactions, you know, you're, you're adding, you know, A few thousand sats every, every day, every week or something, and, and you wanna consolidate some of those. Now that's not great for privacy, but, having a lot of, of UTXOs in your wallet can be very cumbersome. Yeah, it's a, it's a lot of just data to keep track of, but it also can be expensive to send. To, to fund a transaction that's large, you need to gather all of those inputs together and, and let's say you have an urgent transaction that you wanna send right at a time when fees are high, and It's gonna be very expensive. So what you can do with something like manual mode is, you know, say you've, you've noticed that fees have gone down in a couple weeks, you're like, "Alright, I'm gonna consolidate some of my UTXOs." You pick a bunch of your, of the kind of smaller UTXOs in that manual view, you send it back to yourself, and it's a bigger transaction, but because fees are lower, you don't have to send as high fees, and, and you can even, you know, set the fee-- we have

You know, it's not urgent, so I can wait a little bit, but I know the mempool's not full, I'm gonna save on fees and, and send this out. And so that's, that's-- those are kind of like the, the real main things that I think are useful about that.

also, we were speaking earlier just around this idea of connecting up with your own node, do you wanna just touch on, what, what, what people have to think about with that? I mean, there's a URL, username, password. H-uh, how do you connect with your own node?

sure. So, right now we're, it's, it's supporting the Bitcoin D, so, the, the kind of like default if you go to Bitcoin, GitHub repo. And this just uses the RPC interface to interact with the Bitcoin node. The default that we have in Caravan right now is the public client, which you can see in, in the sidebar. That just talks to blockstream.info. Not great for privacy, but super convenient. You don't have to spend any time setting up any sort of node or anything.

but, you You could run it in a Tor browser and, and, and be making your, re-- your balance requests there. Now, but still, it's better if you're doing it against your own node, and it's pretty simple, really, so when you're setting up, when you should have a RPC username and password for when you set up your, your node. If you're running this on localhost, there's a couple other steps, but, in the-- there's some instructions actually right there in the UI of Caravan about how to determine and set up the, the Can be done, again, pretty simply. And once you have that, you put in the username and password, and there's a, a button to test the connection. You test the connection to, to make sure you're communicating properly, and then you're good to go. That's only step one though, that allows you to kind of like get information about the blockchain. But again, I, I was talking about this a little bit earlier, This is a stateless thing. You, you know, you're creating a wallet right there in your browser on the fly. So even if you've done it before, there's no knowledge anywhere about it, in, including of your node, unless you've, you've gone through explicit steps to, to make it aware. And before this update, you actually had to go into your node and you had to tell it what addresses to keep an eye on. you had to do that one by one. Now what we have for both the wallet and the address is when an address is generated and you're addresses, and this will just use the RPC interface to send these addresses to your Bitcoin node, and this basically just tells the node, like, "Hey, I'm interested in what's going on, on these addresses. so can you keep an eye on them? And if you see an address come in, or if you see funds come into this address, I wanna-- I would like you to, store that information locally. And it'll do that. " You can do this even if you're running on a pruned node as well, so you don't have the, you don't need to have the full blockchain history of all address balances for, you know, going back all the way to two thousand and nine. you, you w- you will have to re-scan if you're importing addresses that have received funds older than this current moment, if that makes sense. So when you send an address to your node, it's, it's basically just saying, from now on, keep an eye on this address. But if that address has funds from So you just ask it to do a rescan, and that can be done pretty quickly, in about, I think the, the full IBD time for, for a Bitcoin core now is, is about an hour. So within an hour, you'll have all those balances, but you'll just need to do a rescan and it won't reflect immediately. But that's nice, you, you now have this a-added benefit of privacy, a-against a-normal Bitcoin node, no, no special, setup, server that you, you need to, to really set

Right, and how about, thinking about periodic key tracking and, firmware updates on the trezor and the ledger and, say, the cold card? Is there anything that, listeners should be thinking about there?

Yeah, so firmware updates is always something to be aware of. you know, sometimes there are changes that come up pretty quickly and they could break compatibility with, with software or certain setups that you might have. So this is another advantage of having that test suite that we were talking about. What you can do is if you're nervous about that, is, well, if you have another device, you can upgrade that to the new firmware, load up the test seed phrase, and make sure that signing and, and xPub management still works properly, and that way it'll still Or, you know, at least with Caravan. So that's, that's one thing to be aware of. and then, sorry, what was the other question?

Yeah, I was just asking about, yeah, firmware update and, periodic key checking as well. So just this idea of every-- as I know on the private, on the Unchained Capital platform, there is a periodic reminder to say, "Hey, get, go and check this key."

Yeah, so, we have, so Trezor does support this idea of, and I think Parker was talking about this earlier, this idea that you can actually, confirm addresses as well on, on the device, and so we, we confirm tools, for that. With your own keys, you can also, so you, you know, you plug in the Trezor, and then you look at your full, your wallet, you'll see the balances, and then you'll see that it does match up with the address that's, on the device, and so that, that's an important aspect of that. And then, it just in terms of, of your balances to make sure that everything is, is up to date, you know, you have all the xPub's and for that, you don't even need to plug in the, the devices, but, you know, you can see that your xPubs that hopefully match, and that you can do, with, with the, the confirm on device and, or just loading it up fresh, because again, this is all stateless, so if

Yeah, one thing to add there, Stefan. So, one of the things within our private application, you know, something that we have set on as, as a default is to require every ninety days our clients just, you know, verify both for themselves and to us that they have access to their keys. And, and one of the, you know, we really view that as just a best practice in operational security. Again, you know, especially, you know, and it would apply, to, you know, someone who wasn't working With Unchained, but just explaining our rationale is that, you know, ultimately we are collaborating with our clients, even though they hold two out of three keys, you know, we are contributing to their security, but we are collaborating with them to secure their Bitcoin, and, you know, we want to be ensured that, you know, they have a-- they actually have access to the keys, and by putting in, you know, a ninety-day key check, and again, every time a customer creates a transaction, we count that as a key check, all that is designed to do is ensure that keys goes stale. And one of the things that Buck was talking about earlier is, you know, in our two of three setup, you know, within our private application, we do generally recommend that clients hold backups, and again, that we, you know, we recognize that there is no one size fits all, but, you know, really, you know, when we're, we're working with clients they can be in a position where they could ac- lose access to three different pieces of information and still be able to recover their funds. they essentially have two keys and two backups. But we want, we want them to do, and what we train them to do using kind of periodic key checks is, it's okay, you know, potentially for you to lose access to one key, but we don't want someone to be in a situation where they potentially go a year or two years not knowing that they've lost access to one key, and that could just mean that, you know, They don't have access to a safe deposit box, not that someone's necessarily maliciously stolen a key, and then in that intermittent period, unbeknownst to them, they then lose access to a second piece of information or a third piece of information, and that just by doing that periodically, they're ensuring that keys don't go stale, such that if they ever do, multisig is designed to allow to protect against that, but it-- there's, there's a certain threshold there, and by, you know, periodically verifying that, yes, you do have access to the keys, the They still do work, then ultimately the long term se-security of your Bitcoin is preserved.

And this again highlights the another important aspect of, of multisig, right? It's like if you're in a single signature situation, h-having that, taking your keys out essentially to prove that you still have access to them is actually leaving you, somewhat exposed if you're in a single sig situation, right? Like, but in, in this situation where you're multisig, is that you show that one key, nothing ha- nothing really happens, and you have that redundancy. So if you find out that, okay, you, you had lost your key, that key, you still have another one somewhere else, and it just, like as Parker was explaining, it kind of like brings that to the front of mind and doesn't let you just kind of forget about what's going on and, and hopefully recover. And then once you find that other one, you can sweep the funds to another new multisig and kind of reestablish that two of three security that you had before.

Right, yeah, we really, really, what, what, what we've noticed too is, you know, we've been onboarding customers to our multisig vaults who, you know, in certain cases have never had Bitcoin before, in other cases are coming off of Coinbase, and, you know, having those protections in place, not just in terms of the key checks, in terms of training them on the behavior, because we also do recognize that, that as Buck mentioned, like when you do take your keys or when you access your keys, there is some degradation, may, maybe Of those key locations. So we do give people the opportunity to, to disable those key checks. Again, in most instances, our, our clients really value it 'cause it trains their behavior and they, you know, are more assured that they'll have access to the keys when they need them. But that, that just being in that world where there are guardrails, there are instructions as to, you know, kind of best practices, but then also knowing that, you know, and if we think about this in a world relative to single keys versus multisig and multisig with, you know, a collaborative Partner like Unchained or even like Acasa, that one of the principal benefits of that is, is knowing that you could potentially lose three access to three pieces of information, but as long as you have that fourth, your funds aren't lost. And that actually promotes people holding private keys that otherwise might not. and so, you know, being able to provide people not only the ability to, to maintain, you know, sovereignty over their money, but to provide the security that, you know, again, you know, a partner doesn't have to be a company like Unchained, it could A family member, a brother, you know, a sister, a parent, that, that those type of protections and diversities in key management actually allows for greater adoption of, you know, self custody, private key ownership, whereas many of those people who wouldn't otherwise, you know, opt for those solutions would just have their coins sitting on a coinbase and, you know, living under the false pretense that they're safe, when in reality they're just protecting, a, a form of authentication that's inherently harder to protect

It's like so much else, so much else in Bitcoin that just makes you more aware of all these other things that you kind of took for granted.

Yeah. Yeah. also, Parker, I'm curious, what's your experience been in terms of getting customers to be familiar and using multi-signature, right? Because I can imagine most people are coming from this world where they're just used to having it, you know, well, on, say, on some exchange somewhere or just in a single-signature scenario. Have you found that, recently, you- Seeing more customers get familiar with this idea of multi-signature?

Yeah, definitely, and I think that it is imp- important to recognize, and it's also one of those benefits of a tool like Caravan, that, that we recognize that we're in this phase where, you have multi-sig as a standard has been used by, you know, most institutions that are helping secure Bitcoin on behalf of other individuals, but most individuals that are using self- or that, that are securing their Bitcoin through self-custody are relying Relying on single keys historically and, and, and realistically to this point today, but having a tool like Caravan available to people, as well as services like Unchain or services like Casa, it, it's starting to expose people to, to how it works and their- The realistically, even for people who've, you know, been securing their Bitcoin for a long time, there are knowledge gaps into what's actually happening. And, you know, getting people in, in, in, having them see demos and having people then start to, to use multisig and educate their friends is important because one of the things that we're working on is, you know, I think most people that, you know, rely on a single hardware device to facilitate self-custody, it, it c- it creates some confusion as to actually what's happening because- Because they associate, as an example, the Bitcoin being on the device, rather than there being a key on the device and that key being required to create a signature to then move Bitcoin. And so one of the harder things for people to understand, when they come over to the world of multi-sig is where are the actual Bitcoin? And realistically, the Bitcoin are always where they were, you know, associated with addresses and protected by keys, but, you know, one of the benefits of multisig is, i-it is, really You know, taking something and, and people thinking of, you know, a single hardware device as both a key and a wallet to it really just being a key. and it creates, not necessarily even a layer of abstraction, but additional layers of security where you're, you're, you're being educated not only on how, you know, Bitcoin works and how Bitcoin addresses works, but that if someone was actually, you know, to get a hold of a key and say it was a treasure and they loaded up, there is no linkage between that device and a Bitcoin address. And so somebody could load that device up, even if they were able to access the device, you know, and someone hadn't used it in a single sig, you know, mechanism, then they'd load it up and there'd be zero Bitcoin on there, and they'd have no way of knowing, you know, what other, you know, keys or where those keys were. And so I do think that we are helping to, you know, through So this early phase bridge the, bridge some knowledge gap, educate, but now it is becoming more intuitive. Caravan is part of that story, but, but getting in and, and interacting and uploading keys and creating signatures and broadcasting signatures, you know, we are still recognizing that we're in this very early phase, but we're getting to that point where the early adopters are getting comfortable. And there's certainly things, and, and again, Caravan is a key part of that process where even though, you know, we believe Caravan and multisig in general, again, it's not something, We view the, the service that, that we offer through Unchain is, is extremely valuable, but, you know, the team at Casa is working similarly on, on interesting things, you know, and i-interesting applications to improve people's security. But, you know, when, when, when we're in that process And we're, and we're thinking about advancements. We know that there still are some, challenges of, of being able to, to really make multisig as secure as it ultimately can be. And, you know, having devi- being able to use multiple different devices, being able to reliably not have, you know, update, updates to, to firmwares potentially break signing capabilities, coalescing around standards, that there still are things that we can actually do on the development side to increase security, but having client, the first- First wave of clients come in, the first wave of people that are using multisig in an individual capacity to come through, understand how it works, to then be able to communicate it to friends and family. We are seeing that, and we, we, we do think that we, we have, you know, incremental steps to take, but we've already broken down a significant amount of the barrier

Awesome. so look, I, I also while I've got you guys here, also wanted to talk a little bit about what we've done recently with Bitcoin Adventures. So, for listeners who aren't aware, I'm one of the partners with Bitcoin Adventures, and we have just recently, completed, an allocation. So Unchained gave Bitcoin Adventures an allocation to invest in the company, and, those of you who are interested, if you are anywhere in the world, if you are an accredited investor, you are able to invest as part of our syndicate, and so I'll, I'll put a link in the description later for those of you who are interested, but our first, deal was actually with Unchained. So, w-um, I think from our perspective, those of us who are, involved See a lot of potential and see, think, you know, Unchained Capital is a great, business in the space, and see that, really it's really building towards that vision that we have, going forward. And so, I thought I'd just, put that comment out there, and, perhaps Parker, you could just tell us a little bit about the vision, that you've got, and what, what Unchained are trying to build out in terms of, you know, Bitcoin financial

building out in a way that's sort of really respecting the ethos of Bitcoin. so that for me is something important that I, I really like about Unchained. but, curious to get your thoughts as well, Parker, on, sort of where you see it going.

Yeah, well, well, first I, I just wanna say thank you. You know, we are, humbled to have, you know, Bitcoin Ventures as a partner. And really, you know, when we think about Unchain, you know, me personally and, you know, I think there, there, there is just this culture within the company that, that it's really by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. And, you know, I think that, you know, not even specific to Unchain, within the Bitcoin space, you know, while we're right in a big way

Touching the minority of the world, and even within the, and these are trigger words for me, but even within the crypto and blockchain worlds, having a view of developing applications specifically for Bitcoin and Bitcoiners is the minority, and, and for us, it is important we do want to have, you know, both have our clients have the ability to invest in Unchain, as well as others that may not be clients of Unchain, but like what it is we're building and how we're building it, and, you know, partnering with Bitcoin ventures and having- Bitcoin ventures through AngelList, allocate to, to Unchain is a great way to further connect us with, with, the community and, and our clients. And so it's really important to us, a-and we really value it a lot and we're, you know, extremely thankful. Corey, Jan, Lewis, yourself, all the work that you guys do, and realistically, it's not something that's specific to Unchain, it may be the first allocation, but there are many interesting projects and important projects within the Bitcoin space, and given the dynamics with a lot of the traditional VCs that may not have, you know, as- clearer view as to what Bitcoin is and the, and the right projects to fund, having an entity, in a fund like Bitcoin Ventures really is important, you know, in our view, we're incredibly grateful to have Bitcoin Ventures as a partner, but then we're excited to see the many other co-uh, companies that will be funded through that platform. So, you know, first and foremost, we're thankful for it, you know, in terms of Unchained and, and our vision. You know, really, you know, thinking about it as building the private bank and the financial services for Bitcoin the right way. And, and, and there, you know, when I say the right way, there is no true right way. It's, you know- It's, it's an output of a lot of bitcoiners coming together and recognizing what are the most acute problems that we have today, and then how would we best solve them. And, and our solution at Unchain isn't going to be necessarily the same as somebody at Casa, at River, at Coldcard, but the- But in aggregate, we're all complementing each other in, in some way. And so today at Unchained, you know, we really think about it as having that core nucleus around vaults, around multisig, around caravan, because, you know, if a few number of people own Bitcoin today, a hundred percent of people are going to need it. And in order, not necessarily for Bitcoin to be viable, but just to, to accelerate that curve, we need ways for people to securely store their Bitcoin in a sovereign way. And then the way that we think about, Un In our vision, it really is one of Bitcoin ubiquity, and we're working to, to build out a Bitcoin native ecosystem so that people can not only secure, securely store their Bitcoin, but then maximize the value of that Bitcoin. And so today, alongside the- the Vault product and multisig, we issue, Bitcoin backed loans for people that are looking to preserve their Bitcoin for the long term, but need access to dollar liquidity today. But really, you know, in terms of the, the services suite It, it is going to be much broader than that, you know, one thing that, you know, I'll, you know, announce here, we are, we have just launched a pilot that's only in Texas to, to be able to buy Bitcoin through Unchain. we, you know, we just launched it last week, we, we onboarded a client who had never owned Bitcoin before, and when we think about, really blurring those, those lines of an on-ramp, where, you know, traditionally or how people may have thought about Unchain

And lending, but realistically, if you wanted to be an Unchained client, today, you would have had to acquire your Bitcoin somewhere else. And, you know, again, it is just a pilot, we are testing it out, we are operating more in an OTC capacity, but it is really a powerful idea that you can go from zero to cold stored multisig and, and be able to allocate the Bitcoin, and, and we're trying to, to really tear down all of those barriers so that, that you never have to go, to go to an exchange. but, but, but recognize that there still is value. so, so that, that's a big project that they're working on. And then as we expand, it's just really thinking about as Bitcoin is commercialized and as Bitcoin evolves, what are the needs that need solved, and, and us as Bitcoiners, where do we need them solved, you know, most pressing? And so really, as we think about Bitcoin, we view it as money, and then, you know, as we think about money, what, what do we need alongside of that, its financial services? And in the right way, at least in our views, to build that is create the custody solution that ensures people's security for the long term, but that doesn't compromise their sovereignty, should sovereignty be a goal. And so we want to be that preferred place where, you know, maybe if you're a company, sovereignty isn't the goal and the financial control is, and so you may want to live in a collaborative custody suite where you only have one key, Unchain holds one key, and a third party holds the third. But really thinking about, you know, Re-envisioning the, the Bitcoin on-ramp, re-envisioning how companies and individuals will be cussing their Bitcoin in the future, and then layering on additional financial services as we go, kind of starting with that ethos that, that keys are important and that keys do matter, and that each one of the financial services that comes from here out on after, and again, today it's, it's custody. You know, lending, beginning to help people buy directly to cold stored vaults, cold stored multisig, thinking about the future of payments, but really just that, that, that very clear focus on Bitcoin and what the applications are that, that individuals and businesses, and we already have a number of businesses that, that, that are on our platform from family offices to, to onramps based in Aus- in Australia, investment funds, operating businesses that, that hold Bitcoin in treasury, and then in recognizing that- You know, individuals have businesses and businesses have individuals and helping solve all of those needs. So, you know, there are, you know, incrementally as Bitcoin is commercialized, there will be, you know, different applications, again, today in the world where, you know, you can still, still spend your depreciating fiat, the, the core focus is on preserving your Bitcoin and storing it for the long term and then acquiring it. So that's really where we're focused today, but, but we do kind of view, over the long term, Bitcoin as a, as a global transaction

Facilitate not only the security of their Bitcoin, but then also the movement and the facilitation of transactions, you know, however and wherever that may

be. Yeah, that's really great. yeah, really, aligned with that vision, I think, it's a really great step as well, that idea of helping people buy and directly have it already in cold storage, and so, already in a multi-signature cold storage, which would just be a huge step forward in terms of, the ecosystem and the ability for people to keep it secure. And a, If it is known that multisig is really easy to do and it's commonplace, then we might actually see less kind of efforts of like armed robbery or less efforts of like people trying to steal and attack because they know it's already a hard target, right? Whereas if you kind of know, oh, multisig is really hard, then, you know, someone might be thinking, oh, hey, he's probably got single sig, you know, you know, whereas now in this kind of multisig world, it's actually- Helping make it more, secure for everyone, and so it's, it's a really big, ecosystem benefit there.

yeah, it really, it really is, you know, for our, for, you know, you know, I never disclosed the identity of clients, but just having that idea of- A client, and you even, even made the reference that, you know, I'm probably the first person that bought Bitcoin straight into multi-sig cold storage, and didn't ever have to go to a Coinbase. And, and that idea of being able to, you know, educate users and have them feel comfortable, 'cause that is another element of it, that, that that user may not have felt comfortable if it was just going to a single-sig in certain applications, in others, and especially for sophisticated users, they would, but being able to make that jump, that the application of multi But then also in our instance, by having Unchained be a keyholder, feeling, you know, extra protected that, you know, I know now I have these pieces of information, I know how I'm supposed to secure them, I know how they work, and I know that should, you know, any individual or even multiple, you know, points of these, of these pieces of information, whether it's hardware devices or backups, should I lose access to them, I have Unchained there, you know, to help me move funds, and I'm also not then having to grab an address

you know, multi-sig wallet at Unchain, I can just have it deposited directly there. So it really was a powerful experience, it's something that we want to do more, but it is really, you know, it speaks to the vision that we have for Unchain, that, that it's more than just custody and it's more than just lending. It's, it's, a-and, and it's also more than just highly sophisticated and technical users. It is kind of blurring the gap between, you know, kind of onboarding and on-ramping to, you know, world without having and, and bypassing a, a, a world of, of full custody.

Excellent. And so I guess just from a Caravan standpoint, as that was our focus for most of this episode, is there anything else that listeners should look out for coming up or potentially are there any areas that you'd be interested in, say, pull requests or contributions?

Well, one thing that I, I, you know, an honorable mention, or maybe it deserves even more of an honorable mention, and I'll, I'll screw up his last name, so I'll just go with Kevin, but, you know, it, it was an example where, you know, now a friend of our company's, kind of looked at Caravan and built out a, what, what, he dubbed a cold car kitchen, and just, you know, took the initiative to, to develop an application, on top of, Caravan to be a tool, to, to elicit kind of contributions from outside developers, to, to come up with ideas. we've been talking with Christopher Allen with fully, you know, with Fully Noted, and, and they've been working to, to try to make Fully Noted compatible with Caravan. So that is an important element. I think, you know, Buck mentioned it before, if there's a single probably next thing coming to Caravan, it is, cold card support. but then also, you know, for Unchained Of this functionality that's been pushed in the upgrade to Caravan coming into Unchained Vault, and, and having the benefit of that, that new xPub architecture, the, the confirm on device, in the future, kind of, you know, having that UTXO management, and so, so realistically from here with Caravan, you know, kind of increasing the ability to, to verify addresses on device, cold card support, PSBT, but then, but then, you know, kind of bigger, bigger improvements then coming As we, kind of merge that functionality into the Unchain Vault.

Fantastic, guys. well, look, I think that's probably, the key points I was interested to touch on. so let's just leave it with, where listeners who wanna find you guys online, where can they find you?

yeah, sure. I'm on Twitter at at buck perley, and, GitHub, you can find me on the, the Caravan and Unchained open source projects as well as, as, as well as some of the, Elset stuff I, I, I maintain with Tyrion. So, yeah, GitHub and, and Twitter are probably the, the two best places for, for me.

Yeah, and you can find me, at parker a lewis on Twitter, and, you can also check out a lot of the updates on Caravan, on, on our blog at unchain-dash-capital dot com. my DMs are open on Twitter. Our team's based in Austin, Texas, so as the, as the global shutdown falls, if you're in Austin, you'd definitely look us up. you know, not only is the team of, at Unchain here in Austin, but then we've got an awesome, folks in the Bitcoin community around town. So if you're ever in town, definitely look us up, and you can find us online. And, and, and please do reach out with questions. And if you're interested in contributing to Caravan

We, you know,

we are looking for, for active involvement. Yeah, we have a, a lot of issues public on, on GitHub if anybody's interested in contributing or, or looking to get used to, the, the code a little bit. They're, they're all labeled, you know, there's, there's some easier ones to kind of get your feet wet, and if you did wanna play around with stuff like cold card, PSBT, bug fixing or extra features, I think there's, there's a lot there and, and we're pretty active on

We, we love contributors and we love working in the open source community. So

that's great, thanks very much, guys. I'm a big fan, I love the work you guys are doing, so thank you for the work you're doing on Caravan and on Unchained Capital. I think that's pretty much gonna do it for this episode, so thanks for joining me and, for everyone else, we'll see you out in the citadels.

Alright, see you, Stephane.