I do think for the industry to continue to grow and have mass adoption,
it has to be easy to use.
- You know, we've handed these out to a lot of people. - Absolutely.
People have been able to get ahold of them.
Other devices, if you hand those to people on the street,
they're just not going to put up with that level of effort.
Hey, guys! I'm joined by Dr. Adam Lowe.
He is the CIO of CompoSecure and also the Head of Product with CompoSecure
and also with Arculus, a project we'll be talking about today.
We covered it on the channel before.
It's a company and project that we work with here as a partner at BitBoy Crypto.
- Adam, how are you doing today? - Fantastic. Great to be here.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I mean, there's no reason to really delay.
Let's get into it. First and foremost,
what is Arculus in the most simple way you can explain it?
Sure.
Arculus at its core is a hardware wallet, right?
It is designed to store and secure your private keys
because, as you know, if they're not your keys,
it's not your crypto.
So, you know, at the end of the day,
your keys are generated on the smart card, right?
Just like you have any banking card,
there's a chip inside that keeps all your banking information safe,
there's a chip inside of an Arculus card that keeps your private keys for your crypto safe.
Yeah. That's good.
I think that custody is probably one of the most confusing things in crypto for people.
Like, when they, you know, try to figure out like, "Okay, well, how do I move it?
People say that I need it off of an exchange,
but when I move it, then that's a risk too if you don't really know what you're doing."
And like, you know, "Which is the lesser of two evils there?"
But let's talk about where it comes to hardware wallets and hacking and regulation,
where do you kind of see hardware wallets?
Like, where do you see their role in crypto going forward?
Sure.
So, I think hardware wallets really, at the end of the day,
I totally agree with your point about custody,
but it's really about keeping people safe and secure.
So Arculus actually can secure
non-custodial wallets for people who control their own keys.
And Arculus has additional technology where we can do passwordless login,
so if someone works with the major exchange, you know, on the B2B side,
we can actually help enable them to log in passwordlessly.
So Arculus is able to protect both custodial and non-custodial exchanges.
But to your point about regulatory,
- I think regulators will be okay with people custodying their own crypto. - Yeah.
I think at the end of the day, they're more concerned about on-ramps and off-ramps
and making sure they get their tax revenue.
Well, there's a lot of people that ask me that question, you know.
"What do I do if the government takes my crypto?"
I'm like, "You don't understand. They can't."
Like, when you have it on a device, like a hardware wallet like Arculus,
the government, even if they decide they want to ban crypto completely,
you're going to voluntarily turn that over.
And what do you guys do on the side of, like, KYC, and things like that?
Do you make your customers KYC when they buy a device?
And if so, you know, how are they still protected from a situation like that?
- No. So we do not make our customers KYC when they buy a device. - Perfect.
So you should--
Your customers should think about buying Arculus
as a really sophisticated and easy-to-use lock for their crypto.
Yeah. So, we'll have a link down below in the description for people to check out.
So, okay, well, cool. What--
Now, there are some features on this where you can buy and sell crypto?
Is that right? But it's not technically an exchange?
That's correct.
So, within Arculus,
you can use the Arculus app to what we call swap crypto.
So you can go fiat to crypto,
you can go dollars to Bitcoin,
or you can go crypto to crypto.
You can go Bitcoin to Ethereum and all our supported currencies.
So, you know, we're not an exchange.
We have licensed third party partners that enable us to do those functions,
and you will have to go through KYC/AML to do those functions if you so choose.
But just peer-to-peer.
You want to send crypto back and forth.
If you want to hold your crypto securely,
- you will not have to go through a KYC event. - Yeah.
And, you know, for any of those,
you will have to use Arculus' three factors of authentication.
- If you're not-- - Three-factor?
Yep. So, again, it's something you know, that's your PIN,
something you are, which is your biometric,
and something you have, which is your Arculus card.
But as you'll see from the demo, it's very seamless.
In fact, I would argue it's much easier if you have MFA turned on like Google Authenticator
in one of your major exchange accounts.
This is easier and less friction.
Awesome. Well, I would say, at this point, since you brought it up,
let's go ahead and see what it looks like. Let's check out the user interface
- and see how people use Arculus. - Sure.
And we got time, we'll get to some more questions.
No problem.
So, this is Arculus.
So, it should be familiar to anyone who's used a digital wallet before.
Here, you can see, it's live on the mainnet.
This is all real crypto and a real crypto wallet.
So, we tried to go for a pretty clean and easy UI.
I have just about everything turned on and threw a few dollars in here
just so everyone could see it.
So, as an example, we'll go into Bitcoin.
Let's say you want to see your Bitcoin holding.
You just tap Bitcoin.
Here, you can see your individual history.
I do a lot of demos,
so there's crypto flowing in and out of the Bitcoin wallet here.
If I want to receive, I just tap "Receive".
There's my public address.
I can hit "Share" and send out via Slack, text, Discord, whatever I want to do.
If I want to send crypto, I can hit "Send".
And if I wanted to scan a friend's QR code, I could just hit that QR code button and scan it.
Another great feature of Arculus is let's say I want to repeat a transaction,
here, you can see a prior transaction with the address, hash, how much you sent,
simply hit "Repeat transfer".
Let's say I want to send $1 Bitcoin,
just hit next.
Here, on this demo here, I'm going to enter in my 6-digit PIN,
and then I'm going to tap my Arculus card to the back of the phone,
and then tap,
sign the transaction,
and just like that,
we sent crypto out of cold storage.
So, for some of your user base who's used other cold storage devices,
- I would argue that this is infinitely faster, easier to use, less friction. - Yeah.
- Well, they're certainly a pain. - And even more--
They're certainly a pain, you know, a lot of other wallets.
And I see user interface looks good.
You know, I think sending seemed like it was very very very quick.
What would you say separates, you know, you've got the ease of use, right?
You got the clean user interface.
A lot of places, a lot of, you know, wallets have clean user interfaces.
That's true.
What would you say makes Arculus superior to something like a Trezor or a Ledger?
Sure. So I think it's a couple factors.
I mean, one is having used some of those other devices,
you know, it's not just their interface, they have decent apps,
but the actual connection and clicking through the submenus
and navigating through the firmware and confirming
and trying to push two buttons at once to hit OK.
The actual use of the hardware device is really, really challenging and confusing for a lot of people.
And the second thing that we think makes Arculus unique really is its offline nature, right?
So a lot of those other devices have WiFi or Bluetooth or something
that, at the end of the day, is hackable.
So Arculus is completely passive, right?
There's no battery.
There's no cables.
There's no charging.
The only time it talks to anything is when you tap it to the back of your phone
and it talks over encrypted NFC to the phone
as it essentially takes the hash and signs the block.
So we think that's also a differentiating feature really.
So you simply tap to transact.
Everybody's tap the card to the terminal and is familiar with the concept,
- so it's really easy to use. - Got it.
Now, how much do these cost?
- Arculus retails for $99, - Oh, that's not bad.
- so it's non-competitive with other hardware wallets. - Yeah. Very affordable.
If you don't have $99 to buy a hardware wallet,
then you have not been doing crypto right, my friend.
I would just like to say that.
Now, in terms of the currencies you support,
like here on the screen, we see Aave, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin, Compound.
Compound, which actually got exploited and hacked recently twice.
But how do you guys go about choosing what currencies that you hold?
I assume it probably supports all ERC-20s.
- Or maybe it doesn't. Okay, it does. Okay. - Yes.
- So-- - So, it will not dis--
It does not display every single ERC-20,
but if you have an ERC-20 resident at your Ethereum address,
it's still there.
Just because it's not showing up in the app doesn't mean it hasn't been added yet.
So, the wallet supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum,
a whole bunch of ERC-20 tokens and XRP.
- So we do have additional currencies on the roadmap. - Nice!
But at this time, that's what the wallet currently displays.
So, you know, how do we pick those?
We picked the ones that are, you know, large by market cap clearly,
and we're planning on adding additional protocol ecosystem currencies,
things that have state machines,
so that they can support a whole bunch of tokens
- and really the ecosystem-- - I think that's a--
- What kind of machine? - A state machine.
- So like the Ethereum Virtual Machine, right? - Got it.
- That manages all its smart contracts. Yep. - EVMs. Right.
Binance has something similar. Avalanche has something similar.
So I think-- Solana, which I'm really excited about.
So I think, you know, looking forward, by adding currencies and--
No promise states. These are on the roadmap.
By adding currencies like those that support an entire ecosystem,
- you can additionally look at tokens, - Right.
and it really buys you a lot more than chasing the latest memecoin.
Yeah, you've just got to go after the big chains that are doing important stuff,
and then everything that launches on those chains theoretically should be able to get held.
Now, something going on in the ecosystem a lot of these blockchains is DeFi,
decentralized finance.
And one of the main components of this is staking.
Do you guys currently offer staking on any of the coins people are holding?
And if not, when do you plan on doing that?
Sure. We currently do not.
I'll tell you near on the roadmaps, we're planning on adding WalletConnect
so that people can jump into the DeFi space and connect to their platform of choice,
and then they can work through exchanges, decentralized exchanges, etc.
You know, direct staking, we're working with regulatory right now
to make sure that when we do it, we do it in a compliant way
because there's a few people out there that do staking that don't do it in a compliant way,
and that's not a space Arculus is looking to be in.
So it's on our roadmap quickly,
but it's kind of getting through the lawyers right now.
Okay. Understood.
Now, I want to go back to the actual kind of like hardware components to this
because you have the device, but you also have the card.
I guess that's, you know, a version of the card that's sitting up there behind you
which kind of looks like a Spartan there.
- What does Arculus mean? - Okay.
Is that Spartan language?
So, Arculus is the Roman god of safe and strongboxes.
- So we call that gentleman behind us our guardian. - Oh.
- So Arculus is your guardian of your cryptocurrency. - Nice! I like that. That's good.
But as far as the card goes, you know,
because you said it's something that you are, which is your biometric,
something that you--
I can't remember how you put it--
- something you have, it's the device. Yeah. - Have. It is your card. Yup.
So, what if someone were to lose the card?
What would happen then?
Sure. So the most two important facts if you lose your card,
the first is if someone finds your card on the street,
there's nothing they can do with it, right?
They don't know your PIN.
They don't know your 12-word recovery phrase.
They don't have your biometric.
There's nothing they can do with your card if they find it on the street.
The second, for your crypto, it's not gone.
When you create an Arculus account,
you get a 12-word recovery phrase, like most hardware wallets.
You can get another Arculus card,
go through a restore process,
and you're back in business.
Awesome. Well, that doesn't sound too bad at all.
So, you know, just in terms of kind of hardware devices,
- I think what you're doing is quite revolutionary in a lot of ways. - Appreciate it.
You know, all the different-- the 3-factor, all the different components.
But where do you kind of see hardware devices, like, let's go 10 years down the road,
do you think this is going to be a sustainable industry?
And these are going to be around, they're just going to get easier to use?
Where do you see Arculus playing a role in the next 10 years of crypto?
Sure.
You know, I think the wonderful thing about crypto is an empowered people at a financial level
and it's empowered people to make choices.
So I think some people will choose to keep their crypto on centralized exchanges.
And that's totally cool. That's their choice.
And they'll continue to see security grow, and we're happy to secure those.
And you'll see some people choose to keep individual wallets
and custody their keys and have hardware devices securing that.
And we think Arculus will make a major play there.
I do think for the industry to continue to grow and have mass adoption,
it has to be easy to use.
- You know, we've handed these out to a lot of people. - Absolutely.
People have been able to get ahold of them.
Other devices, if you hand those to people on the street,
they're just not going to put up with that level of effort.
So, you know, we believe and I believe strongly in the kind of mainstream adoption of crypto
for various use cases.
And, you know, I want this super easy to use.
I would love this in a clamshell at Target,
and people grab it and anyone can use it.
And I think that's the future of hardware wallets.
It has to be easy enough for anyone to use.
Yeah. I mean, I definitely agree with you there.
I think that that's--
And this is what I tell people.
Like, you know, we work with Ledger also.
And we tell people whenever I talk to--
you know, whenever we're doing a video on Ledger,
I tell everybody, you know, the thing is,
it's not that you need to worry about getting a device today
and moving everything off onto it,
but you need to buy a device and learn how to use it,
and then when the situation does come up where you're ready to transfer,
for whatever reason it may be,
it may just be on a whim,
it may be something you've decided to do,
it may be because you think somebody's coming after your crypto,
somebody's coming after an exchange,
whatever it is,
you have the power and you're enabled to be able to do that.
I think it's really important that everyone understands how to use hardware wallets.
It's a very key component of crypto.
So, Adam, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's been a great video.
You guys don't forget, go check out Arculus.
We'll have a link down below in the description for you guys to go give this one a shot.
I think the 3FA is very revolutionary.
I think it's definitely something.
It's easy and it's very secure.
You can't really beat that.
- So, Adam, thank you so much for joining us. - Appreciate it. Thank you.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And to all the viewers at home, let us know what you think about the Arculus wallet.
Drop those comments down below.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.