Cyber Innovation Series 2022/23: LastingAsset

You can meet the team behind the innovation at the Cyber ASAP Demo Day on 22 February, where they will be showcasing their project alongside 14 other academic teams, as well as presenting their pitch and demonstrating their Proof of Concept.

Register interest to attend here.

About LastingAsset

It’s estimated that more than $140 billion worth of crypto assets have been lost by investors, due to the failure of current custody approaches to provide highly secure environments. Despite this, investors are still paying a fortune for services which are costly, inflexible and inaccessible, with no known platform providing a holistic solution to safeguarding investors’ crypto assets.

Having conducted desk research and interviews with crypto asset investors, the team at Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) found that whilst tokenisation seems to be the future, storing the private keys of these digital assets is still an issue, making crypto asset security a huge concern for customers.

The problem with existing custodian platforms is that security (e.g. key protection) is introduced at the expense of other essential aspects such as cost, scalability, governance policy flexibility and convenience.

The most common approaches to crypto asset custody are Multi-Signature, Hardware Security Module (HSM) devices, and Multiparty Computation (MPC). While HSM-based wallets suffer from accessibility issues and risk too much manual intervention, MPC and Multi-Signature wallets aren’t flexible enough or are too complex to implement.

With this in mind, the team from ENU set out to create a custody service that provides maximum security and accessibility. LastingAsset proposes a novel, highly-secure, cost-efficient and convenient crypto assets custody platform.

Building on cutting-edge technologies, such as trusted execution environment technology and Shamir Secret Sharing, it provides peace of mind to investors, keeping their crypto assets safe and accessible. The technology meets a number of key needs and offers the following benefits:

• Multi-layer security including location-based signing
• Innovative backup and recovery mechanisms
• Decentralised & scalable
• No single point of failure
• Much lower operational costs and less computational complexity
• Full key ownership
• Private keys downloadable at any time
• Non-custodian & custodian options
• Compliance ready
• Enforceable and flexible governance policies
• Accountability

What makes this custody solution appealing is its applicability to different crypto asset types such as NFTs and other tokens. Therefore it can be leveraged in different use cases in addition to cryptocurrency trading.

Meet the LastingAsset Team

Researchers from the Edinburgh Napier University established the idea of LastingAsset following years of work and research in the cyber security, blockchain and cryptography sectors. With a substantial amount of publications and papers between them, the team consists of:

• Dr Zakwan Jaroucheh – CTO with 7 years’ experience as a security software engineer
• Dr Baraq Ghaleb – System architect and assistant professor in cyber security
• Prof Bill Buchanan – Cryptographic researcher, led three successful spinouts
• Nanik Ramchandani – CEO, Commercial Champion

By spring 2023, the team hopes to have a prototype which they can use to run a pilot project, with the aim of delivering their first MVP by mid-late 2023.

Meet them at our Demo Day

Join us on Wednesday 22 February 2023 and be among the first to preview the team’s innovation, alongside a whole host of exciting cyber products and services from leading UK academic teams. Hear their pitches and learn more about each project in this unique showcase of ready-to-commercialise cyber innovations. Register here.

About CyberASAP

CyberASAP (Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme) is the only pre-seed accelerator programme in the cyber ecosystem which provides expertise, knowledge and support to convert academic research into commercial products and services.

CyberASAP is funded by the UK Government Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and delivered in partnership with Innovate UK and Innovate UK KTN.