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Digital asset wallet firm Curv has announced that it has entered into an insurance partnership with reinsurance giant Munich Re.
In its announcement, Curv said that the insurance will cover up to $50 million of digital assets for the customers of its institutional wallet service. Munich Re is insuring Curv in the case of an external cyber breach or malicious behavior by Curv or one of its employees.
“We view this insurance milestone as a major validation of our wallet service and specifically our cloud based, cryptographically-enforced and distributed signing mechanism,” Curv said.
Founded in 2018, New York-based Curv raised $6.5 million from Team8 and Digital Currency Group earlier this year. It offers a cloud-based wallet service for institutional clients, which eliminates the private key. This means that there are no hot (online) or cold (offline) wallet, but a “universal accessible wallet” governed by cryptographically-enforced corporate policies and controls, it explained.
Curv has developed multi-party computation (MPC) protocols to sign blockchain transactions in a mathematically secure, distributed way, eliminating the single point of failure introduced by private keys.
For signing a transaction, both Curv and its customers independently store and secure shares that allow them to jointly sign transactions. In order to be successful, hackers would require both Curv’s and its customer’s shares at the same moment in time, which is highly unlikely, Curv said, adding:
“Even in an extreme scenario where both networks’ shares were somehow simultaneously compromised and a transaction were initiated outside of the corporate policy, Curv’s insurance would kick in to cover the loss.”
Customers would have to opt-in to the insurance backed service at an additional cost depending on the amount of assets they are managing through the Curv platform. They would have visibility into what portion of their funds falls under the insurance protection.
“Munich Re diligently audited Curv's cryptography, implementation, quality assurance, deployment and security procedures. The simple opt-in solution will provide comfort to Curv's customers because Curv will have the financial capability to pay for losses of crypto assets,” the press release said.
