This Week in Custody is a newsletter covering technical and narrative developments in digital asset custody written for wallet engineers, digital asset operators, and security engineers.
This Sunday is the anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper. Worth reading those nine pages again. Thank you Satoshi!
News
NYDIG. NYDIG announces its first US bank partners that will use its platform to buy, sell, and custody Bitcoin.
FDIC. The FDIC is preparing a framework for how banks can custody crypto.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin Core. Release notes for Bitcoin Core 0.20.2.
Schnorr. This cheatsheet on Schnorr is worth reading. Covers all things Schnorr in one gist.
Bitcoin Core. Tweet thread on how Bitcoin Core finds entropy.
Muun. Christopher Allen voices feedback on Muun’s wallet recovery process.
P2P. Another podcast episode from Chaincode on Bitcoin’s P2P network.
Flow. Voltage announces Flow. Looks like a simple interface to utilize Lightning Labs’ Pool for leasing LN channels on-demand.
Ethereum
Identity. Primer on all the identity schemes popular on Ethereum.
Git. Someone committed their Ethereum private key to a repo and all funds were sweeped in less than 5 minutes. The timing is impressive, but not surprising.
Security at EthGlobal. Video from the security panel at EthGlobal.
Interoperability. Slides on interoperability security.
Composable Finance. New SDK on multi-chain composability.
Cream Finance. Early reports about a hack targeting Cream Finance.
Recurring Payments. Proposed spec for recurring payments.
Other Chains
Polkadot. Substrate conference videos are online for days 1 and 2.
Kusama. An exploit is found and stopped on Kusama. This is a good data point on the value of a canary network.
Solana. Solana implemented a VM for eBPF programs. Really neat. Has anyone tried writing eBPF modules in the context of custody?
Security
Go. New Go 1.18 will embed some source versioning info into binaries.
Vulnerabilities. Paper provides an empirical study of vulnerabilities in blockchains.
GCHQ. The British intelligence agency is organizing a new unit to fight ransomware.
Semantic Search. Google Project Zero shares its semantic search tool called Weggli.
EU Green Pass. The EU’s Green Pass (covid passport) implementation leaked private keys.
Security. Cryptography. Whatever. New podcast episode covering PAKEs and PRFs. Absolutely love this Podcast. Worth subscribing.
Have a great week! 👻