Behind the Investment: ZenGo – a Simple, yet Sophisticated Wallet for the Masses

Crypto can be intimidating. There is a staggering amount of innovation happening across the ecosystem, and evolution cycles create seemingly monthly paradigm shifts. Top talent is flooding into crypto, and they’re hungry to build Web3.0. It’s hard to keep up even as an investor focusing on the industry. It’s fascinating. It’s confusing. It will come in waves, but it’s certainly here to stay.

Despite all the advances happening across DeFi, from AMMs to synthetic assets, we believe the average consumer has been left behind. Major centralized exchanges and FinTechs provide fiat on-ramps to purchase blue chip tokens, but their custodial architecture creates structural product limitations that restrict access to innovation.

On the other hand, non-custodial solutions are too complex for the consumer. Consumers shouldn’t be at risk of phishing scams or rug pulls, and surely we can’t expect every consumer to speak in gwei! But most concerning with non-custodial wallets is private key management. For almost all non-custodial wallets, if you lose your private key, you lose your funds. There is no “I forgot my password” in today’s world, you’re left relying on a social recovery solution at best.

Enter ZenGo. Through innovations in multiparty computing (MPC), the team has built a new breed of crypto wallet. The ZenGo wallet is keyless, distributed, and on-chain. It solves the problem of private key management without sacrificing access to crypto-native ethos and protocols. Set up takes less than a minute, funds are secured through threshold signatures (making ZenGo safer than competing self-hosted wallets), and accounts can be recovered with a simple biometric face scan. All of this is done while adhering to the core principals of decentralized security – ZenGo never has access to a customer’s full private key because it is never generated in the first place. ZenGo has built a unique hybrid wallet that unlocks functionality not possible in the black-and-white world of custodial and non-custodial solutions.

What excites us most about ZenGo is the team. Ouriel, Tal, and Omer bring a special combination of consumer know-how and crypto expertise. They have a close watch on the latest developments across the ecosystem, and they push the limits of threshold cryptography and MPC through their ZenGo X research group. As new protocols mature, the team consumerizes innovations into clean products with intuitive user experiences. The result is radical simplicity built on extreme sophistication.

Today, ZenGo offers a fiat on-ramp, buy / sell functionality, high APR DeFi savings, and crypto-to-crypto trading. The team is hard at work building new products (including a crypto card through its partnership with Visa).

Crypto is built on the ethos of democratized access (yes, even those without laser eyes deserve DeFi), and we’re excited to partner with ZenGo on the mission to unlock the crypto frontier for every consumer.