I’m not allowed to tell you exactly how Anchorage keeps rich institutions from being robbed of their cryptocurrency, but the off-the-record demo was damn impressive. Judging by the $17 million Series A this security startup raised last year led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, Elad Gil, Mark McCombe of Blackrock, and AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, I’m not the only one who thinks so. In fact crypto funds like Andreessen’s a16zcrypto, Paradigm, and Electric Capital are already using it.
They’re trusting in the guys who engineered Square’s first encrypted card reader and Docker’s security protocols. “It’s less about us choosing this space and more about this space choosing us. If you look our backgrounds and you look at the problem, it’s like the universe handed us on the aisle platter the venn diagram of our skillset” co-founder Diogo Monica tells me.
Today, Anchorage is coming out of stealth and launching its cryptocurrency custody service to the public. Anchorage holds and safeguards crypto assets for institutions like hedge funds and venture firms, and only allows transactions verified by an array of biometrics, behavioral analysis, and human reviewers. And since it doesn’t use “buried in the backyard” cold storage, asset holders can actually earn rewards and advantages for participating in coin-holder votes without fear of getting their currency stolen.
The result is a crypto custody service that could finally lure big-time commercial banks, endowments, pensions, mutual funds, and hedgies into the blockchain world. Whether they seek short-term gains off of crypto volatility or want to HODL long-term while participating in coin governance, Anchorage promises to protect them.
Anchorage’s story starts eight years ago when Monica and his co-founder Nathan McCauley met after joining Square the same week. Monica had been getting a PhD in distributed systems while McCauley designed anti-reverse engineering tech to keep the US military data from being extracted from abandoned tanks or jets. After four years of building systems that would eventually move over $80 billion per year in credit card transactions, they packaged themselves as a “pre-product acquihire” Monica tells me, and they were snapped up by Docker.
As their reputation grew from work and conference keynotes, cryptocurrency funds started reaching out for help with custody of their private keys. One had lost a passphrase and the $1 million in currency it was protecting. The pair realized there were no true standards in crypto custody, so they got to work building Anchorage.
“You look at the status quo and it was and still is cold storage. It’s the same technology used by pirates in the 1700s” Monica explains. “You bury your crypto in a treasure chest and then you make a treasure map of where those gold coins are” except with USB keys, security deposit boxes, and checklists of where they are. “We started calling it Pirate Custody.”