Why did we build atato custody?

atato custody, to help store and manage crypto efficiently and securely

For the past 3 years we built blockchain solutions for the financial services industry. Our clients were national banks, brokers, digital assets exchanges, and decentralized finance protocols. All of them were facing the same issues: how to store and manage crypto assets efficiently?

Today we are launching the custody solution that we believe answers most of the challenges that businesses are facing by holding or managing cryptocurrencies.

As a cryptocurrencies user (some of our clients pay us in crypto) we started looking at custody providers on the market to store our digital assets. Custody solutions are not new, large custodians securing billions of assets for many years are already well established. We studied their offerings including security, price, functions, and capabilities. None of them were actually fitting our needs. Mostly, the underlying cryptography technology was not the most efficient or the features didn’t allow enough flexibility for users. But first and foremost, the process it took before you could start using the custody service is far from an easy online sign-up you would expect. It was unnecessarily time-consuming, and even after that you don’t usually get to test the product before payment..

Holding cryptocurrencies : the problem.

• For most of them you had to go through a sales representative, book a demo, make 2 or 3 calls before getting documentation and access. It is very unlikely that a “simple business-owning crypto” was going to go through that process just to store assets.
• Moreover the pricing was always based on assets under management or transaction fees, meaning the target customers of a few thousand usd in digital assets was not one of their targets.
• On top you could only store tokens that were supported by the custodian. No smaller ERC20 or new Defi protocols. The process of listing was often long and with no guarantees.
• No DeFi lending and staking integration for most of them.

What’s available today.

Owning digital assets or being paid in cryptocurrencies when you are a company today is not a simple task. Businesses have rules, regulations, and different departments with different mandatory requirements. Today for an enterprise to own or receive crypto assets you don’t have much options:

• Hardware wallet. While being a very good solution for individuals willing to be their own banks, they present major risk management issues when you are a corporate. Who in your company will have the responsibility to manage those assets and how? What if a mistake is made? What is the recovery process?
• Metamask. The most trusted Web3 wallet is a perfect tool to access all the Ethereum ecosystem. However, securing your Metamask to an enterprise-grade standard is not easy. Many hacks and stolen passwords have been reported. The security is simply not good enough.
• Major institutional custodians. While they are extremely successful for large institutions they are built around the same principles of traditional custodians. They are extremely effective for financial services such as liquidity or clearing but not that much for the simple storage of digital assets. Their customers are handling large amounts of cryptocurrencies with large deposits and withdrawals as well as many transactions per day. Their pricing is also reflected by using either asset under management (AUM) or transaction fees.

All the above flaws presented room to improve in the market: building a custody solution for any business holding cryptocurrencies from the exchange handling thousands of transactions a day to a smaller business just looking at storing its digital assets with an enterprise-grade solution.

Building the product we wanted as a user.

Atato Custody was imagined around the user first in mind.

• Security: atato custody uses multi-party computation for decentralized security. Our secured cryptography key management system is audited and certified.
• Customizable while secured: atato custody allows transaction and change policies approved by multiple parties to avoid a single point of failure.
• Recovery: atato custody offers disaster recovery. As every human can make a mistake it allows your business to handle digital assets custody by yourself while having a backup in case of password loss.
• Risk management: with atato custody, you can set up your own rules according to your company’s risk management policies. Different amounts of crypto transfer might need different approvals. For the best practice of monitoring, you can also generate regulatory-required reports and export any transaction information at your disposal. On our platform, all of this process is customizable as per your needs.
• Token-centered: we believe that tokens are going to become more and more regional and in a much greater number. With that in mind, we allow our clients to list any ERC 20 (and other chains soon) with one click. You don’t need to wait for your custodian to list your token anymore. We call this feature: bring your own token.
• Cost-effectiveness: as mentioned above most of the custodians use AUM or a number of transactions to set their price. We believe that a business should be able to predict their cost no matter the amount of crypto you own. We offer a fixed price per user with no AUM or transaction fees.
• Unlimited wallets: Create as many wallets as you need while saving up 90% in transactions and ERC 20 fees with our MPC technology.

Crypto Custody on the rise

As businesses around the world are adopting digital assets at an increasing rate the need for crypto custodyservice will only continue to grow. So far offerings on the market were mainly tailored for large financial institutions or crypto exchanges but with the adoption by smaller companies we need a product that fit their needs while maintaining the same level of security.