How a $3 Million Mistake Inspired the Most Secure Crypto Wallet
It’s everyone’s nightmare to wake up one day to have lost their money, especially in crypto where hacking has led to the loss of billions every year. One CEO, Derek Rodriguez, lost his mined bitcoin in 2013 – the equivalent of $3 million at today’s prices. This spurred him to create Gridlock, the safest and easiest way to store cryptocurrency.
Rodriguez started mining Bitcoin when his university friend told him about it in 2009: “I thought I had already missed the boat with Bitcoin, but I decided to mine it anyway after following the news on its development”.
Signals of Impending Loss
Everything changed years later when he noticed he could not find the Bitcoin he had worked so hard for. At today’s value, the Bitcoin would have been worth $3 million, which is no easy acceptance to come to.
The reality is that Derek Rodriguez is not alone; billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency is lost or stolen every year. The obvious answer is that everyone needs security over their assets, but other options have either been prone to hacking or so complicated that newcomers get turned away.
Given the reality check, Rodriguez made it his mission to improve crypto security and make it accessible for everyone. Enter his brainchild, Gridlock, a crypto wallet app for IOS and Android.
Gridlock Splitting Private Key
Gridlock splits a private key into 5 and distributes the pieces between a network of devices, never allowing it to be in one place. Because of this the odds of hacking into a wallet are so low that it may as well be impossible.
Gridlock is in its infancy and currently users can only store Ethereum in their wallets. This may pose a problem to new users joining, as competitors like MEW and
Metamask allow users to store other ERC-20 tokens, NFTs and interact with Defi protocols.
Gridlock will have its work cut out to attempt to compete with the existing wallets on the market despite some of those features currently in development. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see where Gridlock goes in the future.
