Company Name: Casa

Founders: Nick Neuman, Jameson Lopp and others

Date Founded: Late 2017

Location of Headquarters: Remote

Website: https://casa.io/

Public or Private? Private

Being self-sovereign isn’t easy — especially if you aren’t technically-minded.

The team at Casa gets this and this is why, for over six years, the company has been helping customers secure their bitcoin in multisig wallets (also referred to as multi-key vaults).

The company was the first to offer an easy-to-use version of such a product that also came with customer support. It was Casa’s plan from the onset to be there for their customers, as this type of support was lacking in the broader crypto industry.

“The service element was what was missing from a lot of solutions out there,” Casa co-founder and CEO Nick Neuman told Bitcoin Magazine.

“People need help doing this stuff, especially for large amounts of money. It was always the plan to support customers, because it was impossible to get support from exchanges or hardware wallets,” he added.

“So, we just took a very support-heavy and user experience focused approach to everything.”

Casa’s approach has paid off, as the company has become a household name in the Bitcoin and crypto space, and has come a long way since Neuman first had the idea for a company like Casa seven years ago.

How Casa Started

It was toward the latter part of the 2017 bitcoin bull run when Neuman had grown tired of his previous work in finance and tech, and found himself down the proverbial Bitcoin (and crypto) rabbit hole. By February 2018, he had an idea for a company and entered himself into a hackathon to attempt to bring the idea to life.

“I participated in the first ETHDenver hackathon,” said Neuman.

“I went in with an idea that I called key split, which was basically taking a private key using Shamir secret sharing and creating a social recovery mechanism,” he added.

“I recruited a couple of people at the hackathon to build it with me, and we ended up winning.”

Neuman quit his job and set out to start a company around this technology he and his team had created. But word had gotten out about his victory at ETHDenver, and the previous CEO of Casa, who was the head of the company before it pivoted to offering multisig wallets, reached out to Neuman, asking him to come on board.

It was after learning that Casa had just recruited Jameson Lopp, self-described “professional cypherpunk” and now Chief Security Officer at Casa, that Neuman decided to join the team.

“I was like, ‘Well, Jameson’s going to be an unfair advantage,’” recalled Neuman with a chuckle. “Instead of starting my own company, I’m going to join.”

Soon after Neuman came on board, Casa retired its then flagship product, the Casa Node, and the company shifted its focus to user-friendly multi-key vaults, a much needed product at the time. Before Casa, multisig software was so complicated that even Neuman himself struggled to use it.

“There was the Armory multisig wallet and the Glacier protocol,” recounted Neuman.

“Glacier wasn’t even software. It was like a giant GitHub repo that you had to follow in order to set up your cold storage. Armory was super janky, too. I remember trying to use it once, and I couldn’t figure it out,” he added.

“We were the first to create multisig that was usable.”

How Casa Works

Casa offers users two main set ups. The first is a five-key vault, which includes three keys on three different hardware wallets, one on the user’s phone (which is backed up securely in the cloud) and one that Casa holds.

This was Casa’s first multisig product, which it rolled out while the company primarily focused on serving customers with a high net worth in bitcoin. Casa learned an important lesson while serving these clients, which was that even if developers create easy-to-use software, people still want an expert there supporting them as they use it — especially if they’re securing a lot of value.

“When you’re dealing with millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, you really want to have an expert there who helps make sure that you don’t make a mistake,” said Neuman.

Casa’s other main product is for those who might not be sitting on bitcoin whale-type wealth, but who still hold enough bitcoin where a less-than-ideal security setup has the potential to keep them awake at night.

This product is Casa’s three-key vault, which the company brought to market in early 2019. It includes a key on a hardware wallet, a key on the user’s phone (which can be swapped out for another key on a second hardware wallet if the user prefers) and a key that Casa holds.

Casa began offering this setup because it “always wanted to be able to offer great security and usability to as many people as possible,” according to Neuman.

New Casa Services And Features

In the past year, Casa has further broadened the services it offers.

Two weeks ago, it announced its Enterprise Plan, which enables companies to more easily secure their bitcoin treasuries.

“We’ve had businesses using Casa for self-custody for years, but they were always using our retail plans and just making it work,” explained Neuman.

“We changed that, though, because I think corporate treasuries holding bitcoin has been popularized by MicroStrategy. We actually see that as a growing trend that’s worth taking advantage of, and we’re hearing from more Bitcoin companies that are storing bitcoin on their balance sheet that they need help with security,” he added.

This summer, Casa also began enabling users to replace hardware wallets used in their vaults with YubiKeys.

“We see people struggle with hardware wallets all the time, and so we were thought ‘How can we make this simpler?’” said Neuman. “We pieced together a couple of new pieces of technology that have passkey and and YubiKey key capabilities and were able to build something that hadn’t been done before.”

And in March, Casa launched Casa Inheritance, a service that makes it easier for the loved ones of Casa users to access the bitcoin secured in the vaults in the event of a user’s death.

“With Inheritance, we heard from our customers all the time ‘Okay, I feel good about my Casa setup, but I’m worried about what happens if I die,’” explained Neuman. “So, we built that feature to make it super easy for their family to recover the bitcoin in case the main account holder dies.”

Normalizing Multisig

Despite all of the work Casa has done in the last six years, some still have an emotional block when it comes to switching to a multisig setup. Whether it’s because this type of wallet format was more difficult to enable years ago or because it’s understandably anxiety-provoking to make changes to one’s bitcoin security, people seem to drag their feet when it comes to using a multisig setup — even if they really want to — according to Neuman.

“They hear the word ‘multisig’ and they’re like, ‘That’s too hard,’” explained Neuman. “What they don’t realize is that to get started with multisig with Casa, you can use your same hardware wallet, and it is literally the same amount of effort as using a hardware wallet, but you significantly improve your security by doing it.”

Neuman thinks that more people will come around and that multisig will become more widely adopted, especially during a bull market.

“It takes the price of bitcoin going up where people suddenly have more value to secure,” said Neuman. “And it takes people hearing from their friends ‘Yeah, I’m doing multisig and it’s not as hard as it sounds.”

For those that do get the urge to try Casa, the company is allowing people to try the service at no charge for a month.

Neuman feels that as more users come on board, it will not only benefit them, but potentially the industry at large as well.

“If we can make it out of this bull market without another massive blow up like FTX because we’ve helped more people self-custody in a way that they feel good about, that feels like a real win to me.”

This space is suffering from a problem of inverted perceptions. What makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place is its decentralized nature. The fact that it is a distributed system, with no central point of control, no central point of influence, not even a central point of interface for its users. This is the source of its resiliency and reliability. Without this property, without the ability to simply download a piece of software and start interacting with it, there is really no value to be found.

It’s fundamentally no different from a bank database at that point. No one can be guaranteed access when someone (the operator) wants to take it away, no core properties like the supply cap or inflation rate can be guaranteed when someone (the operator) can change them at a whim.

Many people in this space cheer on the erosion of these properties at this point. They champion solutions like ETFs and other custodians as a pathway to pumping the price and increasing their own fiat denominated net worth. They attack those working towards and advocating for solutions that don’t compromise the core value propositions of Bitcoin, painting them as spooks “risking what makes Bitcoin valuable.”

It is a complete inversion of reality. The Spooks are Heroes, and the Heroes are Spooks.

Saylor is literally defending custodians as a superior path to adoption than self custody. He is comparing people building and selling tools for self custody to FUDsters and fear mongers, or “paranoid crypto anarchists.” Painting the people who are building the tools necessary to defend and maintain the core properties of Bitcoin that give it value in the first place. He totally ignores the dynamics that led to gold and its role as a sound money to melt away over time as governments interfered and manipulated it.

They accomplished this because all of the gold was held by custodians, no one held it themselves. No one directly used it, everyone choosing to use paper substitutes disconnected from the precious metal itself instead. Bitcoin can very much suffer the same fate. Whether through paper bitcoin diluting market demand, or custodians outright gaining influence over the consensus process and outright changing rules to suit their own needs and wants.

Bitcoin is a social consensus system, its nature is defined entirely by actors who participate in the system. The scale of those actors, their own individual nature(s), the vulnerability to government interference, how many of them make up the majority of economic activity (more being better, less being worse), all of these things factor heavily into how Bitcoin will evolve and exist as a system.

Many people in this space are cheering on short term actions that compromise its resilience in the long term as a neutral and decentralized system for perceived short term benefits in the form of price appreciation and economic gains. Developers working diligently and with little gratitude to maintain those core properties that give it value are attacked as spooks and government agents, while corporate suits and actual spooks attacking those properties are cheered on as heroes.

The world in this space is upside down. 

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Mastercard has partnered with Bitcoin and crypto payments provider Mercury to launch a euro-denominated debit card allowing users to spend Bitcoin and crypto directly from non-custodial wallets, as per Cointelegraph. 

JUST IN: 🇪🇺 Mastercard launches euro non-custodial #Bitcoin and crypto debit card.

They have over 100 MILLION merchants 🚀 pic.twitter.com/xpASRDrhVx

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) September 5, 2024

The card enables European Bitcoin holders to spend from their self-hosted wallets at any of Mastercard’s over 100 million merchants globally without needing to custody funds with an intermediary.

Mastercard is a payments titan serving nearly 1 billion customers in over 210 countries. This latest integration reflects the company’s growing efforts to bridge Bitcoin with its sprawling traditional payments infrastructure.

“We are providing consumers who want to spend their digital assets with an easy, reliable, and secure way to do so, anywhere Mastercard is accepted,” said Christian Rau, Senior Vice President of Mastercard’s crypto unit.

The card allows spending Bitcoin and other crypto simply by connecting a non-custodial wallet. Users avoid selling Bitcoin and crypto on an exchange before spending, maintaining full ownership. However, Mastercard’s card does have fees, including a €1.6 issuance fee, €1 monthly maintenance fee, and a 0.95% transaction fee. 

Nonetheless, by supporting non-custodial wallets, Mastercard addresses a major pain point and grants users the flexibility to directly control their Bitcoin and crypto. The move caters to a growing audience preferring self-hosted wallets over centralized exchanges.