Ecash Ecosystem Rises to Challenge in the Defense of Decentralized Custody

BTC++, Berlin, and breakthroughs in advancing Bitcoin custody

A few weeks ago, I argued that the Bitcoin ecosystem kept asking the wrong question, tending to frame everything as “trusted” or “trustless.” Instead, I urged people to ask “How many independent things have to go wrong before you lose your money?”

This is a guest post by Obi Nwosu, Co-Founder of Fedi and Fedimint. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Look at Liquid or, weeks before that, Coldcard. Matt Corallo expressed the issue in the most succinct terms: run the same software, suffer the same bugs.

That critique applied to Fedimint, too, and I’m the first to say it. We built it to remove single people and single institutions as points of failure. But there was just one implementation of the protocol — a software monoculture below federations of humans. Not secure enough. 

And so I’m happy to say that Fedimint developers have already responded.

At Ecash Hackday in Berlin, the Fedimint team got a single federation running across three independent implementations, with Cashu’s thesimplekid building one of them.

Three separate codebases, one federation, holding funds together. Developers have begun to create a solution to the monoculture I called out a few weeks ago. And the team’s response was to ask who builds the fourth, which is exactly the spirit I was hoping for.