By Matt Jacobus & Erhan Soyer-Osman

Back in the day, if the master of coin wanted to transact he had to send a raven to Bravos, to have a guard enter the bank vault, and wait for a ship to return across the Narrow Sea with his silver stags and copper pennies. Fast forward to today’s cryptosphere, and things have improved only slightly. If you want to transact securely in cryptocurrency, you send a message to your custodian asking them to: physically enter a vault, collect your keys, walk them to an internet enabled device, sign your transaction and finally, send your crypto. Your electronic trustless future is neither. It is being slowed to the pace of a human worker in the (fantastical) middle ages, who you must also trust! Fortunately, now there is hopefully a better solution.

We’re happy to announce that Two Sigma Ventures is leading an $8M seed investment in Trustology, a new platform for safeguarding digital assets. Their first product, TrustVault, strives to streamline this process and authenticate using biometrics, encrypt instructions using a user device’s secure enclave, sign transactions in an infrastructure where no human can access and no computer other than your device can message, and finally write transactions to the blockchain.

At Two Sigma Ventures, we’re intimately familiar with the power of electronic and systematic approaches to finance, so we recognized Trustology’s TrustVault solution as a potential game changer for any institution or enterprise that needs immediate access to their digital assets to manage investments, risk, or just plainly to transact real-time. TrustVault also hopes to have a strong and flexible authentication solution for institutions that require multiple sign-offs, supporting strong user authentication mechanisms for m-of-n transactions, customizable smart contract design, account transacting controls, just to name a few.

Being a crypto-first, high-functioning team that is focused on security is just one aspect of what we think makes the Trustology team great. Equally important we believe, especially in the case of institutional-grade custody, is the expertise in regulatory, compliance and risk measures that can only come from deep industry experience. Alex Batlin, Founder and CEO, brings the combination of these capabilities, having formerly led technical blockchain innovation at both UBS and BNY Mellon (one of the largest custodians in the world) while also serving as a founding member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and R3 consortium.

We’re excited to join ConSensys in backing the Trustology team as they set out to realize a better way for enabling digital asset security. Huge congrats to the team on this exciting milestone, and we’re looking forward to supporting them through this next phase of growth. For coverage of this new round of financing, please also take a look at Business Insider, VentureBeat, and Reuters here.

The views expressed herein are solely the views of the author(s) and are not necessarily the views of Two Sigma Ventures, LP or any of its affiliates. They are not intended to provide, and should not be relied upon for, investment advice.