Ruben Merre
Xavier Hendrickx
Edouard Vanham
Ruben Merre
CEO, Co-Founder @ Ngrave
What is the end goal towards the creation of the ‘NGRAVE’ project?
NGRAVE’s mission is to empower you to start truly owning what is yours.
That means we focus on radically improving your security and your ease of use when you are managing your digital assets and cryptocurrencies. We aim for as little discrimination as possible in this regard.
What we mean with that is that we want to empower businesses as much as end consumers.
It also means that each specific buyer persona or segment should at one point be able to reach such a level of empowerment, by using one of our solutions. We understand that this is a long haul project.
Our current end-consumer market-oriented product suite will need modifications to the particular requirements of businesses.
It might even mean we have to introduce multiple brands. For example if we want to cater to specific segments with higher or lower purchasing power.
Also, we see usability as a dimension of security. If you can make mistakes when using your device, you might end up losing your crypto, regardless of any physical anti-tampering or other extreme security measures that protect the device.
To truly empower you, we need to make extreme security a hygiene factor. And as much goes for the user experience level as well.
In the end, this should lead to our tagline #OwnYourAssets.
Our project also has a broader goal of fostering worldwide blockchain adoption. By removing the security and usability hurdles, it will become safer and easier to invest in, develop, and integrate the technology.
We envision becoming a major player in the blockchain security space and we will advocate the technology’s potential for many societal challenges.
What is the greatest lesson learned on the implementation and development of ‘NGRAVE’?
Your team is beyond doubt one of, if not the most important aspects of your business. Finding the right people - be it team members or business partners - is like a constant search for a needle in a haystack, over and over again.
And every time you make the wrong choice, it will cost you dearly.
As a CEO, you should be on the continuous look-out for potential talent and make such reflections constantly in the back of your head.
Is this an A player and will this A player function as such in my current business context (e.g. stage of the company, etc.).?
Maybe he’s a great addition to the team somewhere in the future? Or, in - unfortunately - the majority of cases, he’s simply isn’t an A player and far from what will make your company great.
At NGRAVE, we have made it a mission to constantly aim to work with the best possible partners. And I believe we have done a great job on that to this date.
Great examples are our top partners imec and COSIC, both world leaders in their specific field.
I’m also proud to have convinced one of the greatest minds that shaped the world of cryptography for the past five decades, Jean-Jacques Quisquater, a famous professor, and the second reference of the bitcoin paper.
It really shows how serious we are about building our team.
Xavier Hendrickx
CTO, Blockchain Developer & Co-Founder @ Ngrave
What inspired you for the security design of the ‘NGRAVE Zero’ and the ‘NGRAVE Graphene?
In the blockchain space, you are supposed to be your own bank. But if you want to be your own bank, you want to understand how your security works.
That’s why we decided to innovate in the key creation process and the transaction signing flow in such a way that it would be easy to understand for anyone why our solution is safe.
With the key creation, instead of just being given a key and handing over the security of this part to the hidden chip, we also involve the user by gathering data from his/her environment such as light and fingerprint, as well as giving the user the option to manipulate the entropy from the random number generator directly.
The transaction data that needs to be signed is communicated over QR codes. QR codes are one-directional, small in data size, and what they contain easy for anyone to verify.
This is different from Bluetooth or USB which is communicating in both ways and it is very hard for the user to verify exactly what is being transferred.
Finally, for the backup solution we wanted to solve the problem of the existing solutions that have you store your most important secrets all together in one location.
Our Graphene effectively splits the backup into two parts, and it does this in a very intuitive and easy to understand way.
Everyone can understand you come recombine the upper and lower plate to uncover the backup key.
How do you describe the security user experience of ‘NGRAVE’ and the end goal to bring down to zero any type of attack?
We want the user to experience a complete and intuitive understanding of the main security aspects of our wallet.
In a nutshell, users buy a hardware wallet because they are concerned about the creation of a safe key and to be able to sign transactions in a fully secure way. We think we provide the best user experiences for both by our processes that each is intuitively easy to understand.
At the key creation process you participate by scanning your fingerprint and shuffling parts of the key yourself.
At transaction signing, due to the use of QR codes, the users understand that the process is one-directional and they can verify the content themselves.
Both of these aspects virtually reduce the likelihood of remote attacks to zero.
For physical security (i.e. if a thief has physical access to your device) we have included extremely high levels of tamper resistance. Finally, unlike most other hardware wallets, we also believe security is indirectly in the ease of use of your wallet.
If your hardware wallet is too cumbersome to use, you end up keeping your funds in unsafe wallets. Our wallet has a high-quality touch screen and feels solid in your hands, adding so much more in terms of user experience.
Edouard Vanham
COO & Co-Founder @ Ngrave
Explain the importance that ‘Ngrave’ as brand and product are adding to the digital assets market?
Blockchain technology will be one of those revolutions that will transform how people and companies interact with each other.
We are still in an early building stage, where we first got to have the Infrastructure layer right, before we see a user-friendly Application layer.
In the end, I don’t think we will speak about ‘blockchain’ and ‘cryptocurrencies’, however, they will be the backbone (and backend) of society.
The use cases where blockchain can have a positive impact are huge. Bringing more transparency, trust, efficiency in daily operations.
Before we get to that stage, we need solid building blocks being scalability, standardization, legal frameworks (yes.), and most important of all, security.
If we talk about the tokenization of assets, we are talking about almost 1.000.000 BILLION in assets. Including stocks, bonds, real estate, and derivatives.
Let’s say NGRAVE is a new generation of security devices and technology compared to existing solutions.
We are still very early in order to attain that large number, which will bring a lot of competition, which in the end is good. As competition in a market also brings innovation and better solutions.
With NGRAVE, we want to be one step ahead and bring continued innovation in securing the digital assets market.
What other features could be envisioned for the ‘Ngrave’ project that is valuable for the end-user?
The main use case and application blockchain are known for today, would be cryptocurrencies in the form of utility tokens.
As mentioned before the use cases are almost infinite. A lot of different companies are working on tokenization projects, stable coins, proof-of-ownerships, etc.
The NGRAVE ZERO, which is our flagship product can easily be extended in the future to store one’s privacy data, ownership certifications, financial assets.
But this can also be extended to business- and government applications.