Wasim Ahmad Vault12 Pioneer Decrypts The DaVinci Code and Encrypts Inheritance

Dr. Josh Lange:

GMGM, gm, everyone. This is Dr. Josh. I'm here with Crypto Mondays Global, right here with me as a young gentleman named Wasim Ahmad, who is a co-founder of Vault12. You might have heard of Vault12 because it's one of the first and most prominent inheritance apps and systems where you can actually keep your crypto in storage for long-term, even after you die. And as you can see, so welcome to Crypto Mondays Global.

Wasim Ahmad:

Thank you, Professor.

Dr. Josh Lange:

Speaking of professors, you might know Professor Langdon,

Dr. Josh Lange:

Not Lange, but Langdon in the Dan Brown movie, found that the missing cup of Christ was underneath the Louvre the whole time. And so that's an inheritance protocol as it were, a way to keep your storage long after you die of your most important assets. And right here behind us is exactly that pyramid. And you just told me actually Wasim, that this is also the storage place of the world's largest art collection.

Wasim Ahmad:

The largest, yeah, this is the largest repository of art in the world. And then the pyramids, as you know, have always been vaults of mummies and their treasures. So yeah, this is a wonderful place to do this,

Dr. Josh Lange:

To talk about Vault12. Now, with the mummies and the pyramids, we don't know what's all in there, but in the sense of your protocol, who knows what's in there, what does it do? Tell us abo that

Wasim Ahmad:

So we have an app that you can download off the app stores, and the way that it works is you create a digital vault and then you as the owner of that vault, can put stuff into the vault. So it could be your crypto keys, it could be a video of you with a riddle of what the 12 words are.

So you have a lot of choices and formats that you can use to store information in the vault, but typically it would be your private key or your seed phrase or something like that. And then that information gets encrypted and then split into pieces, and then the pieces get distributed to people or devices that you own. So it could be three friends, it could be three business colleagues, it could be three lawyers, that kind of thing. And then you get to set a threshold of, well, if you have a need to access an asset, if you ever need the seed phrase, you can say, oh, well three out of nine, I just need three out of nine okays. And that way it's very convenient. If you have three devices, you can do it all by yourself.

Dr. Josh Lange:

I think what crypto called that is a multisig type of situation.

Wasim Ahmad:

Multisig is very limited. You have three or five. This is very, very flexible. It uses shamir's secret sharing, which is quantum safe. So no quantum computation in the future is going to be able to access your vas ult or hack into your vault.

Dr. Josh Lange:

Shamir's super important point.

Wasim Ahmad:

Yeah. And then one of those beneficiaries, or one of those guardians, we call them guardians, gets to be your beneficiary. It's really your technical beneficiary. So it's the person who will receive that information about your wallets, your crypto wallets, and then will be able to do whatever you lay out in your trust or your will or whatever. So you still need a will. You still need to talk to lawyers, but this is the transportation mechanism of all of that technical information, which if you don't record, will be lost. And when it's lost, you will lose those assets.

Dr. Josh Lange:

And this is a lot safer and more secure and more legal in a certain ways in putting your private key on the piece of paper,

Wasim Ahmad:

Well, piece of paper that is like, this is the invention of our time, right? Digital money, and we're using paper to store it. It is ridiculous. No, not paper especially. Look what happened in LA with the wildfires,

Right? So doesn't work. It's a lot safer than having something in a cold wallet and then it either gets stolen or it's lost. It's better than having it in a cloud, which some wallets will say, oh, you can back everything up in the cloud because what happens with clouds? Well, we thought they used to get hacked, but actually the worst thing that can happen to a cloud is you change your relationship with the cloud vendor and then they run off and your dipper is siloed off when you can't get access to it, which is what happened with Gemini and Genesis and that whole debacle years ago. Oh yeah. For 18 months we couldn't access our crypto.

Dr. Josh Lange:

And then we see the 23 & me as well, where they're selling it off even potentially. And that could be a lot of users' data.

Wasim Ahmad:

Who knows where that's going?

Dr. Josh Lange:

Right? Okay, so what happens in case yours, if in case your system would fail,

Wasim Ahmad:

Our system is completely decentralized, so Vault12 doesn't have any information. We don't know who you are, we don't know what your assets are, your guardians don't know what your guardians do, what your assets are. Your assets can be on any blockchain. And so from that perspective, there's no cloud server has information, it's peer to peer. The information isn't even on your phone in the end, it gets distributed. Parts of your information in encrypted form are out in different places, and they can be easily recombined. You don't have to worry about that. You just press the button.

Dr. Josh Lange:

I love that. Napster for private keys. Yeah. So about the origin story, you mentioned the with Gemini, but doesn't Gemini have something to do with the origin story of how this all came to be? Sure, yeah. There is a

Wasim Ahmad:

Connection because the Winklevosses, the Winklevosses who created Gemini, when they got their Facebook money, they bought Bitcoin, obviously everyone knows this. And they printed out their private keys on paper, split them into I think different pieces, and then picked a bunch of banks that were near regional airports and flew around the country in 48 hours and put those individual pieces of paper in different bank vaults. And so that was their solution to protecting in a very kind of cold storage way, offline way, their own personal crypto assets. And so what Vault12 is, is basically the digital version of that that doesn't rely on some third party bank being open for business so that you can retrieve your assets or way more convenient or needing to

Dr. Josh Lange:

Fly from California to New York or wherever your assets are stored. And so you have a long background actually in encryption and in building and building these services products for people. You came into the industry from your days at Stanford, is that right?

Wasim Ahmad:

So yeah, I was at a startup called Voltage, which was a spin out from Stanford, and this was a breakthrough in public key cryptography. And this revolutioniz-ed how easy it was to protect people's personal information. That's where I met my co-founder of Vault12. Our CEO Max Skibinsky was actually part of a16z. He was on the blockchain team. He was the one who ushered in the Coinbase deal into Andreessen Horowitz. Oh, really? And then he tried to convince, this was early on, this was 2012, 2013, and he was trying to convince entrepreneurs that he was seeing to deal with this issue of what happens if you die, what happens with Bitcoin if you die? And no one would take him up on it. And he decided to leave Andreesen and set up Vault12. So we've been at it since the end of 2014, beginning of 2014. Wow. So we're the pioneers in this space.

Dr. Josh Lange:

You are the pioneers actually in this space. Fantastic. And now these guys have come back around, these Andreessen Horowitz and these other people, and they're probably investing in you. And so that's exciting. Now me, just to give you guys a little bit of a story, I had gotten into Ethereum very early and I got 80 Ethe, it was NFTs, then it was all the Defi coins, and this year it's going to be stablereum for $120. And I thought that was kind of expensive, but it ended up being a pretty good deal until, and I thought, well, this is going to be a long-term investment for my daughter, for her school, and things like that. And come to find out that I get hacked. And I lost all that. And as a father thinking about, well, man, what if I would die tomorrow? How would my kids be able to access stat if I didn't prepare, if I didn't go through the process of making a will and then having the assets actually accessible to the parties that would then fulfill the requirements of the will.

So this gave me a real deep reflection. And I myself am going to sign up. Maybe you'll give me a discount, who knows? But it's really exciting to me. And so to the parents out there, to the people that are typically afraid of making a wheel, because I know that in the Pandemic death was happening a lot more and people expected a lot more of that, yet people didn't want to talk about it. They wanted to push away from that. Let's talk about it for just a second here, because it's an uncomfortable topic when you're talking about it face to face, but when you hear a couple other people talking about it, it might be

Wasim Ahmad:

A bit easier. So 35% of men will go off and plan and create a will. 65% of women, right? Wow. Makes sense. But big gap, big. But you do need to plan. So you do need to go talk to a lawyer about not just your digital assets, but all your assets. And the challenge with crypto is that we buy new assets all the time. Every year there's a new category of asset. A few years ago it was NFTs, then it was all the Defi coins, and this year it's going to be stable coins. Everyone's going to be buying stable coins. RWA. Yeah. And then we've got RWAs coming, and there'll be new things, new blockchains, blockchains move around in their priority of what's out there. And so the challenge is, if you don't record the crypto keys for that particular blockchain wallet, that's going to disappear.

So you have to, it's a continuous thing. It's not just like, oh, I put it all in a cold wallet and I gave it to my lawyer. That's not good enough. Because next year you may buy something and you may not send it over to the lawyer. So you have to plan, you have to have a way to back everything up. So for you, everything is backed up. And then you need a way to designate someone who is technically savvy enough to then be able to do the things that need to be done. When should you be incapacitated like people were during the pandemic or when you pass, or in fact if you're in jail. So that's how you ensure accessibility to your assets for your family for the future.

Dr. Josh Lange:

Yeah, I was wondering what happened to all of SBFs assets now that he's in jail, but I'm sure he had some kind of system set up. So if you are a person like me and you don't want to set up an entire whole system complexities and all of these things, obviously Vault12 knows what they're doing with this distributed encryption. It's fantastic idea. And thank you for this interview coming in front of this iconic vault of the world's greatest art. Alright, thanks a lot Wasim for coming to Crypto Mondays. All right. Ciao guys. Make sure to subscribe.