Crypto exchange CoinDCX launches Okto, a keyless wallet for P2P trading

According to CoinDCX, one of Okto’s key features lies in its ability to provide users with the same level of security as any other decentralized crypto wallet, without requiring them to remember a long, complicated wallet key.

While Okto was announced on Friday, users can only sign up for a waiting list right now. CoinDCX executives said the company will begin rolling out access to users “soon,” without offering a specific timeline for when the rollout will take place.

Vivek Gupta, executive vice president of engineering at CoinDCX, confirmed that Okto will begin with support for a blockchain and a limited set of DeFi protocols, but claimed that services will be expanded “quickly.”

“Many web3 investment tools today are complicated, which automatically deters users from investing in this area. For example, in typical DeFi wallets, having to remember and write down a long, complicated key may not contribute to using crypto in the common area – something the wallet’s keyless access system can help solve, says Gaurav Arora, senior vice president at CoinDCX.

‘DeFi’, or decentralized finance, refers to financial transactions made between a sender and a receiver without the involvement of a third party – a bank, in the conventional sense. In web3, platforms typically use a decentralized server system, which is a blockchain, to provide peer-to-peer (P2P) financing tools such as lending or trading.

These transactions are usually managed by smart contracts, which are algorithms that automatically execute themselves when a borrowing or lending criterion between two users in a transaction is met. Until fulfilled, tokens are held within the contract, thus forming a liquidity pool – which crypto users worldwide can use for various DeFi applications.

Arora added that to ensure security in Okto, the service uses multi-party computation (MPC). The latter is a cryptographic technology where the execution and verification of a code is spread over several devices. Theoretically, this means that services that use MPC cannot be broken by only accessing one of the devices that are suitable to authenticate access to the service – in this case, Okto.

“One of the main reasons for the many DeFi breaches lies in lost or stolen wallet keys. If you remove human access to keys and decentralize the storage, that should make your wallet significantly more secure,” Arora said.

To be sure, Okto is not the first keyless DeFi wallet of its kind. Zengo is one of the most popular examples of keyless DeFi wallets and offers a similar use case to Okto. US DeFi wallet service provider Vertalo is another such example.

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