In this episode, Aaron Mangal and Tim Francisco of CoinStructive, caught up with Paul Puey, co-founder and CEO of Edge (formerly AirBitz), a security platform, multi-coin wallet and key management system.
“Paul is a proud Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate of UC Berkeley with a wide range of technical skills from low-level 3D graphics engineering to development of custom web CMS systems, even before people knew what a CMS was. He held lead engineering positions with Nvidia and Chromatic Research, but most recently owned and operated several non-technical small businesses throughout California. There he learned the importance of the intersection of people, business, and technology.
Today, Paul aims to bring Bitcoin mainstream with software and products aimed at simplifying Bitcoin and making it insanely easy to send and secure this revolutionary currency while maintaining the highest level of privacy.
When not converting people to bitcoin you’ll likely find him climbing a rock in Joshua Tree or at a local climbing gym.”
The unique selling proposition is Edge allows users to manage multiple wallets for multiple assets securely under a single sign-on (SSO) login (just like using Facebook or Google to sign up for a site).
Edge’s philosophy is “security is our foundation, not a feature” as demonstrated by their client-side encryption which means data is encrypted from the device itself and before it ever touches Edge servers.
We had a great time learning more about Paul’s origin story, the creation of Edge (formerly AirBitz) and the vision of how to bridge Cryptocurrency use into the mainstream world.
After listening to this episode you will learn:
- Paul’s beginnings in Silicon Valley at Nvidia working on Graphics Processor Units (GPUs)
- The origin story of AirBitz and how it evolved into Edge as a rebrand
- Why we should stop trying to make security perfect and instead analyze the trade-offs
- How users get the benefit of security like Secure Socket Layer (SSL) but for everyday Cryptocurrency usage with Edge
- Why Paul believes in usability and utility as much (if not more so) than just ideology
- About the threat of centralized custodians and how counterparty risk and cold storage reduce usability
- How the architecture of centralized entities slow down transactions due to the lack of funds available in hot wallets
- How Edge saw the opportunity to open up its security architecture to other dApps (like Augur)
- Why Edge is the first use case of their platform itself which can be used in many other contexts
- What the edges of the network are and how data generated there is secured
- How ShapeShift integrates with Edge wallet through their API
- The features currently in the pipeline to be released next from Edge
- How the communities of various cryptocurrencies helped Edge integrate their tokens
- Why wallets will be the big Crypto businesses long term (even compared to exchanges)
- How there has never been a single sign-on (SSO) for private encrypted data until Edge
Further Reading and Resources
- Edge Whitepaper
- Edge.app website
- Paul on Twitter | LinkedIn | Medium | Github
- Key Management
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- Indorse, a decentralized professional network
- Augur (REP), a prediction market protocol
- Edge Developer SDK/API Site
- Edge Blog
