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

Centralised cryptocurrency exchange, CoinDCX, on Friday announced a new mobile wallet for peer-to-peer crypto token trading. Called ‘Okto’, the wallet will work across over 20 blockchains and over 100 decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols or crypto investment services, Neeraj Khandelwal, cofounder of CoinDCX, announced.

According to CoinDCX, one of Okto’s key features lies in the ability to give its users the equivalent security of any other decentralised crypto wallet — without needing them to remember a long, complicated key for the wallet.

While Okto was announced on Friday, users can only sign up for a waitlist right now. CoinDCX executives said that the company will start rolling out access to users “soon”, without offering a definite timeline for when the rollout would take place. Vivek Gupta, executive vice-president of engineering at CoinDCX, confirmed that Okto will begin with support for one blockchain and a limited set of DeFi protocols, but claimed that the services will be expanded “rapidly”.

“A lot of web3 investment tools today are complicated, which automatically puts users off from investing in this space. For instance, in typical DeFi wallets, having to remember and write down a long, complicated key could be non-conducive towards using crypto in the mainstream space — which the wallet’s keyless access system could help resolve,” said Gaurav Arora, senior vice-president at CoinDCX.

‘DeFi’, or decentralised finance, refers to financial transactions that are done 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 decentralised server system, which is a blockchain, to offer peer-to-peer (P2P) finance tools such as lending or trading.

These transactions are typically managed by smart contracts, which are algorithms that automatically execute themselves once a borrowing or lending criteria between two users in a transaction are fulfilled. Until they are fulfilled, tokens are held within the contract, thus forming a liquidity pool — which crypto users around the world 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 across multiple devices. Theoretically, this means that services using MPC cannot be breached by simply gaining access to one of the devices that are liable to authenticate access to the service — in this case, Okto.

“One of the key reasons for the numerous DeFi breaches lie in lost or stolen wallet keys. If you remove human access to keys and decentralise its storage, it 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 as Okto. US-based DeFi wallet services provider, Vertalo, is also another such example.