Project Showcase: Cordial Systems
Today we interview Conor Patrick — Founder and CTO of Cordial Systems. Conor has been an avid key management and authentication enthusiast since he started a U2F & FIDO2 security key company in undergrad. He has published research in hardening cryptographic algorithms. He also co-founded SoloKeys, the first open source security key company, then built the custody platform which led to the development of Cordial Systems.
What is Cordial Systems?
Cordial Systems provides institutional-grade self-custody software using MPC and a Zero Trust security model. Cordial Systems’ first product, Cordial Treasury, provides institutions with the first fully trustless solution that delivers full sovereignty — not just over their digital asset keys — but also the entire codebase, technology stack, and operating model.
How Does It Work?
The core product is a self-hosted appliance that runs all custody processes on customer-side servers, including a consensus set of nodes that enforce policies and MPC threshold signatures. This minimizes the risk of third-party interference on asset operations while maximizing the protection of your data and endpoints.
Cosmos-SDK and CometBFT are used to maintain the consensus of policies enforced on custody nodes.
The deployment can be a single node in a secure machine, similar to HSM’s in traditional finance networks, but we prefer to have a coalition of active servers with active thresholds, e.g. 3 of 4, required to sign anything.
Cordial Treasury is a self-hosted product designed to run in your own data center or private cloud and to be 100% self-administered by your IT team to manage your digital asset business while working within a firewalled corporate internet. Or, it can also be co-managed with a third-party hosting partner if appropriate to the workflow e.g. triparty collateral management.
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Why did you choose the Interchain Stack?
When designing our product we wanted our ‘state’, i.e. ground truth for all of an entity’s user base, policies, and endpoints, to be accessible, verifiable, and immutable. Sounds like a blockchain! As a result, we designed the nodes from the Cosmos-SDK.
Other custody solutions overly focus on key security and MPC. Key use and policies are just as important and often are a single point of failure. Using the cosmos-SDK, we can make cryptographically secure policies.
We had the opportunity to consider Substrate (Polkadot/Rust) to build an app on top of consensus, but we found Go and Cosmos’ module/keeper approach is easier to understand for most devs than Substrate’s rust proc-macro “magic”. Ultimately, we found cosmos-SDK to be the most simple and friendly platform to build a BFT application.
What stage is the project in?
Project launch, post-seed round.
Roadmap: Currently, we offer a fully functional application for all self-custody operations and asset management. In January 2024, we exceeded 30 blockchains in compatibility. Recently, we exceeded 40 blockchains in July 2024. While we continue to work on meeting the market demands for more interoperability, we are focused on improving our UI experience while working on adding DeFi operations to our driver library. Most notably is staking, which is in the works and should be available by the end of the year. Additionally, we are working to flesh out partnerships to support co-managed node operations and make that a standard offering to companies that have a smaller managed infrastructure.
What are you looking forward to?
We drive our team to be security-conscious, customer-driven, and detail-oriented to ensure that our product operates behind the scenes seamlessly with no catchy schemes to improve fee performance (we operate with an annual subscription fee and no operational fee drivers).
Meanwhile, we look forward to being an agnostic product that can offer extensive interoperability for our customers. Of course, this means being interoperable with all the important and trendy blockchains, but it also means expanding asset classes, especially with the tokenization of RWAs on the rise.
We are excited to empower teams with self-custody technology that integrates BFT policies from the get-go. MPC by itself is not sufficient!
