Casa Year in Review: Reflections on 2020

2020 will go down in history as a challenging year for the entire world. Yet, through that challenge, the Casa team continued to build. We’ve continued our mission to improve Bitcoin security and sharpened our focus on personal key management. Over the year, we helped many people take control of their Bitcoin keys for the first time, and we helped others who already held their own keys gain peace of mind that their bitcoin is secure.

We began 2020 by announcing that we’d focus our product development solely on Bitcoin security and self-custody. Making personal key management easier for every individual who desires to hold their own keys is a massive, multi-year undertaking. We envision it will take all of Casa’s focus to tackle that challenge, and during 2020, we worked tirelessly on this mission for our customers and the ecosystem.

Casa Product Updates in 2020

With our renewed focus, we released many amazing product updates throughout the year:

• Our inheritance product for Diamond members, Casa Covenant, made its debut, helping Casa clients ensure that their bitcoin is safe not just for them, but also for their loved ones after they pass away.
• Coldcard joined the family of supported hardware wallets, allowing fully air-gapped multisig transaction signing.
• Casa Gold got a 30-day free trial, so anyone can use their own hardware wallet to test out Casa security, with no strings attached.
• We rewrote Casa’s back end infrastructure to use Electrum, resulting in significant performance improvements. We shared our findings about the performance of different Electrum implementations.
• We completely redesigned the Casa Wallet, a free mobile wallet offering new Bitcoiners a great way to get started holding their own keys.
• We also launched a slew of service improvements to our Casa Diamond offering.
• Casa Keymaster got a fresh rebrand to Casa App, matching our sole focus on Bitcoin security.
• We added the groundbreaking capability to Buy Bitcoin within Casa App, straight to your secure multisig. Now, both new and existing Bitcoiners can purchase bitcoin and be secure by default.

Casa’s Top Educational Guides

Our work to improve Bitcoin security wasn’t limited to product updates. The Casa team pumped out guides and educational content to help our users and community improve both Bitcoin security and the overall health of each individual’s personal security.

• A Home Defense Primer - how to secure your home, Jameson Lopp style
• How to Create a Watch-Only Wallet - helping you verify that Casa software is being honest in securing your bitcoin
• Bitcoin Multisig in a Pandemic - evaluating private key placement and security when travel is restricted
• How to Protect Your Bitcoin from $5 Wrench Attacks - a primer on ensuring your bitcoin is safe from in-person attack or theft
• Casa’s Seedless Security Model - discussing why Casa is seedless, and how that actually improves security in most situations
• The Do’s and Don’ts of Bitcoin Key Management - a massive post from Jameson about securing private keys in all types of applications
• Diversify your keys, not your coins - a discussion of key security diversification from Hector on the Casa Client Service team
• Where are My Bitcoin Stored? - answering a question that confuses many people about Bitcoin by clarifying that your bitcoin are stored on the blockchain, and you just hold the keys
• What you need to know about the Casa Recovery Key - explaining how the Casa Recovery Key works and the security model built around it to protect your funds
• Is one hardware wallet enough? - discussing the pros and cons of storing bitcoin on a single hardware device
• How to use Casa pseudonymously - a guide to protecting your privacy when using Casa
• The Rise of Corporate Bitcoin Key Management - a guide for corporations to self-custody, modeled after how Casa holds bitcoin in our own corporate treasury

Casa Opinions and Technical  Reports

Finally, we wrote some opinion pieces about Bitcoin and the state of the industry, as well as more technical content that stems from our own learnings as we continue to build on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, Retirement, and the Long-Term Mindset

Bitcoin and saving for retirement are both about a long term mindset. Holding the keys to your IRA bitcoin empowers you with real ownership of your savings.

Casa BlogNick Neuman

The Custodian Menace

A small number of custodians hold the private keys to a large amount of bitcoin. This is not good for Bitcoin.

Casa BlogJameson Lopp

Bitcoin Multisig Time Locking Challenges

Q: How do you prevent $5 wrench attacks? A: Make funds impossible to move.

Casa BlogJameson Lopp

Electrum Server Performance Report

Comparing and contrasting the performance of 3 popular Electrum server implementations.

Casa BlogJameson Lopp

Bitcoin Multisig Hardware Signing Performance

Not all bitcoin hardware security devices are created equal. Jameson tests the performance of popular devices in a variety of multisignature setups.

Casa BlogJameson Lopp

Lightning Wallet Recovery: Lessons Learned

Recovering funds from a crashed Lightning Network node can be technically challenging - here’s what we have learned from performing quite a few recoveries.

Casa BlogJameson Lopp

2020 was a busy year for Casa, and the team accomplished many things that we’re proud of. In 2021, we’ll continue to focus on unlocking personal key management for people everywhere. One month into the New Year and we are already shipping much-requested product feature updates, as well as planning for a few noteworthy announcements (coming soon).

Thank you to all of our clients and the Bitcoin community for your support of Casa, and here’s to a great 2021!

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Casa regularly reports and analyzes the newest hardware wallet vulnerabilities, as well as larger changes in the Bitcoin, security, and personal privacy landscape. Sign up for our weekly security newsletter to get the most up-to-date information.