Seed Phrases vs Key Sharding: Multisig's UX Trade-offs | Setzeus SLP781

Jesus Najera (0:00)

My argument would be, 90% of the world can and will adopt that. 10% of the world or less will ever actually properly use seed phrases and hardware wallets, and what matters to me is the optionality.

Stephan Livera (0:13)

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. So today, joining me is Setzeus from Cofund. And we are, you know, obviously, there's been a lot of conversation around Bitcoin self-custody in the industry. And I thought there was some interesting stuff that the guys are doing over at Cofund and just kind of research as well and product design around what self-custody in Multisig looks like. So, yeah, Setzeus, first off, welcome to the show.

Jesus Najera (0:37)

Hey, hello. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's definitely very not, you know, it's a very humbling feeling to be here. It feels like I've, you know, heard so many, if not episodes, just clips of this podcast. And as someone who's been around for, you know, a long, long time in this space now, there's a lot of names that I recognize that have come through here, right? So first off, super thank you for having me. It's been a while since I've been sort of building quietly in this space. And yeah, we're doing some really, really cool, interesting Multisig stuff.

To give you some background about myself, my name is, you know, Setzeus or Jesus Najera by, if you know me, IRL. And I mainly run SetDev, which is a Bitcoin, Bitcoin L2 and Metaprotocol engineering and security shop. So helped build a lot of the L2 protocols. Stacks is by far probably my biggest client and probably the community that I would say helped me start out my career more in like the Bitcoin L2 space than anything else. And since then, started working on other L2s, started doing work in Bitcoin as well. bitscript.app is probably the Bitcoin work that I'm most known for. And that is a script IDE and transaction deserializer that was browser based.

Also, I also ended up buying bitcoinneil.com and I own that as a media arm along with Jake Blockchain, who I'm not sure if you guys have connected together at any point.

Stephan Livera (2:07)

But yeah, all that. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure.

Jesus Najera (2:11)

Yeah. All that to be said is, my main focus for the last three or four years has actually been around Multisig stuff mainly because I wanted to solve problems for me and my own team.

We've quietly been working on what I think and hope is the best Multisig app on the market at the moment. It's basically a Multisig super app where it's cross-chain, it's multi-vendor, but it doesn't feel like that. I think that's probably one of the most interesting points that I'll come back to in this conversation is at heart, I'm an applied mathematician and a designer. I love, love, love product. I love cryptography. I love getting in the weeds, but I've been a founder long enough to know that people don't care about the technology, right? They care about what it solves for them. The people that care about the technology is a niche within a niche within a niche.

So Cofund is kind of trying to cross that chasm between, hey, Multisigs are this tool for very niche select group of people to I can onboard my mom and dad into the family vault and we can take care of our Bitcoin.

Stephan Livera (3:20)

Gotcha. Yeah. So the obvious, you know, we're speaking 8th of October and obviously in the recent months, like there's been so many hacks in Bitcoin, notably the Coldcard thing, the Liquid thing. I mean, how many other, I mean, Bach, the second guys, they had a thing. I mean, it's just been hacks everywhere. And the I guess if I had to summarize where I think just kind of where people people's mindsets are, is they are probably thinking, oh, ETF or Custodian, or maybe they need to learn about Multisig. And that's probably where a lot of people are at. And to be honest, probably a lot of them are just thinking ETF and Custodian. So why don't you make the case, how are you seeing this moment right now in Bitcoin self custody and security?

Jesus Najera (4:06)

Yeah, I agree with what you're saying. And I actually fully empathize with the people that think and feel that way. And that's what made the Coldcard hack, I would say, so devastating, right? It was two factors. It was A, it was the people who a lot of people in the industry looked up to and thought were sort of the paragon of security and of open source and of transparency and of hardened security. And then the other is the people who got hit, which were the people who, as you're saying, cared enough about self custody. These people did the research, went out and bought the hardware wallets that they thought was the most hardened because it was built by maxis that were maxis squared. And they're the ones that got hacked and robbed.