How Ancho Works

What is Semi-custody?

Semi-custody is the process of decoupling the control of a resource between more than one party. This allows for a vast reduction of security risk as it pertains to exploiting the resource.

In the case of Crypto Wallets, this is typically accomplished by housing shares of the Wallet's private key separately between two parties to ensure that both parties need to be involved in order to perform operations using the Wallet.

What are MPC wallets?

MPC wallets are created by running isolated cryptography operations on two separate parties to generate shares for a semi-custody wallet solution. This ensures that the two shares are never housed in the same location. Additionally, each party is guarded from knowing what the other party's share is.

These two aspects of MPC wallets guarantee that the full private key of the wallet is never in a single location at any time.

How are MPC signatures created?

During the MPC signing process a similar set of isolated cryptographic operations are performed to generate a valid signature for the provided message without exposing any additional information to either party.

Because each party has its own pieces of information about how to generate a share, through a series of messages between the two parties, a valid signature can be generated.