Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.
GK8: GK8 was founded by elite Israeli cyber intelligence veterans who previously protected the nation’s strategic assets, reporting directly to the Prime Minister’s office. Being cybersecurity experts, founders, (Lior Lamesh, CEO and Shahar Shamai, CTO) understood that secure crypto wallets were not truly secure. For example, prior to starting GK8, out of pure interest and curiosity, they easily hacked a leader in the industry’s wallet within 4 days, exposing multiple vulnerabilities in the technology and defining for themselves a fundamental approach to securing digital assets.
The question arose, was there a better way to manage cryptocurrency transactions while being able to prevent potential hacking threats? Lior and Shahar clearly understood the answer to be, yes! And from there, GK8 was born.
GK8’s mission is to protect the future of finance by being the world’s best solution for banks and financial institutions by enabling them to protect and manage blockchain-based digital assets and generate new revenue streams by providing them the ability to offer an end-to-end solution for digital assets-based services.
SD: What is the main service your company offers?
GK8: GK8 offers banks and financial institutions an end-to-end platform for managing blockchain-based assets on their own. The patented solution combines a fully offline Cold Vault for sensitive operations which is paired with an MPC for automatic, high-frequency transactions—creating an unparalleled level of security and functionality.
We partner with banks, exchanges, hedge funds, and custodians to provide them a self-managed solution to offer services for blockchain-based assets, including Custody, Cold Staking, Defi, Tokenization, and Trading.
SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?
GK8: We provide TRUE Cold Vault security with the full functionality and usability of the MPC.
The GK8 end-to-end platform brings two key components to the table: a fully offline Cold Vault built to military-grade standards and an MPC Vault platform. GK8’s patented design combines both to provide the ultimate security and automatic high-frequency transactions equipped with a robust AP and customer app to enable enterprises to secure their digital assets with ease and accessibility.
The enterprise-grade Cold Vault is the only TRUE Cold Vault that enables automatic transactions while remaining completely Cold. It is designed to offer users the ability to sign a transaction without ever connecting to the Internet. It operates on a unidirectional basis—the data can only flow out, not in – therefore leaving no access points open for attack, providing an unparalleled level of security.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
GK8: In short, the ability for hackers to gain access to a private key. Let’s elaborate—currently, blockchain’s private key management makes the decentralized blockchain centralized, with the private key being the single point of failure. If a hacker gains access to the private key, even though blockchain is decentralized, hackers can still gain access to the account and drain it of all its assets. This is why banks that manage private keys for their clients are considered an Achille’s heel—they are the entry point and therefore need to ensure the ultimate safety of the private keys to keep the accounts safe and protected.
Hacking is about return on investment. Hackers are willing to invest a few million in the pursuit of the total gain worth tens or hundreds of millions. In these cases, solely relying on an MPC to protect and manage digital assets simply isn’t enough by itself for banks or financial institutions managing those amounts of crypto. That is why financial institutions need to take seriously their custody solution for safeguarding and managing their assets.
A better approach is to divide your digital asset balance and use the MPC to manage only 2% or 3% of the assets, while the majority of the assets are managed in a cold vault where they are 100% safe since they’re never connected to the internet.