Hello readers,

We are back with another Crypti issue on Thursday, and today we will cover the upcoming multi signature functionality in Crypti v0.3.1. We will explain how it works and how it will look like.

A multi signature account with a 2nd passphrase, will make your Crypti account as secure as a Swiss bank. There are few cryptocurrencies with multi signature support, and soon Crypti will join their proud ranks with an innovative twist. This is very important for exchanges, as they can offer a nearly 100% security.

For an in-depth view about multi signatures at Bitcoin you can read this article Multisig: The Future of Bitcoin by Vitalik Buterin.

What is multi signature?

Multi signature is a way to enhance the security of your Crypti account. In general if you do a transaction on the Crypti network, be it sending XCR to another account or registering an account name, your account will sign the transaction with his private key. The private key validates, that the transaction is intended.

Now you can set up a multi signature account, requiring two or more signatures. You can specify the exact number when you set the multi signature account up.

This way the Crypti account can't be harmed because of a single point of failure anymore. For example to validate a transaction you can specify it always needs two out of three correct private keys, i.e. the agreement of two out of three parties.

How is it working?

As I already hinted above Crypti is using the multi signature variation called M of N. N is the number of total participants, M is the number of needed participants to accept a transaction.

M is always smaller or equal to N (M ≤ N), while N needs to be larger or equal to two and smaller or equal to sixteen (2 ≤ N ≤ 16).

When you want to setup a multi signature account you have to select accounts out of your contact book or by typing in their Crypti addresses / usernames. In the next step you have to specify the M number, i.e. how many participants are needed to validate the transactions.

After you confirmed everything, the setup process for the multi signature process is done. All the accounts you specified are now part of your multi signature account.

If you want to send money from the multi signature account, a notification will appear at the other accounts which are part of the multi signature account. They can review the transaction and then agree or disagree with it. If enough agreements came together the transaction is validated, if not enough agreements came together the transaction will go invalid after some time.

How you see it is only possible to send the funds from the multi signature main account, not from the dependent other accounts. They can only agree or disagree with a transaction later on.

If you want to change the multi signature parameters, it is also only possible from the main account. This process also needs the agreement of the other signatories.

How it looks?

First, you need to review and agree to a disclaimer. Remember - multi-signature depends on others permission, so the disclaimer there to remind you to choose carefully who you would like to add as a co-signer.

If the user gives wrong account information, his funds may be lost forever. Once we have the contacts feature activated in the client, we probably will make it mandatory to be a contact of the accounts, which will be added to the multi signature account.

At this screen you add accounts to the multi signature account. Later on these will be your contacts, for now you can insert any Crypti account ID, which exists on the network.

Once you added a minimum of two accounts, you can set the number of signatures needed to accept a transaction.

At the end you will have a nice overview of everything. You then need to give your final confirmation, after that it's not possible to go back, without the agreement of all participants.

Why is it such a big deal?

First of all this is a very important feature for your own security. Even though most often companies and exchanges will use it to raise the security of their users funds. But also you can raise your security, while making several accounts for yourself on different computers. Then combine them to one multi signature account.

Most importantly this is a needed feature for our upcoming decentralized application (dapp) platform. As a dapp provider you need top-notch security standards. There are many possible dapps, which will need multi signature functionality to work properly.

Next week

Next week thursday you can expect another interesting report from us. There will be some very exciting developments that we will present, so stay tuned!

See you next week,
Enjoy your upcoming weekend and spread the word about Crypti!

It can happen that some details explained here might change, as we progress with the development.