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Theya is a brand-new multisig mobile wallet designed to make it as simple and safe as possible to self-custody your bitcoin.
Founded by seasoned entrepreneurs Vikas, Sriram, and Smeet, the Y Combinator-backed startup takes advantage of over a decade of their combined backgrounds in Bitcoin engineering, product, design, and traditional finance.
Outside of the success in building their own companies, they have also built and scaled consumer-grade products with large corporations like Google, Robinhood, and Deutsche Bank.
Theya is on a mission to facilitate the growth of Bitcoin adoption by giving people an option that is more secure than exchanges and easier to use than hardware wallets.
Their goal is to one day be the default consumer app for Bitcoin, with accumulation, lending, investments, and payments all on the horizon.
What Is Theya And How Does It Work?
Theya is a new mobile wallet for self-custodying your bitcoin.
As a 2-of-3 multisig wallet, you need two keys to access your wallet and transact your bitcoin.
There are three keys in total; you keep two, and Theya secures the third key for recovery.
Your two keys are stored on separate devices, which could be two phones, or a phone and a hardware wallet, etc.
This way, keys can be shared between two people (for example, on each person’s phone) or kept by one person with two devices (whether that be a phone and an Apple Watch or hardware wallet, etc.).
Since two keys are needed to transact, Theya cannot access your bitcoin with the one key that they hold.
The third key acts as a kind of “forget password” function, whereby if you lose one key, the third can be used with your remaining key to access your wallet.
How Secure Is Theya?
The beautiful thing about Theya’s wallet is that there is no single point of failure.
If you lose one of your keys, you can still access your wallet using the third key they secure for you.
If Theya were to go under as a company, you would still retain access to your wallet as you still have two keys.
Similarly, if they or their enterprise servers were hacked, hackers would, at worst, only have access to Theya’s key, and couldn’t possibly get your personal keys without individually hacking your personal devices.
One of your keys can also be stored on a hardware wallet in “cold storage,” making it safe from hacks.
Currently, Theya supports hardware wallets from Ledger, and Trezor wallets are expected by the end of October. By the end of 2023, several more popular hardware wallets will also be compatible.
While the service is currently only supported by iOS, the plan is very much to bring it to Android.
What Problems Are Theya Solving?
Theya firmly believes that Bitcoin is not a choice but an inevitability.
However, the founders realized that for new generations of Bitcoiners, there was too much friction in the process of buying and storing bitcoin.
Either you store your bitcoin on an exchange, which lacks security and essentially means you don’t really own the bitcoin (“Not your keys, not your bitcoin”). Or you take full responsibility for securing your bitcoin by using hardware wallets, which can be intimidating for newcomers and present a single point of failure; if you lose access to your hardware wallet, you lose your bitcoin with no hope of recovery.
Theya presents a solution that takes the best of both worlds.
By using a 2-of-3 multisig wallet, with Theya storing one of the keys, there is no single point of failure, and there is a recovery option in the case of a lost key.
However, unlike exchanges, they do not custody your bitcoin, which means you stay in control.
They have also put a huge emphasis on ease of use and a user-friendly experience that will appeal to those who might be intimidated by the setup and responsibility of hardware wallets.
In this way, the ease and simplicity of exchanges are retained, while the security of hardware wallets is also matched (especially if you use a hardware wallet to store one of your two keys).
In Summary
Theya is a mobile multisig wallet designed to enable less tech-savvy people to join the Bitcoinization process.
It also makes it more attractive to people who are used to their wealth being custodied by banks, and don’t feel comfortable with the weight of responsibility and single point of failure created by hardware wallets.
On top of this, the recovery function that Theya facilitates by having one key creates a forget password function that hardware wallets do not have, providing a layer of security against the loss or theft of one of your two keys.
With an intuitive, user-friendly interface and an emphasis on accessibility, Theya could be the self-custody wallet of choice for the next generation of Bitcoiners.
Visit the website for more information
You can also download the app for iOS here
