Leonard Tan & Yong Zhen Yu: The Decentralized Key Management and Login System for Web3

Torus is an open-source and universal key management system for the Web3 ecosystem. It's simple, secure and non-custodial, and suitable for anyone to manage their keys. Torus runs a Distributed Key Generation protocol built on Shamir's Secret Sharing.

Supporting over a hundred thousand authentications a month on popular applications like AAVE, KyberSwap, Augur, GoodDollar, and MyCryptoHeroes, Torus empowers decentralised applications with seamless user onboarding flows while maintaining recoverability and high standards of security for key management.

The Torus Wallet is the second layer to the system and allows one-click login and authentication on partners including Gmail, Facebook, or passwordless logins on Web3 applications. It is however reinforced behind the scenes by a clever distributed architecture. Notably, clever cryptography makes it possible for users to send crypto to social accounts that don't yet have crypto wallet. For example, one could send crypto to a Twitter username, which could be claimed once the recipient creates an account.
The team also recently released a custom version of two-factor authentication (2FA), tKey.

We were joined by Founders of Torus, Yong Zhen Yu and Leonard Tan, who gave us fascinating insight into why and how Torus was built, the recent products released, and what their aims are for the future.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Zhen and Leonard's backgrounds and how they got into crypto
• How and why Torus was formed
• The path Torus has followed over the past year
• Unwrapping the base layer, the Torus Network
• How Shamir's Secret Sharing works and why Torus chose to build on it
• The Torus Wallet and a step by step of how it works
• Torus and account portability
• Use cases and applications built on Torus
• The second layer of security, tKey
• Their plans for introducing Touch ID
• How Torus educate their users on how to stay secure
• The long term goal for Torus and how users are protected in the future

Episode links:

• Torus website
• Torus Status
• A beginner’s guide to Shamir’s Secret Sharing
• Developer documentation
• Torus on Telegram
• Torus Charity Twitter Campaign
• What Distributed Key Generation Is
• Key Assignments, Resolution and Retrieval
• How to Share a Secret in Production
• tKey - An open standard for threshold key management - HackMD
• Torus on Twitter
• Zhen on Twitter
• Leonard on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/B003