Chora

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Inspiration

When you want to store a large amount of crypto, you have a problem, because you really care about the security. You don't want online wallets to be able to decide what happens with your money, e.g. freeze your funds whenever they feel like it. But it feels too risky to just store it in a hot wallet. Hardware wallets are nice yet cumbersome, and still have security issues (need to keep recovery phrase somewhere). There was a feeling like something was missing on the market. This was the inspiration for Chora.

What it does

Chora is a highly-secure crypto wallet that lives in a smart contract where transactions are confirmed by your Metamask wallet and by our platform upon 2FA authorizations from you.

Chora offers recovery mechanism that don't rely on a 3rd party in case you lose access to your hot wallet or your account gets compromised.

It's super-easy to use, too.

How we built it

We used React/MUI for the frontend as it let us progress quickly and have a nice-looking and -feeling UI. We used Ethers.js library which nicely abstracted out the boilerplate around communicating with web3. We chose to use Firebase for handling user auth and storing basic user info for the sake of simplicity and development speed. We used AWS and dynamo DB for the "deep" backend with our secure key store, because AWS platform offers a lot in terms of security, and we can extend this aspect and make it more robust as we proceed. We had great experience with Polygon POS, not only because it's a great EVM platform but also because it's a good dev tool due to it's low fees. It really speeds up the development when you can easily test things end-to-end in a production environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a fully working prototype, which is a great milestone.

Challenges we faced

Technically, dealing with smart contract development, especially with reproducing some calculations within smart contracts was not trivial. Generally, we've had and still have questions regarding the legal status of our project. Different jurisdictions have different rules that are rapidly changing, and we are not sure what the status-quo of our product is, and what exactly it would mean for our customers (e.g. whether some sort of KYC would be needed). Even publishing the prototype online triggered concerns from some team members. We are actively exploring this aspect and trying to get as much input as possible.

What we learned

We learned a lot in terms of how smart contracts work exactly, how they get deployed, etc. We learned that one can have a predictable address for a smart contract which can have an impact on our product's features. We learned that Polygon is fast and has low fees, which is great.

What's next for Chora

First, we want to get as much feedback from the community as possible. The next steps would be to refine the business model, legal status, and other business-related aspects to be able to move on with securing the funding. At the same time, we want to perform the necessary security audits to create some initial trust for our product.