Why a digital vault
I have often spent time musing at the metaphors and analogies tech geeks use in creating their softwares. Recently I had a fun argument with one of my crypto geek friends about why the wallet is the wrong analogy for technologies like metamask, or the wallet you get from the different trading platforms. Regardless of opinion, what we did agree on is that the older notion of a Digital Vault is both, useful and needed in the world of decentralized finance.
I have been on the project with the DegenForest.com team looking for a way to provide a platform that not only embraces the “ethos”, the essence of web 3, but that it truly provides the users with a resonable, stable, secure, and yet, easy-to-use technology for peer-to-peer currency (financial) transactions.
Enter the vault.
The idea is simple the vault is where you store all your valuable digital assets, more precisely, the vault provides a way to store and retrieve your valuable assets.  This is done using wallets, and wallets are addresses that a human acquires when they create accounts or install wallet software. This addresses are endpoints … in the case of crypto, since blockchain is a ledger, the transactions in the ledger identify the addresses involved in a transaction, namely the address that now owns some crypto asset (token, currency, nft, sbt, etc.). So in the case of crypto the function actually doesn’t store anything it just gives the user to make use of the information stored in the blockchain. For other assets, the transaction is similar, but in cases where storing something is necessary, then the vault’s secure store is used.Â
With apologies to my crypto tech gods for turning something extremely technical and complicated into a grossly over-simplified description, I’m going to move on to describe why I believe the Degen Forest wallet/vault should be at the center of your next identity or currency related project.
Hot or Cold
One of the coolest features (IMHO) is that the Vault offers support for both hot and cold wallets — for those of you wondering what these are — cold wallets offer an offline method for storing crypto assets.  In the case of Degen, we added this support in collaboration with … oh my gosh I almost spilled the beans … in collaboration with a partner we will soon announce, stay tuned.  But the point is that Degen has elegantly supported both Hot and Cold functions …Â
... but is it secure?
Honestly, we can’t find anything other with this level of security in the market. For one, it requires three physical things to be present to work:
- Â a smart device (phone) that runs the software
- a separate physical card (also with software)
- and the person themselves
Steal any two of those and you still can’t get to the vault. For the human, you can use biometrics such as thumbprint, iris scan, or face recognition (or all of them, I suppose) to verify that it is the right human.  And when it’s all done, in addition you require a pin. While nothing is 100% secure, this platform is Fort Knox.
So secure, isn't it complicated?
The app has been designed with simplicity in mind. In fact, the initial impetus of the team was to get rid of friction. They accomplished this by following a very simple design principles: don’t ask for anything until you need it, choose convenience as long as it doesn’t compromise security … much … 🙂 and make it as intuitive as possible. The result is an application that has taken extremely complicated functions and put them where they belong under secured software automations that make life easier for the user.
this is getting long, wrap it up
The point of this post was not to extol the virtues of the Degen Forest app, but to point out that there are some folks that are seriously thinking about solving a problem that will become quite clear as governments are slowly rolling around to implementing digital id’s and digital currencies. The battle for control of digital assets will surely ensue; Degen Forest is on the side of empowering the individuals to control their own assets, I don’t think you need me to spell out who is in control in the government’s story. Of course there is always a continuing battle between the rights of the individual and the governments needs to suppress some rights in the interest of social order (or other more nefarious reasons for my conspiracy buddies). By providing a sound, secure, stable technology, Degen Forest is providing a superb solution that puts the control in the people’s hands.  As the service is released to the public I will write about some of the exciting possibilities with a true, peer-to-peer platform for defi transactions.