Nicolas is a Ph.D. mathematician with expertise in cryptography & a background in security engineering. Previously, he founded SoloKeys with Conor in 2018. This open source security company was acquired in 2021, where they went on to build in-house digital asset custody solutions. In an earlier life, he was a high-frequency trader at a boutique prop trading firm.
Conor has been an avid key management and authentication enthusiast since he started a U2F & FIDO2 security key company in undergrad. He has published research in hardening cryptographic algorithms. He also co-founded SoloKeys, the first open source security key company, then went on to build the custody platform which led to the development of Cordial Systems.
Seb has been successfully building digital asset custody businesses since 2018, with one acquisition by Genesis Trading. He has also advised and invested in startups through Outlier Ventures and is part of the Playfair Capital angel network. Prior to joining the digital asset industry he worked at Goldman Sachs.
Cordial Systems empowers institutions to manage their digital assets within a Zero Trust security model. The core offering is a self-managed appliance, and associated services, that removes all implicit trust and continuously validates every interaction in the lifecycle of a distributed workflow.
Our first product, Cordial Treasury, was created for institutions who have a requirement to own and control the critical parts of their digital asset and cryptocurrency operations. Usually as part of meeting systems and controls requirements under financial services regulation or generally taking a security first approach as part of managing a modern enterprise. Fundamentally, these institutions are unwilling to take a leap of faith on a blackbox SaaS provider to maintain adequate processes and controls in delivering mission critical IT infrastructure. They want to run their own services in-house where everything is transparent and third party risk relating to custody, data loss, and service outages is minimized.