Two of our leading principles are radical transparency and building in public. The Auki Network is open-source, and we aim to keep the development process visible and accountable to all stakeholders. As part of this process we share updates about any developments which might be of interest to our community. Today we have another update to share: we have changed our third-party custody solution for our token.

What are third-party custodians and why is it important?

Third-party custodians are companies that securely hold and manage digital assets on behalf of clients. They store the private keys needed to access tokens, increasing security. There are two primary types of custodians: centralized custodians and decentralized custodians. These differ in approach and regulatory requirements, but ultimately both make it easier to hold digital assets securely.  The choice of custody solution is important for any project and should be continually evaluated.

Changing third-party custody solution primarily involves migrating tokens to new wallets under the stewardship of our new custody solution, and re-setting permissions for routines like the weekly node operator reward job to use the new wallets. Some of our more eagle-eyed community members might have noticed the movement on-chain, which is why we felt it was important to write this post and share the information with our community.

The Reasons

While migrating to a new custody solution is mostly a case of moving tokens to new wallets, it does address some issues that our previous solution had:

• They kept all of our cold wallet $AUKI tokens in one wallet so we couldn't have clear on-chain separation between different pools of unvested tokens.
• This wallet also contained other tokens under their custody.
• They can and periodically do move tokens around internally, which could have presented issues since any $AUKI tokens not in a specific list of wallets is considered circulating supply. Such a move on their part would have reflected negatively on us on-chain, and we would not have had any control or even forewarning about it.

The above flaws could have caused perception issues between us and our community. It also did not conform to what we consider is a best in class implementation.

The Benefits

In terms of our new set up, we have migrated to the following third-party custody solution:

• Assets moved to Hex Trust (centralized custodian)
• Smart Contract administration roles moved to Safe Wallet (decentralized custodian)

In addition to solving the above issues, leading to better visibility and more transparency, the migration also provides better insurance coverage for our wallets, further improving security. With Hex Trust we now have comprehensive insurance with USD 50 Million coverage on all wallets.

The better transparency is already benefitting our community with more accurate circulating supply data on platforms such as CoinGecko.

Migrating to our new multifaceted custody solution gives us a better solution for both the present and the future. We wanted to share this update with our community to ensure full transparency and give some further context for any on-chain movement.

   

About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: away for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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