1Kosmos, CodeCluster, and Arculus Partner to Reduce Fraud

All right, thank you for joining. My name is Mike Engle, head of strategy and co-founder at 1Kosmos. Today I’m joined by Mike Vitez, CEO of CodeCluster. Mike, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself and give people a little bit about your background?

Yeah. Thank you for this introduction and thank you for the opportunity to participate in this video with you together. I really appreciate this opportunity. So as Mike told me, I’m Mike Vitez, I’m the founder and CEO of CodeCluster, a system integrator company focused on web two and web three technologies. I personally been in for almost a decade in the industry, started as a computer scientist and then starting my own system integrator company, which differentiates us on the market is that we are not a typical development chef. We mostly do products including the architecture and giving out Scrum masters project managers. So let’s say, full product teams including business analysts, et cetera. And on the other side regarding custom development, we are integrating web three modules and web three elements into custom development projects. That’s how we got in touch with you also and how we started working with you as 1Kosmos.

No, that’s great. I guess the term custom development project is a bit broad. Maybe you could give an example of a type of integration that you do and what your role is in a process like that.

So this custom development phrase as a project covers in the whole integration process, which starts with a consultation where we understand that what is the need of the business, what we are trying to solve, and then we start integration the whole modules from the separate teams and the separate providers. For example, from our perspective, we don’t want to achieve any solution, like to be easy to understandable, we don’t want to create an e-commerce solution. We want to create a solution that can be a solution for an e-commerce business. So we try to solve a business issue, not a technical issue from our side. And custom development means that if we are working with modules from parties, not just ours, then we are the ones who are putting the parts together and probably we can create our own solutions that needs to be developed for the specific reason.

That’s great. No, thanks for explaining that. There’s one particular project which we’re going to dive into here today. It is kind of a three-way partnership between 1Kosmos, CodeCluster and Arculus, right?

Yes.

For those that aren’t aware of Arculus, they are the leading cold storage wallet in the marketplace today. Cold storage wallets are used for, most of the time, storing of things like crypto keys, keeping a private key private, and compared to other form factors in the marketplace. The Arculus card, I have one here but don’t have time to pull it out of my wallet, it’s a basic credit card form factor and the company that’s behind that called CompoSecure, they’re a public company and they make most of the metal credit cards in the world today. This Arculus card has some amazing benefits, superior security, it’s got what they call three-factor authentication. And maybe you could talk a little bit about why Arculus, 1Kosmos and CodeCluster came together.

So our role was to create, at first a frame for this card. Arculus hired us to create a mobile application for their cards and we integrated 1Kosmos solutions into the pipeline, so this is a very good example for this custom development process I mentioned above, because after we have made the whole design process, the whole point of the process, we made the application by ourselves based on the design and the needs, what Arculus brought to us. Then after we were able to integrate 1Kosmos SDK as the KYC provider for this particular case and for the security reasons that needs to be done from 1Kosmos’ side to make Arculus to be able to use this solution on the market. So we were the ones who put these parts together, our role was the system integrator.

Right. As you described. So the perfect use case for your organization and the type of expertise you bring to the table. There’s a process that was in introduced, and that is proving somebody’s identity and we call that Identity Enrollment, which brings a couple disciplines together. So there’s matching somebody’s face to government credentials, verifying the integrity of the credentials, obviously all the security and decisioning bias has to be addressed with that as well. So at the end of this process though, you’re able to use the Arculus card for some pretty neat capabilities. Could you talk about the capability that is brought to the table, what you can do with this card from a transaction perspective?

Yes. I’ve got two answers for that. Firstly, I would briefly introduce how this pipeline works, how the workflow goes through the registration. Then I can talk about the benefits of the integration. So during this card registration with 1Kosmos BlockID, the user’s payment card creates new keeper. Through the 1Kosmos BlockID app, the user approves the unique authorization by tapping the secure Arculus payment card to the back of our mobile device. So with that case, we’ve been testing and using these physical devices also by ourselves, it was a very interesting part, I have to say. Every one of my developers was super excited about this part and, “I want the card, I want the card.” Everybody said that. So yeah, this is really a cool use case to use also from a technical perspective.

So what we have seen that the real benefit in this case is the heightened security because this solution that was 1Kosmos made is totally eliminating the use of a password to authenticate users, which means that we are eliminating all the risks to inherit into password, including sharing, loss and theft from cyber attack, like account takeover. User authentication is always a problem because in a lot of cases you forget to remember your password authenticate.

So I think that everybody faced that issue in the past, and in that case, a simple tap from the Arculus card is enough to make the users authenticated. So in that case, we are eliminating these need of passwords and password biggest attacks, which I think is the future because the leak, the biggest security leak is still and the most vulnerability point of every system is still the password. So I think that this kind of authentication can be a good solution to solve this.

Yeah, there’s a phrase that’s getting really popular, “Hackers don’t hack in anymore, they just log in.” Because they’ve stolen the username and password, and as we saw just this week, the big announcement about how the LastPass hack happened, they basically put a keystroke logger on the main developer’s home machine and got access to all the keys. Imagine if that last pass developer had to go like this with the Arculus card and tap it to the back of the phone for as you put a card present transaction or an incredibly strong factor. And that’s what you guys have developed and brought to the table with this capability be just this simple act and this amazing form factor, which fits in my wallet, is a real game changer in the industry.

So Mike, it’s been really a pleasure speaking with you and hearing about the process, the success story that’s already to market and is brewing as this really picks up speed and looking forward to working with your team in the future.

Yeah, me too. And also I really appreciate being represented here and also it was enjoyable process working with both, 1Kosmos and both, with Arculus together.

All right, let’s keep on keeping on. Thank you very much.

Thank you.