Cardano DeFi #012: BroClan

Written interviews with DeFi projects on the Cardano blockchain.

Today’s guest on the Cardano DeFi column is a multisig and smart wallet that does not store any private keys and allows users to create more complex and nuanced custody arrangements: BroClan.

The previous guest was a decentralized solution for data storage and cloud services that is on a missione to become your Data’s new best friend.

This column is where I invite Decentralized Finance (DeFi) projects to introduce themselves and share their vision, allowing me to connect with and learn about the Cardano Ecosystem.

Hey, glad to have you here. Please introduce your team, where are you from, what are your backgrounds?

My name is Leandros, you might know me as the guy behind [BSP] stake pool and most people call me Leo. I am a 1 man team behind BroClan.

Studied electrical and computer engineering in Athens, worked as a QA engineer, a DevOps engineer, a K8s-cloud engineer, an SPO and now with BroClan I picked up React, Helios and Aiken to be a full-stack Cardano engineer.

I am half dutch, born and raised in Cyprus. I have had the chance to witness the collapse in Greece while I was a student there and just as I returned to Cyprus I lived through the banking collapse. It was hard times but it gave me a perspective that allows me to understand how important it is to build a system where you “Cannot do evil”. Because at the end of the day as systems collapse it is real people lifes that get ruined, and that is not acceptable.

What is BroClan and how do you differ from the many other wallets out there?

BroClan is a multisig and smart wallet, the difference with a regular wallet is that it does not store any private keys and allows users to create more complex and nuanced custody arrangements for their digital property.

With multisig anyone can build their own non-custodial solution for many problems with self custody this include but are not limited to:

• Time locks
• Social recovery
• Stolen key protection
• Shared accounts
• Inheritance planning
• And much more

BroClan implements the Native Script standard of Cardano in full, meaning that you can create a multisig structure to fulfil any need no matter how complicated it is.

Around smart wallets at this point we have only one type the “tokenVault”, this are tokenized wallets you can mint with our Aiken validator, then you can use it as a wallet while in the background your get your own Smart contracts written in Helios and compiled in the browser that controls said wallet.

BroClan was designed with 2 main ideas in mind:

1. Make multisig accessible and easy to use for non-tech savvy people
2. Make BroClan completely permissionless.

Almost all the BroClan logic runs in the frontEnd, so as a result anyone can clone the github repo and run their own instance on the software locally, you are even able to configure your data-providers, making it possible to use it in a full-node configuration, taking you completely offGrid.

Doing this I am able to say with confidence that nobody will ever be able to stop you from using your money as you see fit!

Can you talk about your experience building on Cardano? What pros and cons have you encountered?

Developing for Cardano is not that hard, out of the 30K+ lines I wrote for BroClan just over 100 are for the Aiken minting validator and the Helios Contracts are just 14 lines long. Being able to compress the real critical logic to such a small footprint gives me the confidence to say that this is a very secure solution.

Additionally if anyone would like to review and self-validate the code this ~150 Lines of code will give them all the assurance that the app functions with the way I advertise.

For the multisig module we are using pure native-scripts so the critical code is validated out of the box and offers a very high level of assurance.

For all its good, Developing on Cardano is still a bit hard because of how new it is, documentation is very sparse and I had to make up most things on my own and even contribute back to Lucid to get multisig working properly (especially staking).

Where do you envision BroClan in the years to come? What kind of functionalities can people look forward to?

We have a multisig wallet and a token wallet implementation, so I guess everyone can guess what the next thing will be *wink* *wink*.

Other than that I am currently building the multisig dApp connector that will be implemented in BroClan, this will allow multisig wallets to connect to dApps and utilise Cardano DeFi.

In the years to come I hope that BroClan will establish itself as the gold standard for this kind of wallets thanks to its superior security due to its architecture (separate keys from multisig) and thanks to its ease of use.

We have many functionalities this project can implement both on horizontal scaling (more features for existing wallets) and vertical (more kinds of wallets), and it will depend of course on the demand in what direction and how fast we will move.

Amazing. Any closing thoughts? Where can people learn more about BroClan?

I started building BroClan because I needed a reliable multisig wallet to store in it the pledge of my pool since it represents a huge chunk of my net-worth.

I invite anyone to join the BroClan Discord and start familiarising themselves with multisig because it really is a manifestation of *Crypto magic*. And I am very happy that in the time I was building BroClan more teams have shown up to implement this functionality for everyone to use.

If you want to have complete control of your finances but do not feel confident managing your own keys, Multisig might be the thing for you!

Since this project is at the very early stages you can count on getting support from me personally if you need any assistance to understand how BroClan works and using it yourself :)

Make sure to also test BroClan on the testnet since I will be giving away free mints of tokenVaults for anyone that finds and reports any bugs :)

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the people interviewed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG. Moreover, this content is for educational purposes, it doesn’t constitute financial advice.