Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $2 million from some of the most strategic investors in crypto. The round was led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Binance Labs, Accomplice, Coinbase Ventures, Sixth Horizon, and Terminal Argonautic Ventures. The round came together quickly and was eventually oversubscribed. We’re absolutely delighted to bring them all on board.
At Torus, we’re building the frictionless gateway to the decentralized ecosystem. The status quo for DApp logins is simply too hard. Right now, DApps are only truly accessible to a tech-savvy few who are already fluent in code, which is not how it should be — DApps should and need to be available to everyone. Our tests found that the current state of the art for DApp onboarding can take as long as 10 minutes. That is simply unacceptable. The onus is on us and the development community to start radically reducing the barriers to entry, otherwise, DApps will remain a novelty exclusively for the developer community.
Operating on the principles of simplicity, seamlessness and security, we’ve built a distributed key management system to provide users of all skills and backgrounds with a user-friendly authentication method. It’s the exact opposite of the status quo. Users do not need to manage private keys, nor do they need to set up complicated recovery seeds or install browser extensions. Instead, Torus was intentionally designed by leveraging existing user authentication methods to secure private keys, and to piggyback on existing UX experiences that are already familiar to users. The shortest route from A → B is one click, and today, the easiest way to do one-click verification is OAuth — and that’s exactly what we’ve built: frictionless logins for DApps using OAuth.
Looking back to our first hackathon, we sought to eradicate complicated tools and make the authentication procedure simple and straightforward for both users and developers. If history has taught us anything, it’s that if something is hard to integrate developers will refuse to use it.
Integrating Torus into your DApp is ridiculously easy by design. It only takes a few lines of code and then it just works. Torus provides developers with a backwards-compatible web3 interface that includes subresource-integrity to keep it tamper-proof. Developers get the comfort of ensuring the seamless login through integrating a single script tag into their DApp.
On the backend, our system handles all of the hard work of splitting up a user’s key into multiple shares and securely distributing them to a network of nodes run by large ecosystem stakeholders strategically distributed around the world. When a user logs in with Torus using Google or Facebook Connect, Torus automatically retrieves their shares and reconstruct their private key instantaneously. The entire process happens within a second, allowing DApps to onboard new users in a fast, secure, familiar way. Moreover, Torus’s native browser functionality comes with built-in mobile support, providing users with unparalleled access to DApps across platforms and devices without any additional hardware or installation.
Radically improving the onboarding experience is the single biggest lever you can pull to exponentially increase your user base. If you build apps that are familiar to use, more people will use them.
We launched our test net earlier this year and recently opened up our public beta for Ethereum-based DApps at ETH New York. We’re heads down and building aggressively. We’ll be supporting more smart contract platforms very soon starting with EOS and Tron next.
Completing this financing round enables us to grow our team, accelerate development, and polish the on-ramp for users onto decentralized systems. We hope that you join us on our journey and integrate Torus into your next big DApp.
In the meantime, we’re actively recruiting for several engineering positions, so head on to the recruitment page for more details. Also, be sure to check out our new website and documentation here.
Thank you for your continued support!
Cheers,
The Torus Team
