A beginner's guide to Acronym
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At Acronym we’re building products which bridge the future of finance to the realities of today. Our vault is the bedrock of the ecosystem we’re developing. Hardware wallets are secure, but inflexible and hard to work with for active trading. Centralized exchange wallets offer the most speed and flexibility, but leave customers vulnerable to the next big collapse in the crypto space.
Enterprise custody solutions like Fireblocks offer “insolvency protection” by settling trades directly back into your wallet, but at high costs. The Acronym Vault solves these issues. It’s free, offers equivalent security to MPC vaults, can connect to both CEX and DEXs and gives the advantages of a managed solution without sacrificing control. Acronym can never access your vault and move your funds. It's your keys, your coins, your control, no exceptions.
Acronym Vault is non-custodial. Instead of self-custodial solutions like Metamask or a hardware wallet, your Acronym vault sits on a server in Germany (with cross-country backups), behind a firewall which only allows outgoing network requests. Your Acronym vault is comprised of a few components:
Your “cold” storage vault. This is a Virtual Machine which holds all of your wallets. You can think of it as your hardware wallet, just sitting on a server rack instead of your pocket.
The “Hybrid Sync” orchestration layer which manages orchestration between your offline vault and online transactions.
The Acronym Vault app, which lets you manage your vault and sign transactions.
The Acronym Vault is built on top of the “Hybrid” ecosystem. For more details, check out our (very WIP) deep dive docs here: <Doc Link>
Roadmap Link: https://github.com/orgs/acronym-ventures/projects/4
To start, the Acronym Vault will seem like a normal crypto wallet with limited functionality. Deposit and withdraw, that's it.
Once we've put the final touches on our UI/UX, the next feature we’ll be surfacing is the ability to sign Metamask transactions with your Acronym Vault (like you would with a hardware wallet or enterprise custodian).
If you want to see what we’re planning down the line, here’s a video of how the vault connects to external exchanges (which is also a sneak peak at the UI/UX of how our exchange will operate once we are issued our license in Q1 2025):
