CAPITAL & TRADE
Asterion Capital & Trade (ACT) manages a variety of investment options on behalf of the company. Ideally, it serves as not only the funding center for Asterion, but as a self-contained secure investment hub for our clients. Our priority is risk allocation and we remain adaptable in the face of a volatile market environment. In fact, it's where we thrive - in the face of adversity.
To learn more about the markets managed by ACT, contact us for additional information or scroll down for the most exciting news in the cryptocurrency industry.
Securing Your Data, Securing Your Future:
Blockchain's Place in Your Risk Management Strategy
History has shown us that successful companies are those which can not only flourish during growth markets, but can maintain their presence during the turbulence of recessive trends. Businesses prepare for adverse events in a variety of ways. Some businesses choose to grow their cash-based assets to weather rougher markets. Others compound their investments and hedge risk through various securities trades. Then there are the modern companies applying blockchain technology to ensure their efforts are guarded against obstacles to their success. Why should companies look to lean on blockchain as the keystone of their future?
1. Insuring invested funds through a blockchain platform is cost effective compared to traditional banking in most cases. Banks charge a variety of fees to maintain their infrastructure including operational overhead. With blockchain, the infrastructure is minimized through efficiency and the costs involved, although still carried through to the customer, are up to 60% smaller.
2. Conversion from analog media storage to digital allows for the use of blockchain's inherent structural security to maintain your investments. Cash on hand can be lost and if a currency exchange is needed, one is reliant upon brick-and-mortar banks to complete the conversion. With digital assets, currency can be converted in real time to optimize exchange rates and secure the asset through the decentralized storage of blockchain.
3. Decentralization is the progressive trend of business and blockchain can act as a stable foundation for operations. Imagine decentralization as an evolution of the traditional physical banking branch - be it a walk-in bank or an ATM. With blockchain, the invested funds are insured by the exchanges who, like banks, have it in their best interest to retain the highest security measures possible to protect their client base.
Blockchain Cryptography
Resistant to Quantum Computing Attacks:
In the Ethereum 2.0 Serenity upgrade, accounts will be able to specify their own scheme for validating transactions, including the option to switch to a quantum-safe signature scheme.
Hash-based signature schemes like the Lamport signature are believed to be quantum-resistant, faster, and less complex than ECDSA. Unfortunately, this scheme suffers from size issues. The size of Lamport public key and signature together is 231 times (106 bytes vs. 24KB) more than the ECDSA public key and signature. So, the use of the Lamport Signature scheme will need 231x more storage than ECDSA, which is unfortunately too large to be practical at this time.
Ethereum developers are testing other quantum-resistant signature options like XMSS (eXtended Merkle signature scheme) signatures used by The Quantum Resistant Ledger blockchain, hash ladder signatures, and SPHINCS.
There are many reasons to switch to hash-based signature schemes like XMSS, as they are fast and yield small signatures. One major drawback is that XMSS signature schemes are stateful, due to their Merkle trees with many one-time signatures. This means the state has to be stored in order to remember which one-time key pairs were already used to create a signature. On the other hand, SPHINCS signatures are stateless as they use few time signatures with Merkle trees, which means no need to store the state anymore since one signature could be used multiple times.
Hash-based RANDAO functions, which are used for random number generation in the beacon chain in Ethereum 2.0, are already believed to be post-quantum.