The Gordian Developer Meeting on August 5, 2026 focused on how to better secure your Bitcoin with Smart Custody techniques such as multisig and Shamir’s Secret Sharing. It included two feature presentations:
- Sharding Secrets to Protect Your Bitcoin. A discussion of the threat of “loss” to self-sovereign Bitcoin ownership, how that can be resolved with metadata and Shamir’s Secret Sharing, and how Bitcoin Core can be brought into the process.
- How Keylay Works. A look at a novel technology that allows the secure transmission of QR codes across the internet.
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Full Meeting:
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Sharding Secrets (excerpted):
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Keylay (excerpted):
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Meeting Slides:
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Sharding Secrets Slides:
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Keylay Slides:
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Also see the transcript for the full content of the meeting.
Key Quotes
“In the first year we failed over half of maybe 30 or 40 reviews of server software because of randomness.” —Christopher Allen, on SSL Reviews
“So clearly we failed if we can’t even get Bitcoin Core engineers to do the right thing.” —Christopher Allen, on ensuring best practices for key management
“Loss is what you have to really keep the focus on.” —Shannon Appelcline, on the dangers of self-sovereign custody
“It ensures that this key isn’t just a couple of digits on a piece of paper that no one might have any idea what they are.” —Shannon Appelcline, on the importance of metadata
“The coordination of the setup is the leaky step.” —Stan Reeves, on the dangers of multisig
“KeyLay is a coordination layer. It’s not a wallet.” —Stan Reeves, on Keylay’s design
Links
General Meeting
- Q2 Quarterly Report
- Revisiting SSI
- Dev Pages
- Learning XIDs
- Learning Bitcoin
- Musings of a Trust Architect
- Dispatches of a Trust Architect
- Smart Custody
- Learning FROST