The mobile cryptocurrency wallet Zengo has launched a premium subscription service with biometric security as its heart.
The platform had made a name for itself before the pandemic with a crypto wallet that allowed end users to log in with a 3D selfie scan, thanks to biometric technology from FaceTec. Now, the premium Zengo Pro service is extended that support for biometric security to crypto transactions themselves, allowing users to require a face scan for the authorization of any outgoing payments.
The functionality has been paired with a risk analytics system that Zengo has dubbed a “web3 firewall”, which alerts users in the event that the party receiving any transfers is believed to be operating a scam.
The other key feature of Zengo Pro, which is priced at $20 per month, is a legacy transfer function allowing a user to add a trusted individual as a kind of trustee in the event of the user’s death. Once this trusted affiliate has downloaded Zengo, both users will be able to share a secret stored in the cloud, and after predefined period of inactivity on the part of the primary user, all of the assets in their account will automatically be transferred to the trustee.
It’s a more elegant way of handling such situation than the “extremely costly solutions involving lawyers or notaries,” Zengo CEO and co-founder Ouriel Ohayon explained to TechCrunch.
Of course, the majority of users signing up for Zengo Pro probably will be thinking more about its sophisticated security features than what happens to their assets when they die, and the expansion of support for biometric authentication attests both to the utility of biometric security tools and the strength of FaceTec’s solution in particular, which the company has backed up with a spoof bounty program offering up to $600,000 in rewards to white hat hackers who manage to fool the 3D facial recognition technology.
Both companies have prospered after focusing to strongly on sophisticated security technologies. Zengo has seen over a million downloads and processed over $1 billion in transactions, while FaceTec has seen its own revenues jump by an astonishing 995 percent since the first quarter of 2020.
Source: TechCrunch
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July 26, 2023 – by Alex Perala
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