Opdefi Co-Founder & CEO Harry Donnelly goes on defense for digital assets

Opdefi plays a critical role in digital asset recovery & security

Harry Donnelly, Co-Founder & CEO of Opdefi

5 questions for Harry Donnelly

1. What problem or opportunity are you tackling?

When trading digital assets, every second counts. Opdefi addresses the crucial need for reliable backup and recovery solutions, ensuring business continuity for institutional digital assets operations, even during wallet tech provider outages or failures. We have developed next-gen security and disaster recovery that seamlessly integrates with existing wallet providers to ensure customers always have access to their assets. This provides peace of mind to traders and investors in a market that’s always on.

2. What’s the unique insight you have in this area?

Understanding users top priorities — speed and trust— we identified significant oversights in existing backup and recovery solutions, which don’t focus on these priorities. Existing methods depend heavily on third parties for sensitive data management, like private keys, and involve cumbersome manual recovery processes. These inefficiencies can lead to unacceptable delays and financial losses for users. Addressing this, we developed a keyless recovery solution that eliminates reliance on third parties and guarantees instant access to assets during emergencies, ensuring users can back up and recover their digital assets swiftly and securely.

3. If your startup is wildly successful, how will the world be a different place?

At Opdefi, our vision is to unlock the true potential of the asset class, by removing security and operational risks. The digital asset space has been plagued by counterparty risks and failures, deterring many institutions from adopting this technology.

By achieving our goals, we'll not only increase institutional confidence in digital assets, paving the way for wider adoption, but also significantly reduce counterparty risk for the financial rails of the future. This reduction in risk is critical for enabling businesses to transact with one another with greater confidence, freeing up capital that can be used to make the world a better place. 

Opdefi's success would help mark a shift towards a more efficient and secure financial system where digital assets are utilized to their full potential.

4. What’s the most impressive thing your company has achieved to date?

Opdefi’s most impressive achievement to date is unlocking the novel technical solution to allow digital asset recovery, without needing to hold any part of your private key. Our solution empowers firms to independently recover their assets from both wallet technologies and custodial services, marking a significant leap forward in digital asset security. This significantly mitigates the tail risk associated with institutional digital asset ownership, eliminating the need for firms to expose their private keys to additional third parties. We’re excited to begin bringing this to market.

5. What should we look out for in the coming year?

On the product side we are planning to roll out the solution to more chains throughout the year, allowing us to offer a comprehensive multi-chain solution to our clients, alongside additional custodial integrations and enterprise features like on-prem solution storage. 

On the go-to-market side, we are rolling out our product to an initial set of paying clients and  will soon be announcing partnerships with key industry players in our space. Stay tuned!

If you are an digital asset manager, and want peace of mind for your team and your LPs around the security and accessibility of your assets, reach out to Harry.

Follow Opdefi on LinkedIn to continue to follow the journey.