Coinkite expands multisig functionality

Coinkite, a Bitcoin web wallet notable for its interest in cryptographic user security, announced earlier this week that it is releasing the first working implementation of multi-signature wallet technology that can support up to fifteen signatories.

Multisig wallets allow for a variety of applications, making it possible to distribute responsibility for a wallet among many signatories. You can imagine applications of this for jointly owned accounts, or the creation of escrow agents or banks which can hold your money without being able to steal it. Until recently, most platforms have been limited to a maximum of five signatories, which, while useful, it somewhat limited. Coinkite is the first web wallet to expand this support substantially, which will open up more complex possible business relationships, and in order to make this feature more accessible, Coinkite has implemented a web interface, creating a web page where transactions from multisig wallets can be proposed and discussed, and individual signatories can choose whether or not to authorize the transaction.

In the press release sent to CoinReport, Coinkite CEO Rodolfo Novak said:

“With this new feature, we wanted to be able to offer something to the crypto-currency advocates that are nervous whenever a service holds their precious private keys. Now you can decide if any or all of the private keys for a shared account will be kept secret from Coinkite. We are using BIP32 extended public keys, and every payment address for the account will be unique.”

You can read more about the functionality (and try it yourself) on Coinkite’s website.