Republic’s new multi-chain wallet is tailored for tokenized assets

Financial services company Republic debuted its own self-custody digital wallet Thursday, which will be integrated into its retail crypto investing platform. 

According to Republic, users will no longer have to create their own third-party wallets to manage their crypto holdings or participate in token drops on the platform. Instead, they can rely on Republic’s multi-chain, multisignature wallet which will have “one unified interface.”

The wallet, which has been in development for over a year, is supported on Ethereum, Circle’s USDC, and Algorand. Republic said that it plans to add compatibility with Bitcoin, Avalanche, Polygon and others in the future, according to a press release provided to Blockworks.

Republic also allows its 3 million members to invest not just in digital assets themselves, but also tokenized securities and tokenized real world assets such as art, music or real estate. 

Andrew Durgee, Head of Republic Crypto, said that assets like these are usually off limits to most normal people looking to invest in the market. He thinks tokenization is the answer.

“For millions of global retail investors, investing in private assets like startups, real estate, and fine art is opaque, highly illiquid, and mostly inaccessible,” Durgee said in a statement. 

He continued, “Tokenization solves all of these problems. It’s why we built Republic Wallet.”

Republic has facilitated the funding of 15 separate crypto projects. Among them is LimeWire, an early 2000s website chiefly known for music piracy, that is attempting a comeback as a Web3 creator platform. 

And if crypto isn’t something a user wants to add to their portfolio, there’s also the option to invest in private startups, real estate, and a number of other opportunities that aren’t specifically blockchain oriented.

For the crypto minded among Republic’s customers, they’ll eventually be able to stake their crypto through the newly-minted digital wallet and earn rewards via the company’s validators on Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Aptos and more.

Republic informed Blockworks that while their wallet utilizes multi-signature technology, it also intends to integrate multi-party computation (MPC). Initially, MPC will be an additional method for users to recover their seed phrases, while the primary function of multisig will be to ensure the security of transaction signing.

A full-scale adoption of MPC will occur once the wallet team runs a full set of audits on the MPC architecture, Republic told Blockworks.

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