Insula’s founding idea:
The idea is to hedge Insula investors against the next “Mt. Gox” type of event, which is the “Lehman Brothers collapse” of crypto.
As centralised crypto platforms are growing huge (and start to heavily rely on lending and shadow banking), the question remains “what is going to happen to crypto when one of the largest of them breaks down”. This also extends to DeFI, since the DAO hack itself triggered the Ethereum Classic fork which shows that systematic changes shape the crypto industry beyond organic growth.
It is better to be prepared against unforeseen black swan events, and Insula intends to address small institutions needs, who may want to turn to smart contracts and crypto in order to decentralise away from centralised platform risk.
Buying crypto is not enough if the underlying platform reproduces all the flaws of traditional systems (i.e. *centralised exchanges are just banks in disguise* down the line). The tech is the same, only the marketing is different.
Insula’s journey to zero trust:
Zero trust in edge computing environment: a blockchain-based practical scheme. At Insula, we do not even want our clients to trust us and what we say, and this is why we do not have a marketing budget. What we do is a natural description of our products: we don’t tell stories.
Insula was founded in London in 2018 as a response to the growing marketing abuses in the crypto investment industry:
We suggest our clients to not trust what we say but to verify it instead. Verifying Insula’s contracts source code is a stronger assumption than believing what a person such as your banker/financial adviser wants to make you believe, and Insula built its foundation on these assumptions based on cold-hard code rather than human trust.
Human trust in banking has a poor track record. History shows all banks ultimately go bust due to a human mistake at some point. All of them, Insula solves this! In our view, “Insula’s code is law, and Insula is entirely technology-regulated and technology-secured. This leaves little room for human uncertainty and errors, and the error term is well identified & understood and accounted for.
The only remaining barrier is our prospective users technical understanding ability. We understand people don’t invest on what they don’t understand and that Insula may trigger the classic “fear-flight” response in prospective users who find themselves lost to overwhelming novelty and technical disruption.
This is why Insula also offers demos and educational sessions in order to allow crypto users to up their game and take back control with Insula allowing their crypto investments to survive and strive in an increasingly uncertain and hostile cyber environment.
Insula striving by focusing on the substance rather than form:
We remind our prospective users that the most popular crypto platforms with the most appealing designs are also the ones who get the most prone to being hacked: do not trust what you see!
Visible and perceived security has nothing to do with factual underlying truth! This is the difference between interface design & marketing (superficial, visible) and structural backend (foundational, invisible).
In crypto, the interface sells you the product but it is not an effective reflection of the underlying software product itself. This is where most users get tricked by their emotional bias and begin to consume irrationally, based on variables that are not the decisive ones i.e. a visually pleasant cryptocurrency exchange website design does not ensure its security. It only provides a mirage of it.
When superficiality takes over substance, it is best to halt a purchase or investment action and to reflect on it in our view, since there is a risk for the user to self-deceive in the long run.
Substance: What counts in Insula’s security (core, backend, substantial).
-Security audits (Successfully audited by PWC Zurich).
-Storing crypto offline in hardware (stored offline).
-Resistance to government-backed attacks (Resisted successfully).
-Public cybersecurity ratings (systematically in the industry’s top tier).
-Publicly available information (All info is public).
-Cybersecurity procedures (regularly updated and communicated to our client base).
-No risk/liability for loss of client crypto (Insula is not a “bank” or “own” the vault/funds). Clients possess their own crypto.
Form: What does not count in Insula’s security and is a marketing bias (superficial, unimportant surface level details to Insula’s security)
-Website design, colors and speed – only visual stimuli.
-Public perception of the founding team – only thoughts.
-Marketing, wording and political opinions – only thoughts.
-Business reputation – only perception
-Government lobbying capacity- only talks and words.
-Media informational influence capacity – only words.
-Social media posts – can’t impact security.
-Online reviews – do not always reflect/calibrate the factual truth.
At Insula we gave up 100% of our marketing budget and invested it all in cybersecurity in order to deliver secure value to our clients. We prefer to deliver absolute, verifiable security, rather than telling stories and with an engineered visual mirage.
At Insula we focus on what is core rather than on the appearance of things. In a cyberwar if you do not have a strategy, you are part of someone else’s strategy.
What is your strategy for securing your crypto investment over the next decades? If you do not have one, and leave it to tomorrow you may well be part of someone else’s strategy: a drained account may be the price of it.
We believe companies who do not overinvest in cybersecurity will get washed away by time and natural selection, much like the path of water and forms river’s bedrocks: blockchain is where crypto belongs to and is its only bedrock.
Cybersecurity: crypto in our funds is owned by our investors, rather than stored by ourselves or a risky platform. (not your key = not your crypto).
Insula: an internet-based company that banks offline.
Insula cybersecurity: Insula took active crypto asset management offline.
Insula based its online to offline security transition on the finding that the ultimate firewall is not needing a firewall at all. Anything online is virtually compromised already.
Insula took crypto offline:
In 2019, Insula mentioned edge computing R&D development of edge computing features and distributed intelligence via information flow richness. Insula mentioned that its final product would be perceived by the user with its sensory sense as a device: In 2022, Insula eventually made it true, with an unseizable, offline system.
The original research project was called Insula Fortress in 2018, Insula’s founding year. building on the intuition of a decentralized self running statistical arbitrage algorithmic trading system with offline storage.
Insula’s evolving security framework: a Big Bang analogy. From a centralized company to an ever-decentralizing software network re-distributing resources between members across spacetime. Insula’s security frameworks now cover IoT systems and applications in edge computing, beyond software only. Insula literally expanded to the real, digital tangible world.
The journey to a zero trust architecture can seem like climbing a mountain at times. Determining which approach you should take, looking for a solution which is safe and efficient. When you set off it can be tough going. I’m hoping these principles will make it easier to understand what is needed when planning your transition to a zero trust architecture.
Crypto exchanges follow the same model as banking, but with crypto. The format has changed, but the format is the same.
Insula offers something radically different, closer to crypto’s original etos:
Why Insula investment funds are solving the two main problems of crypto-investing:
1-Cybersecurity: crypto in our funds is owned by our investors, rather than stored by ourselves or a risky platform.(not your key = not your crypto).
2-Risk-adjusted returns: our investment funds are diversified, rather than having all eggs invested in one basket.
To date, crypto investment solutions tend to only expose return potential to their clients, but often cover superficially (if not at all) cybersecurity and investment downside risks – until a problem arises.
At Insula we only do one thing, but we do it well: we offer *secure* crypto-asset management solutions *on the blockchain*, and educate our clients in a transparent way in the process.
Service:
A major benefit of choosing Insula Investment Management™ to invest in crypto is that you will be onboarded, guided and receive endless support throughout the process. At Insula you are never left talking to a wall – unlike other crypto platforms that are available in self-service only.
LinkedIn ranks Insula’s onboarding and support services as one of the best in the category “Top products in Cryptocurrency Exchange Platforms”. Insula’s focus on providing a quality human service is also mentioned in TopUkCrypto Fund provider 2020,21,22, and mentioned as one of the 4 most salient crypto asset management companies in the world in “Riding the Crypto Asset Management Wave”.
At Insula we understand that our clients live in a busy world, have a full time job and little time to spare. They only want to invest their savings in crypto securely and make returns, nothing more, nothing less.
More importantly, Insula’s clients expect a platform with a human face to proceed to prompt, informed and secure investments without having to go through a liturgy of documentation & processes by themselves.
Insula focuses on quality rather than on quantity – this is how we stand out:
-Few, selected clients that are well served with personal attention and multiple managers/per client.
-Market – beating returns.
-Military- grade cybersecurity.
-Prompt support response time
-No co-dependence or information asymmetry between Insula and its clients since clients hold their own funds and Insula is an entirely public infrastructure.
-Competitive management & performance fees.
Automated and interface-only platforms will never compete with a dedicated team of human specialists. We understand that our clients who deposit their hard-earned savings on Insula expect the attention and support they deserve.
Military grade security:
Insula’s cybersecurity level is also stronger than the industry average since Insula and its team do not hold any funds, taking away risk associated with custody and investment funds.
Insula’s security is already battle-tested, rather than only hypothetical:
Insula has been building up & training capacity for four years to resist cyberwarfare instead of focussing on profit and growth right away. To us, survival & competition is key to Insula’s clients ‘ long-term investments success. In the ranking of human needs, security is the absolute foundation of everything. Now that Insula has built rock-solid foundations, it is ready to begin building up its commercial capabilities.
There are two types of companies: Those who know they’ve been hacked & those who don’t: Insula has already resisted unsuccessful government-backed cyberattacks in the past which built further confidence, resilience and trust in our systems. Most platforms do not resist such attacks: last year alone, $7bn was stolen from crypto platforms worldwide, especially from the largest names in the industry. While nothing was ever stolen from Insula.
At Insula, only the client holds their own funds unlike in banking. There is nothing to steal within Insula and this is what makes it a safer cyber-environment than a crypto exchange or traditional crypto fund. If you have currently stored crypto on an online exchange you can consider moving it offline to a secure Insula solution.
Insula: what is the next wave of disruptive innovation?
Insula aims at maintaining its position as the techiest crypto hedge fund available on the market by continuously developing disruptive crypto asset management solutions inspired from the traditional equity market.
Insula’s software versions act as a wave washing off sand on the shore: each new release erases the past ones and bulbs from scratch. Why? Then copycats get distanced and need to “recopy” Insula to keep up with it. Insula leads and misleads it plagia versions.
#Security notice: Insula is a non-custodial trading platform, we do not hold any funds. Insula, its employees and computer systems do not hold any funds or private key accesses for physical security reasons. Only Insula’s depositors have access to their own funds within the Insula ecosystem. This keeps our investors trading funds safe on our platform. Learn more about Insula’s security policy here: https://insulainvestments.com/crypto-cyber-security-awareness/
#Disclaimer notice: None of the consultation, information, video, blog posts & any other form of content is to be taken as financial advice. WE/INSULA are not financial advisers.