Imagine if you had to access your mobile banking app by remembering a clunky long list of words or if you forgot your banking password, you couldn’t access your funds. In that scenario, would mobile banking be as pervasive as it is today used by billions of people globally?
Web 3.0 has the potential to be the future of the internet, because it allows users and creators greater ownership of their data and digital assets. However, if you have ever tried using a crypto wallet, you would have realised that the user authentication experience is fundamentally broken and is one of the leading causes of slower user adoption.
According to an analysis done by Chainalsys, nearly ~20% bitcoin has been lost forever primarily due to holders forgetting their seed phrases. Additionally last year itself, over $4B of cryptocurrency theft was perpetuated by hackers. So the current security methods are neither protecting against hacks nor are they delivering a functional user experience. The ethos of the blockchain community is also misaligned with centralised platforms holding control of a user’s private keys. As a result, there are strong tailwinds towards decentralised methods of authentication and password recovery powered by strong cryptographic protocols.
We have already experienced major changes in the user authentication workflow in the Web 2 world over the past few years - starting with password driven log in to password less authentication via SMS OTP or email links and more recently, specific authentication apps like Google Authenticator for high value use cases. However, these currently popular MFAs - Multi-Factor Authentications methods provided by leading IAMs - Identity and Access Managements providers have multiple security vulnerabilities such as phishing attacks, concurrency attacks, SIM swapping and many others.
At pi Ventures, we are always looking out for IP led startups solving some of the most pressing global problems and currently cybersecurity is the biggest pain point across both Web 2 and Web 3 use cases.
And Silence Labs is at the forefront of creating the technical infrastructure of distributed signatures and authentication libraries through a unique fusion of multi-party computation (MPC) based cryptographic algorithms, threshold signatures schemes (TSS), and intelligent multi-modal signal processing based layers of proofs.
The team at Silence have designed their flagship products Silent Auth (MFA Library) and Silent Shard (Key and access management Library) that have their roots in multiple patents.
Silent Shard derives its name from the concept of sharding (splitting) of private keys into portions such that a single point of failure (theft of private keys as whole) is ruled out as the complete private key is not exposed at any point during the distributed signature generation. Silent Shard essentially is built using state of art concepts of Multi-party computation (MPC) algorithms and Threshold Signature Schemes. The libraries handle core functionalities of key management, providing authorization policies and recovery.
What sets Silence Labs apart from existing MFA solutions is a proof-ecosystem based MFA called Silent Auth that combines various proofs of proof of proximity, co-location, legitimate possession, liveliness via activity, identity, and others. Silent Auth when combined with Silent Shard is inherently more secure than push-based authentication or social logins by design.
Silence Laboratories’ vision is to enable a developer-centric cryptographic infrastructure such that enterprises can adopt best in class cryptographic algorithms for key and access management without worrying about implementation and design details so they can focus on their core business.
Silence Laboratories has been working closely with several leading players, particularly in the Web 3 ecosystem. They are designed to support varied demands of authentication and authorizations with very high degree of contextualization, be it for digital asset custodians with high risks, non-custodial digital wallets, semi-custodial phone based wallets, exchanges with high expectations on usability, mobility providers, sensitive government or medical institutions or cloud service providers. Silence Laboratories will soon release their product-portfolio for integrations and announce some strong collaborations that will position them as a leading security partner of enterprises, irrespective of the blockchain applications.
Silence Labs team has already integrated Silent Shard with MetaMask’s Snaps which in itself is a great example of how MetaMask has opened the wallet design ecosystem. The Snap based designs will help to enhance wallet security and set benchmarks for MPC based wallets.
The holy trifecta of ironclad security, great user experience and developer-friendliness for Web 3 is yet to be cracked and we believe the team at Silence Laboratories is best placed to solve this. Jay is an expert in wireless communication and design science, while Andrei is an experienced hacker and cybersecurity expert. Together, they bring the unique combination of complementary technical backgrounds and design science required to build a robust, user-friendly authorisation experience.
We believe that the next billion users will adopt Web 3.0 quickly if they are provided a seamless user experience, with security guaranteed by experts. Read more about our thesis in our Deeptech Shifts 2026 report here.
This marks our first investment in the Web 3.0 infra space and we are really excited to back the next generation of founders building in the crypto infrastructure space. Building more user-friendly and useful decentralized applications will require fundamentally reimagining the infrastructure layer as repurposing the current layer will lead to suboptimal results and at pi Ventures, we are actively looking for founders building cutting edge products.