Quick Information
- Startup Name: Pass2Heaven
- Year Founded: 2022
- Website: Pass2Heaven.com
- HQ Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
Startup Founders
Oleksandr Kurbatov – Cryptography Lead, Engineering
Elizabeth Gurieva – QA, Engineering
Alexey Shapoval – Engineering, DevOps
Startup one-liner:
The digital inheritance protocol
Problem Startup Solves:
There is no trustless and straightforward way to bequeath sensitive digital information, such as passwords, banking details or mnemonics to the relative or trusted person directly. Existing ways are either rely completely on trust in a third-party (e.g., when making an actual paper will) or are workarounds that are not secure (account passwords get leaked from databases, cloud providers get hacked, etc.). Pass2Heaven makes an impact by providing simple, secure and straightforward way to send sensitive information to anyone. It relies on cryptography to encrypt, digitally sign, and prove ownership of the will. There’s no registration, cryptographic keys are generated randomly and processed in user’s browser and instantly deleted when page is refreshed. When the will is sent, it creates a transaction in a blockchain ledger but the sender is anonymized using a special signature mechanism. The recipient has no identifiable information except the public key so it’s impossible to trace who is the sender and who is a recipient. Moreover, both sender and recipient can regenerate keys as many times as they want so that each new will can be associated with a new key pair. The encrypted contents of the will are stored in IPFS, which ensures that they will be available and cannot be deleted or censored.
Progress and Current Status
It’s currently in a public Beta, available for free to everyone, no limit on wills.
What is a Crazy Story about the Startup?
The crazy story is how Pass2Heaven got revived in seemingly the least suitable circumstances for working on a tech startup.
Pass2Heaven stated as a hackathon project in 2020. It won and gathered some attention but eventually stagnated due to all of us having more urgent things on our plate. But by the fall of 2022, as Ukraine was under constant attacks and rocket strikes (and still is as of today), we sat down and realized that it’s now or never. Either we do it now or there might not be a chance tomorrow. Pretty morbid, but it gave us that motivational boost we lacked, I guess. We ended up re-doing the project from scratch in 2 weeks, improving a lot of things as we went on. And now it’s something we all are happy with, although there still many aspects that can be improved and new features to introduce.
What is a Company the Startup Looks Up To, and Why?
Although no one realized it at the beginning, Pass2Heaven has some things in common with SecureDrop made by Freedom of the Press Foundation. I think we definitely have some things to learn from this foundation and the way whistleblowers’ privacy is protected overall so that we can incorporate these mechanisms in our own web app. Also, opensourcing the protocol level of Pass2Heaven and, more importantly, making it usable as part of other applications, would be the next big step for us.
The Company in Four Years Will Be…
Considering the niche nature of the project, it would be insincerity to say that we see ourselves as the next unicorn, but there are definitely some goals to achieve. Right now, we see Pass2Heaven becoming two things: (1) a mature and well-understood product, the first option when it comes to digital inheritance and (2) strong and secure open source protocol that anyone, from solo developer to organizations, can use to solve their need for a secure way to send sensitive information.
