CoinPouch App Enhances Cryptocurrency Security

Mobile app guru Kirk Ballou’s Touch Titans has entered the world of cryptocurrency, creating an app that he said increases the security of digital money exchanges with increased convenience.

His new app, called CoinPouch, puts secure access to cryptocurrency in the palm of your hand, and allows you to send it anywhere in the world in seconds, just as you would send an email.

Kirk Ballou

CoinPouch is a secure blockchain wallet that features a built-in exchange. It supports Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, Ethereum, and Doge, while also supporting conversion to 48 different alt coins.

The app, which is available for the iPhone starting this week, allows users to save, send, exchange, and check market rates while on the go.

It removes the central server that can be attacked and it’s like the “key to your security box never leaves your phone,” Ballou told me.

Blockchain technology is very secure, Ballou said, because it removes the central server that can be attacked from the outside.

“It’s a consensus platform,” he said.

Cryptocurrencies work by using distributed ledgers, or blockchains, to record data — primarily the balance of every address for value transfer platforms such as Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies. Distributed ledgers are spread across multiple locations.

“This app came out from seeing a gap in the market.”
Kirk Ballou

To make the blockchain work correctly, the network of servers must agree collectively on the contents of the ledger. But the authority for maintaining the accounts is not centralized in one place, such as a bank, but rather is shared among everyone on the network.

Ballou said there are thousands of servers and that more than 51 percent of them would have to be compromised to affect the data.

“This app came out from seeing a gap in the market,” Ballou told me. He said his background in security apps makes CoinPouch more valuable to cryptocurrency users.

Here’s how it came to be.

Ballou said that he has a lot of friends in the tech industry who were talking about digital currency, so he did some research and decided it was time for Touch Titans to develop something in that space.

THE ROOTS OF COINPOUCH’S DEVELOPMENT

Touch Titan Labs entered an app called NovaWallet into the Stellar Build Challenge. Stellar, a standalone blockchain alternative to Bitcoin and Etheream that enables international transactions in under five seconds.

Stellar uses digital currency called a lumen (XLM).

Ballou was awarded 1.25 million lumens in the challenge for Novawallet, an app that enables the secure sending of cryptocurrency through a Slack bot. It allows users to check their balance, send lumens to any email address or lumens wallet, and puts new users onto the Stellar network.

That effort became the foundation for CoinPouch.

“I wish we had gotten into it earlier,” Ballou said.

Touch Titans made its name producing mobile app technologies for clients such as Microsoft, CNN, National Geographic, Nokia, Red Bull, Qualcomm, MTV, Dallas-based AT&T Inc., and others. It partnered with Vinli on a suite of connected car applications and platform.

Ballou sees great potential for blockchain technology in the retail sector for loyalty programs and other uses.

“In the next year, there’s going to be a surge in businesses using cryptocurrency as a reward,” Ballou said.

Ballou said his own dabbling in cryptocurrency markets began on March 7.

“I put in a little money, then I got hooked,” he said.