as a possible threat to financial transactions). Currently, practice employing U2F devices employs such strong authentication measures at the user side. CertCo's most notable commercial customer was SETCo, the operating company for the Visa-MasterCard Secure electronic transaction credit card security protocol, to which it provided certificate authority technology, which was the first implementation of distributed Threshold cryptography based signing. Currently, Threshold Cryptography is widely employed, say in the Cryptocurrency exchange ecosystem. Business failure CertCo can be considered a pre-Blockchain pioneer of Fintech, yet at the time, it used up all of its money, never found a wide market for its products, and went out of business in Spring 2002, following substantial reductions in technical staff in November and December 2001, due, partially, to unavailability of investors after the September 11 attacks. Technical contributions CertCo made various contributions to the fields of cryptography and public key infrastructure via scientific publications and patents. Its most heavily cited patents by subject are: Attribute certificates Certificate authority Digital Rights Management Identity warranty Key escrow Payment system Other patent filings include Changing key fragments in a digital signature system Computer-based method and system for aiding transactions Standards and policy CertCo personnel contributed to a number of standards bodies and policy projects, including: IETF Online Certificate Status Protocol OCSP American Bar Association Digital Signature Guidelines] ANSI X9.30 The Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) ANSI X9.31 Reversible Public Key Cryptography (rDSA) (better known as RSA) ANSI X9.45 Attribute Certificates ANSI X9.57 Certificate Management for Financial Services References American companies established in 1994 American companies disestablished in 2002 Computer companies established in 1994 Computer companies disestablished in 2002 Defunct computer companies of the United States