Fireblocks, a platform which is known for protecting the digital asset in transit raised $16 million in Series A funding from popular investment firms such as Cyberstarts, Tenaya Capital, and Eight Roads, which is proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International. The extra raised funds will allow the firm to establish its own infrastructure and court additional firms.
Some influential customers such as Galaxy Digital and Genesis Global Trading have already opted for Fireblocks to protect the transmission of their crypto assets across exchanges, over the counter exchanges, hot wallets, and cold storage.
In order to take action against a series of high-profile hacks, founders Michael Shailov, and Pavel Berengoltz, expect to remove the root cause of crypto hacks and scams, which includes private key theft, spoofing, and compromised credentials.
Shailov informed CoinDesk that he and his colleague from Lacoon Mobile Security have “reprioritized” their target clients from “traditional financial infrastructure to crypto,” following the “clearly sophisticated hacking by true professionals, including nation-states.”
Both the founders along with some security engineers from Symantec, Trusteer, IBM Security and well-known Cryptography advisor Prof. Ran Canetti developed a cloud-based security platform which removes the task of copy and pasting addresses and allows seamless flow of funds.
“While Blockchain based assets by themselves are cryptographically secure, moving digital assets is a nightmare. After interviewing over 100 institutional customers, including hedge funds, broker-dealers, exchanges, and banks, we concluded that the current process is slow and highly susceptible to cyber-attacks and human errors,” stated Shailov.
Fireblocks allows the digital asset to be moved from any state of storage and is specially meant for settlement and transfer of blockchain utilizing chip-level security and MPC technology. The platform enables users to utilize some layer of security along with passwords, biometrics, and two-factor identification, which have become industry standard.
How Fireblocks is better as compared to other platforms?
One thing which sets Fireblocks apart is the level of programmable control accessible to client accounts. The platform enables fractions of authorization and access among those users who use the service to manage the flow in terms of timing and amount of transactions. This enables financial institutions which have different types of employees, from traders to operations managers, all with complete access to digital funds, to fix different permissions for different scenarios.
Two main issues faced by users is security and speed. Shailov stated, “New uses of blockchain cannot rely on gaps in service. [Investors] need assets to be available, interactable, and transferable.”
He further added, “There was a need to take assets, either native to the blockchain or tokenized assets or securities, and move, trade, sell them in a reasonably fast time frame. Keeping assets locked down in cold storage like a traditional custodian is antithetical in the way [investment firms dealing in crypto] operate.”
Fireblocks launched a product last quarter and was managed to handle hundreds of millions of dollars worth crypto transfers. The platform can be used for the financial use case of blockchain.
The firm is incorporated with 15 crypto exchanges and provides support for over 180 cryptocurrencies, tokens, and stablecoins.
