Photo: Fireblocks / LinkedIn
A platform for securing digital assets in transit, Fireblocks, announced $16 million in Series A funding from investment bulls like Cyberstarts, Tenaya Capital, and Eight Roads, all the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International. The additional capital will be used by the company to build out its infrastructure, and court additional firms.
The truth is, Fireblocks has been serving prominent companies for the secure transmission of their digital assets over the hot and cold wallets, across the exchanges and counter brokerage. Galaxy Digital and Genesis Global Trading are among their clients who have already been using these services.
Founders Michael Shailov and Pavel Berengoltz wanted to change the insurance sector inside the crypto ecosystem, especially after seeing the hacking attacks on the south Korean exchanges in 2017. They decided to set up a blockchain security company in order to eliminate the root cause of digital asset hacks and scams as are private key theft, spoofing, and compromised credentials.
In one of his interviews, Shailov said that he and his colleague from Lacoon Mobile Security, acquired by Check Point in April 2015, “reprioritized” their target clients from “traditional financial infrastructure to crypto,” following the “clearly sophisticated hacking by true professionals, including nation states.”
Together with security engineers from Symantec, Trusteer, IBM security and leading cryptography advisor, Prof. Ran Canetti, they built a cloud-based security platform that eliminates the hassle of copy and pasting addresses and enables the seamless flow of funds.
Shailov said:
“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.”
The digital security platform is built on Ethereum blockchain and is powered to provide an additional layer of security to the financial business. That kind of platform stands out from others, by offering access slots and authorization to the users in terms of time and amount to be transferred.
From Fireblocks they said that they have used MPC technology and chip level security for the digital assets that are ready to be transmitted over the blockchain.
The company so far has integrated fifteen cryptocurrency exchanges and supports around 180 cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies. In the future, the company is planning to build infrastructure for small and medium scale companies that want to accept cryptocurrency as payment.
