Japan-based financial services firm SBI Group and Danish cryptography services company Sepior ApS have partnered to jointly develop a proprietary wallet, according to an announcement published Oct. 13. The wallet is set to ensure secure transactions on SBI’s cryptocurrencies exchange platform, VCTRADE.
The SBI Group was established in 1999 in Japan as an Internet-based financial services provider. Since then, the company has formed a financial conglomerate with a focus on new technologies, including fintech, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and others. In 2018, SBI reportedly invested over $533 million in the blockchain and AI sectors.
Per the press release, Sepior and SBI have signed an agreement to license Sepior’s Threshold-Sig Wallet Security technology and to jointly develop a proprietary wallet to secure online content and transactions on SBI’s digital currencies trading platform, VCTRADE.
With this move, SBI is reportedly looking to set new standards for crypto exchange security, partly through the development of more effective key management and protection. Sepior’s patented Threshold Wallet technology reportedly allows faster signing of transactions involving multiple parties and “eliminates the need for any device or entity to possess the entire private key at any time, making it effectively impossible for an attack to result in key theft.”
Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, President and CEO of SBI Holdings commented on the technology:
“After extensive investigation, our security research team determined threshold signatures based on multiparty computation (MPC) offered our desired level of security, performance, and scalability needed to manage transactions for our growing SBI Virtual Currencies customer base.”
Earlier this month, Ripple-powered payments app MoneyTap went live. The service was co-developed by Ripple and SBI Holdings, and will use Ripple’s blockchain solution xCurrent to enable domestic bank-to-bank transfers “in real time.”
In September, SBI Holdings began trialing a crypto token “S Coin,” that can be used to make retail purchases with users’ smartphones. In the trial, SBI Group employees will reportedly use the S Coin platform to complete cash-free purchases at cafes and eateries around the premises of the SBI headquarters.
