SBI Digital Asset Holdings is launching an institutional digital asset custody service that will incorporate Sepior’s ThresholdSig software into the sbiwallet.
“Sepior has proven to be a truly reliable and innovative partner,” said Fernando Luis Vazquez Cao, CEO of SBI Digital Asset Holdings. “The digital asset market is evolving rapidly and we’ve expanded our focus to assist other financial institutions with their entry into this space.”
“As we reviewed our customer’s solution requirements, Sepior proved once again to offer the most compelling cryptographic technology for us to integrate as part of our wallet and broader digital asset ecosystem.”
Sbiwallet is the brand for SBI’s digital asset wallet and custody platform. It uses MPC for transaction signing, requires multi-level approvals, and supports compliance for all transactions.
In 2018, Sepior worked with SBI Group to develop a wallet based on Multiparty Computation (MPC). As we outlined at the time, with MPC for keys, there are shares or fragments of a key that can be distributed off chain across different cloud service providers, and they come together when a transaction needs to be signed. By splitting the keys up it makes it far harder for a thief to steal them. One of Sepior’s co-founders Ivan Damgård, literally wrote the book on MPC.
Since then, several other custody firms have adopted a similar approach, including Curv, the digital asset custody firm acquired by Paypal.
Meanwhile, SBI is one of the most active institutions when it comes to digital assets. It recently launched a retail security token offering (STO) of bonds issued by SBI Securities using the BOOSTRY platform. It’s involved in multiple digital asset exchanges. One is a joint venture in Singapore with Swiss stock exchange SIX. Another is in Japan in association with SMBC. And it’s also an investor in the Stuttgart Digital Exchange. However, its activities are far more extensive than these.
