Today digital asset custody startup Fireblocks announced a $310 million Series D funding. The investment round valued the company at $2 billion and was co-led by Sequoia Capital, Stripes, Spark Capital, Coatue, DRW VC and Siam Commercial Bank’s SCB 10X. This brings total funding to $489 million.
A little over four months ago, the company unveiled a $133 million Series C round which included a strategic investment from the world’s largest custodian bank BNY Mellon. Fireblocks is to provide the blockchain technology for BNY Mellon’s digital asset custody offering. In addition to SCB and BNY Mellon, Fireblocks also counts Silicon Valley Bank as an investor.
Today’s announcement claims that more than 500 institutions use its solution to safeguard a trillion dollars of digital assets. To put that in context, the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies is $1.5 trillion. A spokesperson clarified that the trillion dollars refers to transfers, as opposed to just digital assets at rest.
Back in March, the assets under custody were split 40% Bitcoin, 30% Ether and the rest mainly tokenized assets, particularly stablecoins but also NFTs.
Some of Fireblocks clients include Revolut, BlockFi, Celsius, PrimeTrust, Galaxy Digital, Genesis Trading, crypto.com, and eToro.
“We are an investor, partner and customer of Fireblocks in multiple areas as we believe the Fireblocks Asset Transfer Network and its crypto custody infrastructure are world-class and are unparalleled in the digital asset space,” said Mukaya (Tai) Panich, Chief Venture and Investment Officer, SCB 10X. “As Thailand’s largest bank, we are looking forward to bringing Fireblocks’ solutions to future users in Southeast Asia.”
The Fireblocks solution uses Multi Party Computation (MPC), which means no single digital asset key can be stolen. Simplistically, the key has distributed fragments that have to come together to sign a transaction.
Other digital asset custody solutions include Anchorage, METACO, Ledger and from ING and several incumbent banks, Pyctor.
