Today METACO, the digital asset custody startup, said it has partnered with Brink’s to transport private keys and store them in Brink’s secure vaults. Brink’s is best known as a company that collects cash from banks and provides other solutions.
METACO is backed by Standard Chartered and Giesecke+Devrient, with clients that include Spanish bank BBVA, Singapore’s DBS Bank, and the Philippines UnionBank.
Brink’s offering forms part of METACO’s backup and disaster recovery framework and will help to store private keys.
Given that institutional digital asset holdings can have very significant financial value, there usually isn’t a single private key that can be used to recover the assets. Instead, private keys are effectively fragmented, so multiple pieces need to participate in restoring the digital asset holdings.
In METACO’s case, these key fragments are stored on smart cards, and Brink’s will transport and store the smart cards in multiple vaults.
“A robust recovery solution is not an afterthought, but a core foundation to be able to securely build and scale a bank’s digital asset future,” said Seamus Donoghue, METACO VP of Strategic Alliances.
“Brink’s is a market leader in physical security solutions and our partnership adds a critical service for institutional clients in the transport and distributed storage of physical key backups across multiple secure vaults, complementing METACO’s value proposition of’ no single point of compromise ‘into the physical realm of key recovery.”
As with most digital asset custody firms, METACO has expanded beyond pure custody. Its METACO Harmonize supports multiple self-custody providers, custodians and liquidity providers. It recently integrated with IHS Markit’s Security Processing platform.
Compared to other digital asset custody firms, METACO has raised a relatively modest sum of $20 million with its last funding round almost two years ago. In contrast, Fireblocks has raised more than $1 billion and Anchorage Digital almost half that, with its latest round led by KKR.
