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(Kitco News) - As companies around the world explore the integration of blockchain technology with their operations, Fireblocks, an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets, has announced that it has added support for cloud service providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, Thales and Securosus.
According to a press release from Fireblocks, the firm has expanded its secure MPC-CMP wallet and key management technology to include support for the popular cloud providers so that banks and financial institutions can utilize Fireblocks' technology stack “to quickly bring their digital asset initiatives into production while meeting their risk, compliance, and regulatory requirements.”
Fireblocks has helped over 50 major financial institutions build out their digital asset offerings in recent years. The company’s list of clients includes some of the most recognizable names in banking and finance, including BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, ANZ Bank, NAB, ABN AMRO, BTG Pactual, Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), and SIX Digital Exchange.
“These institutions have leveraged Fireblocks to build new digital asset custody, trading, clearing and settlement services, tokenization of financial products such as tokenized fiat, central bank digital currencies (CBDC), carbon credits, and more,” the release said.
“With Fireblocks, we were able to take our digital treasury bond initiative – Project Eden – from ideation to go-live in five months,” said Orly Grinfeld, EVP, Head of Clearing at TASE. “We were impressed with their ability to work with us and meet our extensive compliance and security requirements. Their world-class security operations and modular infrastructure allowed us to deploy wallets to our primary dealers, which included international banks like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and JP Morgan.”
In early 2022, the firm announced that it successfully raised $550 million through a Series E funding round that brought its valuation to $8 billion, making Fireblocks the highest-valued digital asset infrastructure provider in the world.
According to a Fireblocks spokesperson, this latest move is part of the firm’s effort to make its services accessible to a wider range of businesses and will allow it to serve a market of banks whose IT infrastructure is deployed on-premise or through cloud-based solutions.
“Banks are transitioning into the cloud but are currently fragmented,” the spokesperson said. “Some are on private cloud, some are using public cloud, while the rest remain on-premise.”
For example, Capital One currently uses AWS, Wells Fargo plans to move to data centers owned by Microsoft and Google over several years, Bank of America has saved $2 billion per year by building its own cloud infrastructure, and Deutsche Bank is in a ten-year partnership with Google for cloud computing.
“In order to serve 100% of all banks and financial institutions globally, Fireblocks is expanding its cloud support so that wallet and key management can be secured using the market-dominant providers in digital assets,” the spokesperson said. “Between Amazon, Google, Alibaba Cloud, and Fireblocks’ existing support for Microsoft Azure SGX support, Fireblocks will now cover the majority of the market share.”
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A key piece of the Fireblocks ecosystem is the Fireblocks Network, which “connects the largest consortium of regulated financial institutions that have implemented digital assets on the blockchain.” This connectivity allows companies to “execute their business strategies almost immediately by putting them in touch with exchanges, market makers, and other distribution partners such as private banks or fintech platforms.”
The platform also offers tokenization capabilities that support end-to-end lifecycle management for tokenized assets, including smart contract management, minting and burning, distribution, and custody across public, private, and permissioned blockchains.
“From the very beginning, the Fireblocks platform was created and designed to be business-first,” said Michael Shaulov, Co-founder and CEO of Fireblocks. “We understand the risk requirements in the bank at an architectural level and we have strategically developed components to make sure that our customers can get from proof-of-concept to production in the shortest timeframe possible.”
