BNY Mellon Joins $ 133 Million in Series C In Bitcoin Fireblocks Fire

New York city-based Crypto custodian Fireblocks has raised $ 133 million in Series C venture capital funding with strategic investment from BNY Mellon and Silicon Valley Bank.

The tour was led by Coatue, Ribbit, and Stripes, according to a Fireblocks report. Completion of the round will bring the company’s total venture capital to $ 179 million. Previous investors include Paradigm, Galaxy Digital, and Swisscom Ventures. The company declined to disclose how much the investment valued the company.

With increased capital, the company plans to expand its infrastructure for its fast-growing customer base. “Engineering is going to be a key part of our cost,” said Fireblocks CEO and co-founder Michael Shaulov. Over the past few months, the company has boarded 70 new clients and is likely to have 80 new customers by the end of this quarter, twice as many as expected. To date, FireBlocks has completed $ 400 billion in digital asset transfers for approximately 230 clients including banks, hedge funds, fintech companies, and exchanges, among others. The company closely advises 50% of the top 70 banks in the world and develops pilot products with five multinational banks, Shaulov said. Managed funds are in the $ 10-20 billion range.

Click here to join Forbes CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor

“We are proud to be part of the larger move to mainstream digital assets,” a spokesperson for BNY Mellon said in an email. “This strategic investment is the next logical step in our journey to becoming an asset server for all asset classes.” In February, America’s oldest bank launched a digital asset unit and is beginning to provide accounting and asset management services for bitcoin ETFs in Canada, with plans to expand the offer to the U.S. when such results are agreed. The bank’s own digital asset hold will be “available later this year pending approval,” a company representative wrote. Further details have not been released but Fireblocks’ core technology will be an “important part” of the new digital asset platform.

Fireblocks ’relationship with the world’s largest holding bank can be traced back all the way to mid-2018, just weeks after the establishment of Fireblocks, according to Shaulov, – a humorous situation for the much more turbulent crypto market , unless abandoned Bonanza ICO of 2017.

The company’s recent success has far outweighed the frothy cryptocurrency industry, with bitcoin alone breaking the $ 1 trillion mark in market capitalization a month ago. Forbes has previously reported flooding old-line financial institutions into the cryptocurrency capture industry.

In March 2019, Fidelity began offering a bitcoin capture service through a separate subsidiary called Fidelity Digital Assets. Last December, the unit partnered with crypto management platform BlockFi to crack down on clients who borrow from BlockFi against their bitcoin securities. That same month, Northern Trust

NTRS
and Standard Chartered, two of the world’s largest secure service providers, launched London-based crypto Zodia.

With billions of dollars available, brand recognition, and a much larger clientele, these legacies could pull the rug out of the ever-growing crypto unicorns, but young people are hungry for success. More importantly, the knowledge gap will provide. “We are engaged with the top leaders across capital markets and they lead the way in that dialogue. There is still a lot of education that needs to be embedded in a lot of these relationships, ”says Shaulov.

Fireblocks was founded in 2018 by members of the cybersecurity company Check Point

CHKP
, which investigated the 2017 hacks of South Korean crypto exchanges by Lazarus Group, a hacking activity attributed to the North Korean government. The New York-based startup provides an enterprise-level platform for moving, storing, and exporting digital assets, including bitcoin, ethereum, polkadot, and others.

Like many other companies in space, FireBlocks has grown tremendously thanks to the bitcoin rally. Just this February, it has transferred more than $ 100 billion worth of digital assets, almost 17 times more compared to $ 6 billion transferred in February 2020.

The partnership with one of the world’s largest asset managers makes Fireblocks an attractive target for construction. On March 8, PayPal

PYPL
announce that it is acquiring Israel – based crypto security infrastructure provider Curv, Fireblocks’ closest competitor. Both companies use the same type of technology to protect client assets known as multi-party computing (MPC). With this approach, several parties can each compute their own snippets of a larger post while keeping their entries private and the result they want to achieve.

Sign up for the free Forbes Webinar “Crypto Assets & Taxes: What You Need to Know” on March 30

Shaulov says that a construction bid has not yet been sent to Fireblocks but that the agreement between PayPal and Curv is a good sign for the company. The fact that PayPal “continues to recognize and recognize this new generation of technology really shows that this is the norm,” says Shaulov.

Fireblocks has also been working with the Diem Society, a group behind a controversial stable of the same name developed by Facebook

FB
. The startup created an infrastructure for any buyer or payment service that was willing to accept Diem as payment. Facebook idea, formerly known as Libra, is on track for its launch later this year.