Crypto custody provider Fireblocks, fresh off a $133 million raise, has transferred more than half a trillion dollars worth in total assets since launching in 2019. Specifically, the company has transferred $637 billion and seen a 2023% uptick in transaction volume since 2020.
“In January, we were doing around $60 billion of settlements per month,” said Michael Shaulov, CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks. “Now we are at $124 billion for the last 30 days.”
The company said retail-facing businesses like Revolut, BlockFi Trading and Celsius are boosting growth on the crypto custody platform.
For example, Revolut reported 300,000 new cryptocurrency customers, adding 100,000 of them in the first six days of 2021, a few months after they integrated with Fireblocks. Meanwhile the Celsius Network, an early Fireblock client, announced in April it boosted its growth to 500,000 new users and had over $10 billion worth of digital assets under management.
From Q4 of 2020 to Q1 of 2021, Fireblocks has also nearly doubled its client list, from 60 to over 110. Shaulov said it’s not just new clients that are coming to the space; it’s also clients that were in the space and are scaling up.
“There are completely new logos of companies that I haven’t seen before and not operating in that space before,” said Shaulov. “We’re seeing a lot of traditional asset managers as well as traditional funds stepping in and looking to deploy active strategies in this space.”
Multiparty computation
Part of Fireblocks’ attractiveness to customers is their Multiparty Computation (MPC) approach. MPC allows for large pools of data to stay encrypted while permitting information to be extracted from those data pools using encrypted computations. Other methods include, for example, multisignature (multisig) wallets, which require two or more private keys to sign and send a given transaction.
“Multisig just became an infeasible technology for anyone that has to do a high volume of transactions on Ethereum,” said Shaulov. “It just doesn’t scale, so the only alternative to do it securely is basically MPC.”
He’d previously told CoinDesk that multiple wallets based on multisig are associated with higher fees than regular, single address transactions, but MPC-based wallets are represented on the blockchain as a single wallet address, with the actual distributed signature computed outside of the blockchain.
“Thanks to Fireblocks, we significantly reduced blockchain fees for ether and ERC-20 token transfers. MPC technology eliminates the multisig smart contract that makes transactions consume additional gas,” said Max Sapelov, co-founder and CTO of CoinLoan in a statement.