Tenaya Capital, Fidelity fund blockchain startup Fireblocks

On June 10, Fidelity and Tenaya Capital announced they have provided $16 million to Fireblocks to help the blockchain startup expand their infrastructure as well as acquire other companies.

Fireblocks has developed a platform that secures digital assets in transit. Their platform has already earned the company quite a reputation across the globe, as companies like Galaxy Digital and Genesis Global Trading have switched to the platform to protect transactions of their digital assets across a variety of exchanges, including over-the-counter brokerages, cold storage, and hot wallets.

Fireblocks founders Michael Shailov and Pavel Berengoltz had committed themselves to developing a platform that protected these transactions following a number of high-profile hacks that had been reported in the news. Their goal was to eliminate these asset hacks and scams and have employed security engineers from some of the top cybersecurity firms on the planet, including IBM and Symantec, to assist in the development of this platform.

Most security experts are building platforms that can protect wallets and digital assets, but very few are as concerned about the transition from one crypto asset to another or between wallets. This has been the focus of the startup and is why they have labeled themselves as the producer of “secured highway” with their new technology.

“While Blockchain based assets by themselves are cryptographically secure, moving digital assets is a nightmare. After interviewing over 100 institutional customers, including hedge funds, broker-dealers, exchanges, and banks, we concluded that the current process is slow and highly susceptible to cyber attacks and human errors,” explained Shailov.

The funding of these kinds of firms is a growing craze across the globe. On May 20, South Korean fintech firm Dunamu invested $46 million in blockchain startup companies. Two weeks earlier, Alibaba invested $14 million in QEDIT, a company using blockchain technology to increase privacy. In June 2018, Binance promised $1 billion in funds for these kinds of firms.