Fireblocks — The Institutional Digital Asset Network

Infrastructure / Technology — Fireblocks occupies a position in the digital asset ecosystem that is structurally analogous to SWIFT in traditional banking: it is the transfer network that institutional participants use to move digital assets between themselves, without needing to trust each other or rely on individual wallet-to-wallet transactions. Fireblocks is not a custodian — it does not hold client assets. It is the institutional digital asset operating system: MPC key management, programmable transaction policy, and a settlement network connecting 1,800+ institutions globally. The technology is invisible to end investors but present in virtually every significant institutional digital asset operation in the market.

Overview

Fireblocks, Ltd. was founded in 2018 in New York by Michael Shaulov (CEO), Pavel Berengoltz, and Idan Ofrat — all with backgrounds in cybersecurity and enterprise technology. The firm raised $550 million in a Series E round in January 2022, achieving an $8 billion valuation that made it one of the most highly valued private fintech companies globally. The valuation reflects market recognition that Fireblocks’ network-effects-driven business model — where each new institutional client adds to the network’s settlement connectivity — creates compounding competitive advantage.

The firm’s core technology is MPC-CMP: Multi-Party Computation with Continuous Multi-Party Computation. Fireblocks holds the IP for MPC-CMP, which is the fastest implementation of MPC-based transaction signing commercially deployed. Traditional MPC implementations distribute key shards across multiple parties and require multiple rounds of communication between those parties to generate a signature — a process that can take seconds. Fireblocks’ MPC-CMP protocol reduces this to milliseconds, enabling real-time transaction signing at the speed institutional trading requires.

The Policy Engine is the second critical Fireblocks component. Every transaction executed through a Fireblocks workspace must pass through the Policy Engine, which enforces programmable rules before authorization. A bank can configure policies such as: transactions over $1 million require sign-off from two senior officers; transactions to unverified external addresses require compliance review; transfers to exchanges require a 24-hour time delay; any transaction involving a sanctions-listed address is automatically blocked. This programmable compliance layer replaces the manual compliance review processes that dominated institutional digital asset operations before Fireblocks, dramatically reducing both cost and human error risk.

The Fireblocks Network — the settlement connectivity infrastructure — is arguably more strategically valuable than the MPC technology. When two institutions both use Fireblocks (say, BNY Mellon and a hedge fund counterparty), they can settle transactions directly between their Fireblocks workspaces without broadcasting a public blockchain transaction for every transfer. This off-chain netting capability reduces on-chain transaction costs, provides settlement finality without relying on blockchain congestion, and enables the kind of high-frequency institutional settlement that public blockchain transaction costs would make prohibitive.

The client roster demonstrates Fireblocks’ penetration of the institutional market: BNY Mellon selected Fireblocks for its digital asset custody infrastructure. Credit Suisse integrated Fireblocks before its acquisition by UBS. Revolut, the European neobank with 40+ million customers, uses Fireblocks for its crypto infrastructure. More than 200 additional banks, exchanges, fintechs, and hedge funds appear across Fireblocks’ client announcements. This is not a niche platform for crypto-native firms — it is the operational infrastructure that regulated financial institutions use to enter the digital asset market.

Fireblocks’ business model operates on a licensing and volume fee structure: clients pay for access to the platform and pay per-transaction fees as their volume grows. This creates revenue that scales with the growth of institutional digital asset activity — a structural alignment between Fireblocks’ commercial success and the broader adoption of institutional digital asset services.

The firm’s expansion into DeFi access — providing institutional clients with controlled, policy-governed access to decentralized finance protocols — represents the next phase of Fireblocks’ product development. Institutional participants wanting to use DeFi yield strategies, decentralized exchange liquidity, or on-chain lending protocols face unique challenges: public DeFi is designed for pseudonymous users, while institutional compliance requires KYC and OFAC screening for every counterparty. Fireblocks’ DeFi access product provides the policy controls and compliance filtering that allow institutions to engage with DeFi within acceptable regulatory and operational risk parameters.

Key Metrics

Tokenization Activity

Fireblocks’ infrastructure underlies a significant portion of the tokenized real-world asset market’s operational execution. When BlackRock’s BUIDL fund executes an investor redemption — converting BUIDL tokens back to USDC — the token transfer and settlement operations execute through institutional-grade infrastructure that, in many cases, involves Fireblocks workspaces at one or both ends of the transaction. The platform’s visibility into institutional transaction flows gives Fireblocks a unique data asset: real-time, comprehensive intelligence about institutional digital asset activity across 1,800+ institutions.

The tokenization platform layer — where Securitize, Vertalo, and similar firms issue and administer tokenized securities — frequently relies on Fireblocks for the key management and transaction signing infrastructure that governs token transfers between institutional participants. Securitize’s platform, for example, can leverage Fireblocks’ MPC infrastructure for the custody key management of token admin wallets, providing institutional-grade security for the master key controls that govern who can issue, redeem, and administer tokens.

Fireblocks’ NFT and DeFi gateway products extend the platform into creative and decentralized finance use cases that were not part of the original institutional custody vision. These products reflect Fireblocks’ strategy of following institutional client demand — as institutional clients explored NFT market making and DeFi yield strategies, Fireblocks built the infrastructure to support those activities within a compliant framework.

Investment Relevance

Fireblocks is privately held, making direct investment currently unavailable to public market participants. The $8 billion valuation implies significant revenue growth expectations that will require either an IPO or continued private market funding to validate. As the institutional digital asset market grows, Fireblocks’ per-client revenue should grow proportionally — each new digital asset service an institutional client launches generates additional transaction volume on the Fireblocks platform.

The network effect is the core investment thesis: with 1,800+ institutions on the Fireblocks Network, adding the 1,801st institution makes the network more valuable for all existing participants and makes Fireblocks harder to displace. At sufficient network scale, the switching costs (recreating Policy Engine configurations, re-establishing Network connections, migrating MPC key shards) become prohibitive for most institutions — creating durable competitive advantage.

Related Entities

• BNY Mellon Digital — Key client using Fireblocks for digital asset custody tech
• Anchorage Digital — Competitor using proprietary MPC (not Fireblocks)
• Copper — Competitor in institutional MPC custody and settlement
• Securitize — Tokenization platform potentially using Fireblocks infrastructure
• Coinbase Prime — Institutional custody competitor