GK8
Israeli digital-asset custody company specializing in deep cold-vault storage architecture for institutional crypto holdings, acquired by Galaxy Digital in November 2022.
GK8 is an Israeli digital-asset custody company specializing in deep cold-vault storage architecture for institutional crypto holdings. The company was founded on the technical premise that the safest way to hold digital assets is to operate the private key on a computer that has never been and never will be connected to any network.
GK8 was founded in 2018 by Lior Lamesh and Shahar Shamai, both alumni of Israeli national-cyber units. The company developed a patented air-gapped vault architecture in which transactions are signed offline and only the resulting signed payload is transmitted into network-connected systems.
Product and positioning
GK8's commercial offering is positioned for the most risk-averse institutional segments — banks, custodians, central-bank pilots, and regulated stablecoin issuers — for which the multi-party-computation custody model used by competitors such as Fireblocks and Curv represents a different risk profile. The architecture is built around the company's proprietary cold-vault hardware and software stack, with policy controls and signed-transaction verification layered on top.
In November 2022, GK8 was acquired by Galaxy Digital for a reported price of approximately $44 million, in a transaction that closed in the depths of the post-FTX crypto winter. The acquisition gave Galaxy a controlled cold-custody platform alongside its existing digital-asset trading and asset-management businesses.
Position in the Israeli digital-asset custody cohort
GK8 sits within the Israeli digital-asset infrastructure cohort that includes Fireblocks in MPC-based institutional custody, Curv (acquired by Coinbase in 2021) in the same MPC custody adjacency, StarkWare in zero-knowledge protocol infrastructure, and Bancor in decentralized exchange architecture.
The GK8 acquisition is one of the most-cited Israeli-rooted transactions in the institutional crypto-custody category and a meaningful reference point in coverage of how listed and listed-adjacent US crypto holding companies acquired Israeli technical talent during the 2022 reset.
