How Fireblocks Won the Institutional Crypto Custody Race

In 2017, the North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus Group hacked four South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges and stole roughly $200 million in Bitcoin and other assets. Check Point, Israel’s largest software company, was called in to investigate. Three of the engineers on the task force — Michael Shaulov, Idan Ofrat, and Pavel Berengoltz — reached the same conclusion: the exchanges had not been negligent. The vulnerability was architectural. Any model in which a complete private key existed somewhere was, eventually, going to be broken by a sufficiently sophisticated actor.

They left Check Point in 2018 to build a different architecture. They named the company Fireblocks. By late 2025, Fireblocks reported it had secured more than $10 trillion in lifetime assets, served approximately 2,400 institutional clients, and routed an estimated 15 to 20 percent of all on-chain stablecoin volume through its Network for Payments product — figures consistent with the company having become the dominant institutional crypto custody provider in the global market.

This is the story of how three Unit 8200 veterans built what now sits underneath most of institutional crypto.

The 2017 Lazarus Hack and the MPC Bet

The Fireblocks origin story is unusual for a crypto company. It started not in a hackathon or a token launch but in a cybersecurity investigation. The Lazarus Group — a North Korean state-sponsored unit also responsible for the Bangladesh Bank heist, the Sony Pictures breach, and the WannaCry ransomware attack — successfully breached four South Korean exchanges in 2017, stealing roughly $200 million.

Check Point, the Tel Aviv cybersecurity firm founded in 1993 by Gil Shwed, was called in to investigate. The forensics team included Michael Shaulov, then head of mobile and cloud security at Check Point; Idan Ofrat, a senior security architect; and Pavel Berengoltz, a research lead. All three had Israeli military signals-intelligence backgrounds. Shaulov had received the Israeli Presidential Excellency Honor for his contributions to Unit 8200’s mobile security work.

The investigation produced a structural conclusion. The exchanges had not been operationally negligent. Their defenses matched industry standard for the period. The vulnerability was conceptual: every institutional crypto custody model in production required a complete private key to exist somewhere — on a hardware module, in cold storage, split across signers. Whoever controlled the key controlled the assets. Defense was always going to lose against a patient enough adversary.

Fireblocks’ core insight was simple: eliminate the complete private key.

The cryptographic technique that could achieve this — multi-party computation, or MPC — had existed in academic literature for decades. It had never been productized for institutional crypto custody at scale. Shaulov, Ofrat, and Berengoltz left Check Point in 2018, raised a $16 million Series A within months, and built one of the first institutional-grade MPC custody platforms.

Why MPC, Not HSMs or Multi-sig

Three architectures dominated institutional custody before MPC. Each had a structural weakness.

A Hardware Security Module (HSM) — used by Anchorage Digital and parts of BitGo’s stack — holds a complete private key inside a tamper-resistant device. The key exists, intact, in one place. The device is physically protected, but the underlying vulnerability is conceptual: whoever can compromise the device can extract the key.

Multi-signature (multi-sig) — used in earlier custody systems and in parts of BitGo’s product — requires multiple parties to sign each transaction. Each signature still requires a complete private key to exist somewhere, and the on-chain transaction footprint reveals the multi-sig structure to any observer.

Multi-party computation (MPC) — Fireblocks’ architecture — never assembles the private key. The key exists only as encrypted shards distributed across separate hosts. Transaction signatures are produced through cooperative cryptographic computation between the hosts. None of them ever holds the complete key. There is no device to compromise; no key to extract.

Fireblocks layered MPC on top of Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) — hardware-enforced trusted execution environments that protect the MPC computation itself from host-level compromise. The combination — patent-pending MPC-CMP plus SGX enclaves — produced an architecture that was legible to banks, asset managers, and regulators. The institutional buyers could read the design, model the attack surface, and underwrite the risk.

That underwriteability is what consolidated the institutional market around MPC over the past five years.

The Scale

Fireblocks’ growth from 2018 to 2025 is among the steepest curves in modern enterprise software. The reported milestones, in sequence:

• 2018: Founded, $16M Series A. First institutional clients onboard.
• 2020: $30M Series B, led by Paradigm. Early institutional clients include Galaxy Digital and Genesis.
• 2021: Unicorn status. The BNY Mellon partnership — reported widely at the time — places the company on the institutional industry map. BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custody bank, also takes an investor position.
• January 2022: $550M Series E at an $8 billion valuation. Investors include D1 Capital, Spark Capital, Sequoia, General Atlantic, Index Ventures, SoftBank, CapitalG, and Stripes.
• 2022–2024: Through the post-FTX collapse and the broader crypto winter, Fireblocks does not raise additional capital. Public reporting indicates revenue and client count continued to grow.
• August 14, 2024: NYDFS limited-purpose Trust Company charter granted to Fireblocks Trust Company, LLC. Per NYDFS, Fireblocks joins Coinbase Custody Trust, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, and PayPal Digital as qualified custodians under New York Banking Law.
• February 2025: Fireblocks submits a formal memo to the SEC Crypto Task Force. Invited as a panelist at the SEC’s crypto custody roundtable alongside Fidelity, Anchorage Digital, and Kraken (per BeInCrypto reporting).
• September 2025: Launches Network for Payments, a stablecoin settlement layer spanning 100+ countries.
• Late 2025: Per company-published figures (BeInCrypto Q2 2026), Fireblocks reports more than 2,400 institutional clients, 550 million+ wallets, integrations with 150+ blockchains, and lifetime secured assets exceeding $10 trillion.

One data point matters disproportionately. Fireblocks raised at $8 billion in January 2022 and has not raised since. The company funded its post-2022 growth out of operations through a market environment that bankrupted many of its peers — Genesis, Celsius, FTX, BlockFi, Voyager. That financial-discipline marker is the kind of signal institutional clients read carefully.

The Client List

The reported client roster is the proof of institutional acceptance. Fireblocks now underpins crypto operations for, among others:

• Tier-1 banks: BNY Mellon (the world’s largest custody bank, with more than $46 trillion in assets under custody at last reporting), BNP Paribas, and a growing European and Asian institutional bench.
• Asset managers: BlackRock, via the BUIDL tokenized money-market fund. Fireblocks is one of four initial ecosystem partners alongside Anchorage Digital, BitGo, and Coinbase (per BlackRock’s March 2024 BUIDL launch announcement). Franklin Templeton’s BENJI and Ondo Finance’s USDY also reportedly run on Fireblocks infrastructure.
• Trading platforms and brokers: Robinhood, Revolut, Bybit, eToro (notably another Israeli company — see The Olam’s coverage of the Israeli digital assets economy).
• Institutional crypto specialists: Galaxy Digital, Bakkt, FalconX, BtcTurk, Wintermute, Castle Island Ventures, and most of the regulated institutional trading bench.
• Stablecoin issuers and tokenization platforms: Fireblocks reports support for USDC, USDT, USDP, PYUSD, DAI, FDUSD, RLUSD, and most other regulated stablecoins, plus tokenized money-market funds from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Ondo.

The composition is the point. This is not a crypto-native customer base. It is a traditional finance customer base that has selectively adopted crypto infrastructure for specific institutional purposes — primarily settlement, tokenization, and stablecoin payment rails. Fireblocks sits where those decisions get operationalized.

The NYDFS Trust Company Charter

On August 14, 2024, Fireblocks Trust Company, LLC — a wholly owned subsidiary of Fireblocks — received a limited-purpose trust company charter from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). The charter authorizes cold storage custody for digital assets under New York Banking Law and the SEC’s Custody Rule. Per NYDFS, the charter places Fireblocks Trust Company alongside Coinbase Custody Trust, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, and PayPal Digital as authorized institutional crypto custodians under New York oversight.

The charter completes a structural distinction worth understanding. The parent company — Fireblocks — remains an infrastructure and technology provider, supplying MPC custody software, the Network for Payments, and tokenization tools to clients who hold their own assets. Fireblocks Trust Company, the subsidiary, is the qualified custodian that takes legal-of-record possession of client assets where institutional rules require it. The two coexist. Some clients use only the technology. Others use the Trust Company directly. Several do both.

In early 2025, Fireblocks was invited as a panelist at the SEC’s first crypto custody roundtable, alongside Fidelity, Anchorage Digital, and Kraken. That invitation — for an Israeli-founded crypto infrastructure company built five years earlier — signaled the regulatory positioning the company had achieved.

Network for Payments: The Strategic Expansion

Custody was the original product, and the area of established market position. Payments is the strategic expansion — the bet on what the next decade looks like — and its eventual scale is not yet settled.

In September 2025, Fireblocks launched the Network for Payments, institutional stablecoin settlement infrastructure that routes payment transactions across approximately 90 blockchains, in more than 100 countries, in more than 60 fiat currencies. Per company-published data cited in Fortune (September 2025), the network was routing more than $200 billion in stablecoin flows monthly as of mid-2025, and an estimated 15 to 20 percent of all global on-chain stablecoin volume (denominator: Dune Analytics).

The strategic logic is the migration thesis. Stablecoins are becoming a viable cross-border payment rail for institutional finance. Cross-border SWIFT transfers can take 1 to 5 business days and cost 1 to 3 percent in fees. Stablecoin transfers settle in seconds at near-zero per-transaction cost. If even a modest percentage of cross-border institutional payment volume migrates to stablecoin rails over the next decade, the infrastructure layer where that volume runs becomes a structurally significant business.

That migration is not guaranteed. The regulatory framework for institutional stablecoins is still being written. The Network for Payments product is two years old. The reported scale is large but small relative to the $5+ trillion that moves through SWIFT-equivalent rails monthly. What is established is the architectural position and the early traction. What is open is whether the migration sustains.

The Competition

Fireblocks did not win the institutional custody race uncontested, and the competitive set continues to evolve.

• Anchorage Digital — the only federally chartered crypto bank in the United States (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, January 2021). HSM-based architecture with the Atlas settlement network. Strong US institutional positioning.
• BitGo — multi-signature and HSM-based custody with qualified-custodian status. Filed confidentially for IPO in July 2025 following a reported $100 million Series C. Broader product suite.
• Coinbase Custody — qualified custodian tied to the Coinbase trading platform. Substantial scale; vertical integration with a single exchange creates structural conflict-of-interest questions for some institutional clients.
• Ledger Enterprise — institutional offering from the French hardware-wallet company. Provides self-custody technology rather than custodial services. Reportedly preparing for a US IPO at a $4+ billion valuation.
• Copper — UK-based MPC custody with the ClearLoop off-exchange settlement network. Strong European positioning.

Each competitor brings real structural strengths. None has matched Fireblocks’ combination of reported network breadth (2,400+ institutional clients), product breadth (custody + payments + tokenization), and the regulatory positioning that came with the NYDFS Trust charter and the SEC roundtable invitation. The institutional default appears to have consolidated around the company — though competitive dynamics in regulated digital asset infrastructure remain fluid.

Risks and Open Questions

A serious account of Fireblocks must include the risks. Five categories matter most.

First, regulatory risk. Institutional crypto custody operates under a regulatory framework that is still being constructed. SEC rule-making, Treasury guidance, OCC interpretations, and state-level VASP regimes are all in flux. A change in any one — particularly a tightening of qualified-custodian definitions, or a reversal of the SAB 122 framework that allows banks to provide crypto custody — could materially affect Fireblocks’ market position.

Second, stablecoin policy uncertainty. The Network for Payments thesis depends on stablecoins being treated as a viable cross-border payment instrument under future US, EU, and Asian regulatory frameworks. Major shifts in stablecoin regulation — particularly reserve, redemption, or systemic-risk requirements — could compress the addressable market.

Third, competition. Anchorage Digital, BitGo, Coinbase Custody, Ledger Enterprise, and Copper are real competitors with real institutional positioning. Anchorage’s OCC charter status is structurally distinct from Fireblocks’ NYDFS Trust Company charter. BitGo’s pending IPO and broader product set are credible competitive pressure points. The institutional crypto custody market is not yet fully consolidated.

Fourth, hardware and architectural risk. Intel SGX has had documented side-channel vulnerabilities since its introduction. The MPC-CMP architecture is well-reviewed in academic literature, but no cryptographic primitive is permanently invulnerable. A material discovered vulnerability in either SGX or the MPC implementation would be a serious event for the company and its clients.

Fifth, crypto cycle exposure. Fireblocks’ revenue base is heavily tied to institutional crypto activity. A sustained reversion in institutional adoption — whether from regulatory shock, geopolitical disruption, or a broader risk-off cycle — would compress volumes across the platform. The company’s reported financial discipline through the 2022-24 crypto winter is reassuring, but the structural exposure is permanent.

None of these risks invalidates the thesis. They sharpen it. Fireblocks has built a defensible position. Whether that position holds across the next institutional cycle depends on how the company manages each of these five exposures.

Why an Israeli Company?

Fireblocks is part of a structural pattern. The same Israeli engineering pipeline that produced Check Point in the 1990s, Wiz and the broader Israeli cybersecurity wave, and the NVIDIA networking team in Yokneam also produced Fireblocks. The connective tissue is the same: Unit 8200, the broader IDF technological corps, the universities, the cybersecurity-industry talent compounding across decades.

Three of the four most consequential institutional crypto infrastructure companies in the world are Israeli or Israeli-founded — Fireblocks (Tel Aviv), StarkWare (Netanya), and Curv (Tel Aviv, now embedded in PayPal). The fourth — Anchorage Digital — is American. The pattern matches what The Olam has documented across the broader Israeli digital assets economy: the country exports institutional infrastructure rather than consumer-facing crypto products.

Crypto custody is, at its core, a security and cryptography problem. Israel has produced security engineers and cryptographers at scale for forty years — through Unit 8200, through the Weizmann and Hebrew University academic complex, through Check Point and the broader cybersecurity industry. Fireblocks is one expression of that compounding. The Israeli infrastructure-export thesis explains the company; the company in turn proves the thesis.

What Comes Next

Three questions shape Fireblocks’ next five years.

First, the IPO question. The company has not raised since its January 2022 Series E. Revenue growth, regulatory positioning, and the reported $10 trillion lifetime asset milestone all point toward a structurally IPO-ready company. Fireblocks has not publicly committed to a timeline, and the company has declined to comment on IPO speculation in industry interviews. The conditions are in place. eToro’s May 2025 Nasdaq IPO reopened the window for Israeli crypto-adjacent equity. Fireblocks would be the largest Israeli crypto company to test that window if it chose to.

Second, the tokenization expansion. Fireblocks’ Tokenization Engine, integrated with LayerZero across 35+ blockchains, positions the company at the institutional issuance layer for tokenized real-world assets. BlackRock’s BUIDL was the first major proof point. The pipeline of additional tokenized money-market funds, treasuries, and other regulated tokenized instruments is substantial. Whoever operates issuance infrastructure for the institutional tokenization wave captures one of the larger fintech transitions of the decade — if that wave sustains at expected scale.

Third, the Network for Payments scaling. $200 billion in monthly stablecoin flow is large but small relative to traditional cross-border payment volumes. The growth ceiling is structurally large if stablecoin adoption sustains. The downside scenario — regulatory tightening, market contraction, or technical disruption — would compress the thesis materially.

If institutional crypto needed a hidden infrastructure company, Fireblocks has become the closest equivalent. The plumbing under the next generation of regulated digital finance — custody, payments, tokenization — increasingly runs through the company that three Unit 8200 veterans started after investigating a North Korean cyber theft in 2017.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded Fireblocks?

Fireblocks was founded in 2018 by Michael Shaulov (CEO), Idan Ofrat, and Pavel Berengoltz. All three were veterans of Unit 8200, the Israeli military signals intelligence corps, and worked together at Check Point Software Technologies before founding Fireblocks. Shaulov was previously head of mobile and cloud security at Check Point following its acquisition of his earlier company, Lacoon Mobile Security. He holds a BSc in Computer Sciences and Physics from Ben-Gurion University and received the Israeli Presidential Excellency Honor for his Unit 8200 contributions.

Is Fireblocks Israeli?

Yes. Fireblocks was founded in 2018 by three Israeli cybersecurity engineers — all veterans of Unit 8200 and Check Point Software. The company maintains substantial operations in Tel Aviv alongside its New York headquarters and is widely considered one of the defining companies of the broader Israeli digital assets infrastructure economy, alongside StarkWare and Curv (acquired by PayPal in 2021).

Is Fireblocks a custodian or a technology provider?

Both. The parent company — Fireblocks — is an infrastructure and technology provider, supplying MPC-based custody software, the Network for Payments stablecoin settlement layer, and tokenization tools to institutional clients. Fireblocks Trust Company, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary, is a qualified custodian under New York State law, holding a limited-purpose trust company charter from NYDFS granted on August 14, 2024. Institutional clients can engage either the technology platform, the regulated custodian, or both depending on their needs.

What is Fireblocks’ technology?

Fireblocks uses a combination of multi-party computation (MPC) and Intel SGX hardware enclaves to secure digital assets. Unlike Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), which store complete private keys in tamper-resistant devices, MPC splits keys into encrypted shards distributed across separate hosts. Transaction signatures are produced through cooperative cryptographic computation between the hosts, with the complete private key never reconstituted at any point. This architecture is designed to eliminate the single-point-of-failure risk that defines HSM and multi-signature systems.

How much is Fireblocks worth?

Fireblocks was last valued at $8 billion in its $550 million Series E funding round in January 2022. The company has not raised additional capital since that round, having funded its growth from operations through the post-2022 crypto market downturn. Total funding to date is approximately $1.04 billion across six rounds. Investors include D1 Capital, Spark Capital, Sequoia, General Atlantic, Index Ventures, SoftBank, CapitalG, and Stripes.

Who are Fireblocks’ clients?

Fireblocks’ reported client base includes BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, BlackRock (via the BUIDL tokenized money-market fund), Robinhood, Revolut, Bybit, Galaxy Digital, Bakkt, FalconX, eToro, Wintermute, Castle Island Ventures, and approximately 2,400 other institutional clients across banks, asset managers, exchanges, brokers, stablecoin issuers, and crypto-native firms.

What is the NYDFS Trust Company charter?

On August 14, 2024, Fireblocks Trust Company, LLC — a wholly owned subsidiary of Fireblocks — received a limited-purpose trust company charter from the New York Department of Financial Services. The charter authorizes the company to provide cold storage custody for digital assets under New York Banking Law and to act as a qualified custodian under federal SEC investment-adviser rules. Per NYDFS, Fireblocks joined Coinbase Custody Trust, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, and PayPal Digital as authorized institutional crypto custodians under New York oversight.

Why did three cybersecurity engineers found a crypto company?

In 2017, the North Korean Lazarus Group hacked four South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges and stole approximately $200 million. Check Point, the Israeli cybersecurity firm where Michael Shaulov, Idan Ofrat, and Pavel Berengoltz worked, was called in to investigate. The team concluded that the breaches were structural rather than operational — institutional crypto custody relied on a private-key model fundamentally vulnerable to sophisticated state-sponsored attackers. The three engineers left Check Point in 2018 to build a different architecture, based on multi-party computation, where the private key never exists in complete form. That architecture became Fireblocks.

What is the Network for Payments?

Fireblocks’ Network for Payments, launched September 2025, is an institutional stablecoin settlement layer that routes payment transactions across approximately 90 blockchains, in more than 100 countries, in more than 60 fiat currencies. Per company data cited in Fortune (September 2025), the network was processing more than $200 billion in stablecoin flows monthly as of mid-2025, and an estimated 15 to 20 percent of all global on-chain stablecoin volume (denominator via Dune Analytics).

Is Fireblocks going to IPO?

Fireblocks has not publicly committed to an IPO timeline. The company has not raised since its January 2022 Series E and has demonstrated reported revenue growth, regulatory positioning, and scale (more than $10 trillion in lifetime assets secured, approximately 2,400 institutional clients) consistent with an IPO-ready company. eToro’s May 2025 Nasdaq IPO at a $4.2 billion valuation reopened the window for Israeli crypto-adjacent equity. Industry observers have repeatedly cited Fireblocks as one of the most likely Israeli crypto IPOs of the next cycle, though no formal announcement has been made.