A Sign of Rising Institutional Demand? New York Company Raises $6.5M to Improve Crypto Storage for Institutions

Curv, a cryptography pioneer headquartered in New York, raised $6.5 million for the creation of a new and innovative institutional digital asset wallet service for institutional crypto asset security.

The service targets top-tier financial players who allocate significant amounts of capital to cryptocurrency investments and require more security and autonomy over their crypto assets.

As put by Curv CEO Itay Malinger:

“We are focused on unleashing the potential of blockchains with our revolutionary approach to digital asset security. We give customers a way to securely integrate and manage all their digital assets, so they can easily transact and thrive in the digital world.”

Operational Complexity of Crypto Security

According to Curv’s research and development team, the slow and drawn-out process of onboarding institutions to the crypto industry could very well be due to the operational complexity of storing and signing blockchain transactions with private keys.

Besides storing and keeping your private keys safe, Curv believes that the industry needs an alternative level of security due to private keys being a single point of failure if they are compromised by a hacker or rogue individual.

A recent example of this is the Cryptopia hack, where hackers managed to take control of over 17,000 Cryptopia wallets by somehow gaining access to their private keys.

To prevent something like this from happening, Curv is introducing a revolutionary cryptography that maintains high levels of security while enabling availability.

Per the press release, Nadav Zafrir, co-founder and CEO of Team8, and one of Curv’s seed investors, stated:

“Curv is solving the eternal trade-off between security and availability. No longer do institutions or enterprises need to maintain physical security that doesn’t scale or hot wallets that are difficult to integrate and secure. Curv gives them a single solution that does it all.”

Moreover, the service will eliminate the concept of private keys by being the first cryptocurrency security service to implement proprietary multi-party computation (MPC) protocols.

Not much else was said about the technical details, but it’s been noted that the security service will use a scalable, software-only, cloud-based service to ensure digital assets are always secure and available.

A Sign of Rising Institutional Demand?

Curv’s new and innovative security service for institutional investors may be a sign there is a rise in institutional demand. After all, the company received $6.5 million in funding from world-leading investors in digital asset companies, including Team8 and Japan’s Monex Group.

As well, the co-founder and CEO of eToro and advisor to Curv, Ronen Assia, is very excited about Curv’s new security initiative and looks forward to offering their security solution to eToro clients.

Assia said in the press release:

“Curv makes it easier for institutions to manage digital assets by ensuring that each and every transaction is secure. eToro believes that in the future all assets will be tokenized and that we will see the greatest transfer of wealth ever onto the blockchain. As we grow our digital asset offering we are looking to work with innovators such as Curv in order to provide the best possible service to our customers.”

Per the press release, Curv’s institutional digital asset wallet service will be a subscription service that becomes available on March 25, 2019.

What do you think will be the next major step in onboarding institutions to the crypto markets? Let us know in the comments below!