Blockchain infrastructure provider Blockdaemon today announced that it has bought Sepior, a company that secures digital assets such as cryptocurrencies using cryptographic key management solutions.
Blockdaemon gives businesses the capability to manage and handle their own crypto assets securely by providing the necessary infrastructure to operate their own blockchain asset management. It is aligned particularly with institutional partners such as payment processors, finance and banking that are addressing security needs when getting into crypto.
Sepior addresses those needs by providing high-security capabilities for digital asset wallets using what is called multiparty computation, or MPC, key management and protection technology. This allows a third party to share custody of digital assets so that multiple people must approve transactions before they happen, thus reducing the chances of theft and hacks.
By joining Blockdaemon, Sepior’s team of veteran cryptographers and industry experts will add their knowledge to the platform and accelerate its ecosystem growth.
“The ability to properly secure private keys is a cornerstone of the multibillion-dollar institutional crypto finance industry,” said Konstantin Richter, Blockdaemon founder and chief executive. “With this acquisition, we are now able to foster the distribution of trust, identity and privacy of keys at scale.”
In 2021, approximately $3.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency was lost due to theft, according to a report from Chainalysis – an increase of roughly 516% since 2020. These thefts happen when the private cryptographic keys protecting the wallets storing the digital assets become compromised and unauthorized users gain access.
With the addition of Sepior, Blockdaemon’s clients will be able to build their own wallet services, protect keys within decentralized applications and provide certainty with multiperson transaction signing.
“Integrating advanced MPC into Blockdaemon’s portfolio opens up new use cases for our technology that will allow us to serve our customers with even better digital asset security solutions,” said Ahmet Tuncay, former chief executive of Sepior.
Tuncay will be joining Blockdaemon as head of MPC Digital Asset Security and lead the team that manages the multi-party private key protection solution for institutional partners.
“The Sepior team brings unrivaled research and credentials in MPC technology and will help us continue to build out a robust, feature-rich ecosystem with our partners,” added Richter.
This purchase is the fourth successful acquisition within the past two years for Blockdaemon, including the nonfungible token startup Anyblock, cryptocurrency staking platform Lunie and the blockchain infrastructure and node management company Gem.