Fidelity, Tenaya Capital Fund Crypto-Security Firm Fireblocks

Fireblocks, a platform for securing digital assets in transit, announced today $16 million in Series A funding from investment heavyweights including Cyberstarts, Tenaya Capital, and Eight Roads - the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International.

Have already switched to Fireblocks to safeguard the transmission of their digital assets across exchanges, over the counter brokerages, hot wallets, and cold storage.

Spurred to action following a series of high-profile hacks, founders Michael Shailov and Pavel Berengoltz aimed to eliminate the root cause of digital asset hacks and scams, i.e. private key theft, spoofing, and compromised credentials.

What they built - along security engineers from Symantec, Trusteer, IBM security and leading cryptography advisor, Prof. Ran Canetti - was a cloud-based security platform that eliminates the hassle of copy and pasting addresses and enables the seamless flow of funds.

"While Blockchain based assets by themselves are cryptographically secure, moving digital assets is a nightmare. After interviewing over 100 institutional customers, including hedge funds, broker-dealers, exchanges, and banks, we concluded that the current process is slow and highly susceptible to cyber attacks and human errors," Shailov said in a statement.

Fireblocks enables digital assets to be easily transitioned from any state of storage and primed for immediate settlement and transfer on the blockchain using chip-level security and MPC technology.

Shailov said, "New uses of blockchain cannot rely on gaps in service. [Investors] need assets to be available, interactable, and transferable."

"Keeping assets locked down in cold storage like a traditional custodian is antithetical in the way operate."

Fireblocks released its product last quarter and has already overseen hundreds of millions of dollars worth of digital asset transfers, according to Shailov.

The company is integrated with 15 digital asset exchanges and offers support for over 180 cryptocurrencies, tokens, and stablecoins.