Custody Provider Vo1t Partners With IBM to Offer Customers Secure Key Storage

Cold storage custody provider Vo1t is offering clients secure data centers from IBM to hold and encrypt their private keys.

The new option, which comes from IBM Hyper Protect, ensures that clients’ keys are safe even if Vo1t’s data centers are compromised. The data center can be installed on-premise or accessed remotely from a client’s computer, and the enclave keeps the data encrypted, regardless of whether it’s in transit or in memory.

“Having this means our clients get to sign with their key in a separate transaction with IBM,” said Sebastian Higgs, general manager at Vo1t. 

The London-based firm, whose name is supposed to remind customers of a bank vault, provides custody, lending, staking and trading products for 35 digital assets. Since 2017, Vo1t has been offering cold storage to firms listed on the Financial Times Stock Exchange, Trust companies and other financial institutions around the world. It advertises a 45-minute withdrawal time for assets held in cold storage. 

While custody once only the purview of wallet providers and crypto exchanges, banks and other large firms are pursuing the institutional investors who are becoming increasingly interested investing in cryptocurrency. 

“We’ve been looking at the digital custody space and how we could make our servers and our cloud platform be a killer value proposition for this specific market,” said Rohit Badlaney, director of IBM Z as-a-Service.