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About Fireblocks

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Overview

Fireblocks offers customers an easy-to-use platform to create new blockchain-based products and manage day-to-day digital asset operations.

In this article, we introduce Fireblocks, our principles, core features, and technology. The rest of our Help Center guides you through independently setting up and using Fireblocks, so you can quickly and self-sufficiently begin operating on and capitalizing from our platform.

Who we are

Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. We enable exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, hedge funds, Web3 companies, PSPs and payments businesses, and more to securely build, run and scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and our non-custodial MPC-based wallet infrastructure.

We serve thousands of financial institutions and Web3-based businesses, have secured the transfer of over $3 trillion in digital assets, and have a unique insurance policy covering assets in storage and transit. We continuously provide our customers with best-in-class products and customer service as we work together to build the next wave of digital asset innovation.

Learn about how it all began, key milestones in our growth, and our investors and board.

From centralizing treasury management to building Fintech apps, we enable top use cases like:

  • CeFi and DeFi Trading
  • Cross Border Payments
  • Crypto E-commerce Payins
  • Digital Asset Custody
  • NFT Marketplaces and Platforms
  • PSP Merchant Stablecoin Settlements
  • Treasury Management
  • Wallets for Retail Applications
  • Web3 Gaming

Our mission

To enable every business to easily and securely support digital assets and cryptocurrencies.

Custody and risk principles

Fireblocks is a direct custody platform delivering a specific implementation of self-custody where we seamlessly blend zero counterparty risk with multiple layers of security in the most performant manner. With Fireblocks, you are 100% the owner and controller of your assets.

Unlike custodians, we never have access to full private keys when generated, signing transactions, or backed up. Instead, we enable you to be your own custodian while securely storing and transferring assets from our MPC-CMP wallets and SGX-secured transfer environments.

By combining direct custody and multi-layer security, we can deliver on five principles:

  1. Provide a zero counterparty risk environment
  2. Eliminate internal and external attack vectors
  3. Guarantee business continuity
  4. Ensure granular control and visibility of every transaction
  5. Deliver high performance with ease of use

Learn more about Fireblocks’ custody and risk principles.

Our platform

The Fireblocks platform is designed around six foundational capabilities and a robust partner and integration ecosystem for a true all-in-one platform. Our product and integration roadmap focuses on delivering even greater security, ease of use, scalability, and connectivity for you, as you build, run, and scale your businesses.

We build many of our features to be self-service and provide you with thorough documentation for self-learning. This enables you to set up, operate, and manage risk for your business as self-sufficiently as possible and with minimal dependence on our Support team. You can use Fireblocks through a web-based UI, API, or a combination of both to access the capabilities listed later in this section:

  • Fireblocks Console: UI-based access and control for workspace operations.
    • Easy to use hub for all balances, accounts, transactions, and admin controls
    • Single platform with internal wallets, linked third-party accounts, and connected Web3 apps for seamless operations
  • Fireblocks API: programmatic access and control for workspace operations, including multiple web3 tools, plugins and offline signing capabilities for advanced use cases

All Fireblocks features are secured and backed by our multi-layer security technology.

Platform capabilities

Platform partners and integrations

Fireblocks is committed to serving you through partnering with the most sophisticated and innovative teams. From industry-leading technology providers to the newest innovators/advances in DeFi, we actively seek partners that also empower more companies to build and scale their digital asset businesses.

Partner Integrations

  • DeFi: WalletConnect
  • Disaster recovery service: Coincover, Station70
  • Crypto exchanges: 25+ integrated exchanges
  • Fiat: BCB
  • KYT/AML: Chainalysis, Elliptic
  • Staking: Figment, Kiln
  • Tax/Reporting: TRES
  • Tokenization: Tokeny, BitBond
  • Travel Rule: Notabene
  • Trading: Talos, AlgoTrader

Our technology

MPC-CMP wallet infrastructure

The Fireblocks Vault is a secure multi-party computation (MPC) based wallet that prevents a private key from being a single point of failure when signing transactions. Our MPC-CMP wallets divide private keys into multiple shares stored across a mobile device and hardware enclaves at two geographically dispersed top-tier cloud data centers.

Our secure, flexible, and scalable MPC-CMP wallets are the foundational layer of Fireblocks’ multi-layer security model.

Multi-layer security

At the heart of Fireblocks' security philosophy is acknowledging that there is no silver bullet for mitigating the risks associated with creating and operating a digital asset business. Our years of experience in cybersecurity and responding to high-profile crypto exchange hacks taught us many valuable lessons about the critical need for a defense-in-depth approach that combines specific mitigation strategies that protect against both internal and external threats.

That is why we designed a security system that layers the strongest software and hardware defenses which together make breaking in highly expensive and nearly impossible. These layers include:

  1. MPC-CMP wallet infrastructure with hot, warm, and cold storage.
  2. Intel SGX secure enclaves: Hardware-level isolation of sensitive software and cryptographic material across segregated cloud environments.
  3. Automated Policy Engine to configure and enforce rules that affect how transactions are handled and approved. Secured by SGX to prevent both hackers and insiders from manipulating policies or approvals.
  4. Secure settlement layer to connect to over 1,800 Fireblocks Network counterparties for instant settlement, rebalancing, and payments.
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