Denmark-based cryptography specialist Sepior has partnered with Japanese online financial services firm SBI Group to jointly develop a proprietary wallet on SBI’s Virtual Currencies exchange platform, VCTRADE.

Cryptography Specialist Sepior Agrees to Boost VCTRADE’s Security With Threshold Wallet Technology

The financial services giant licensed Sepior’s Threshold Wallet technology, which addresses online wallet and transaction security using multiparty computation (MPC), for use in their proprietary wallet.

SBI Virtual Currencies is the first bank-backed, government-licensed cryptocurrency exchange in Japan. Sepior will help the institutional-grade cryptocurrency operator to provide custodial wallet services with the highest level of security for signing transactions, storing private key components, and minimizing the risk of assets being frozen or moved without the approval of the end-user or custodians.

Sepior’s Threshold Wallet enables rapid signing of transactions involving multiple parties and its key protection approach eliminates the need for any device or entity to possess the entire private key at any time. The two features greatly reduce security risks on VCTRADE, according to SBI Holdings chief executive Yoshitaka Kitao.

“After extensive investigation, our security research team determined threshold signatures based on multiparty computation (MPC) offered our desired level of security, performance, and scalability needed to manage transactions for our growing SBI Virtual Currencies customer base. Sepior is recognized as a market leader in cryptography and threshold MPC. They’ve applied these core competencies to facilitate secure online transactions without the classic reliance on a single trusted party.”

The subsidiaries of SBI Holdings have been very active in the blockchain and cryptocurrency arenas. SBI Securities, SBI FXTRADE, and SBI Virtual Currencies, got the green light from Japanese regulatory authorities to partner with Ripple in order to launch a new joint venture called SBI Ripple Asia and provide fast peer-to-peer payments.

SBI Remit, the conglomerate’s money transfer company, has partnered with BitPesa to enable direct currency pairs between Japanese yen and the fiat currencies of Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, using the Bitcoin blockchain.

It is estimated that over $1.6 billion in today’s values have been lost to cryptocurrency hackers since 2014. Japan, as the most active cryptocurrency trade region in the world, has experienced a high number of such attacks. The $500 million Coincheck exchange theft in January prompted Japan’s financial watchdog FSA to tighten oversight on the cryptocurrency trading world.

Security is the name of the game and SBI Virtual Currencies will have to make sure the operator is impervious to hacking. The agreement with Sepior aims to ease concerns from the regulator and gain trust from users.

Image from Shutterstock