Japan-based financial services firm SBI Group and Danish cryptography services company Sepior ApS have partnered to jointly develop a proprietary wallet, according to an announcement published Oct. 13. The wallet is set to ensure secure transactions on SBI’s cryptocurrencies exchange platform, VCTRADE.
The SBI Group was established in 1999 in Japan as an Internet-based financial services provider. Since then, the company has formed a financial conglomerate with a focus on new technologies, including fintech, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and others. In 2018, SBI reportedly invested over $533 million in the blockchain and AI sectors.
Sepior said its threshold technology uses signatures based on multiparty computation â a cryptographic method that allows a secret to be shared between different parties without revealing the secret â to provide a high level of wallet security.
Yoshitaka Kitao, representative director, president and CEO of SBI Holdings, said in the release:
"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."
Saying that the "vast majority" of crypto hacks since 2014 were down to poor key security, Sepior claimed that its wallet technology "eliminates the need for any device or entity to possess the entire private key at any time, making it effectively impossible for an attack to result in key theft."
Per the press release, Sepior and SBI have signed an agreement to license Sepior’s Threshold-Sig Wallet Security technology and to jointly develop a proprietary wallet to secure online content and transactions on SBI’s digital currencies trading platform, VCTRADE.
With this move, SBI is reportedly looking to set new standards for crypto exchange security, partly through the development of more effective key management and protection. Sepior’s patented Threshold Wallet technology reportedly allows faster signing of transactions involving multiple parties and “eliminates the need for any device or entity to possess the entire private key at any time, making it effectively impossible for an attack to result in key theft.”
Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, President and CEO of SBI Holdings commented on the technology: