BitGo Courts Wall Street With New Bitcoin Custody Products

Big Wall Street firms now have new options for storing bitcoin.

Announced Sunday, Palo Alto-based startup BitGo has unveiled a new suite of custodial services aimed at institutional investors who may be eying the market with interest.

BitGo head of product Tracy Olson indicated that the launch - which finds BitGo stratifying its service into three offering tiers - is about framing the company as a full spectrum provider of security solutions, one that can now scale from consumer to institutional needs.

"We're definitely seeing a lot of bigger names interested in digital currencies. But there are other customers like smaller hedge funds, they just don't want to have to hold custody themselves. They're looking to have the security and compliance and storage solutions that they can outsource to, and that's what BitGo is really delivering."

The three services tiers include "Qualified custody," in which BitGo offers secure storage and custody through Kingdom Trust; "Institutional custody," a solution that enables clients to manage wallets connected and disconnected from the Internet; and self-managed custody.

As for customer details, Olsen indicated that BitGo would not reveal the total value of the assets it helps custody, though she said 15 percent of bitcoin transactions now occur through the company's wallet offerings.

Olsen indicated that BitGo now provides its custody solutions to over 20 cryptocurrencies, but that the company is "Absolutely" looking to increase that number in 2018.

While BitGo primarily started as a bitcoin-only firm, it steadily increased the number of coins it supported over 2017 in line with a jump in the number of crypto hedge funds, as well as wallet and exchange providers that began moving to support multiple protocols.

Overall, the announcement also serves to potentially recast BitGo as a rare cryptocurrency startup ready to appeal to those seeking to do business on Wall Street.

Among them are Ledger and Coinbase, two companies that have also sought to raise big funding rounds to serve custody products to an institutional clientele.