Unido - Building the Future of Crypto Custody and Asset Management for Enterprises

As the floodgates are opening for large businesses and corporations to enter the crypto market, you see increasing demand for an established digital asset management platform. Luckily, Unido is among just a few who fits these criteria, but with all the noise in the crypto space now, it is crucial to compare similar products and projects to understand the options and differences between platforms better.

Among the very few options today, this article will look at Fireblocks to analyze the different product offerings against the Unido ecosystem. Fireblocks is a digital asset management platform with similar product offerings as Unido, such as Multi Party Computation (MPC), DeFi integration, DeFi APIs, complete control over governance, and a thoroughly robust security system for digital assets.

Fireblocks vs. Unido

Fireblocks was founded in 2018 and is an end-to-end blockchain security platform that protects, stores, transfers, and issues digital assets to the blockchain/s while using Multi-Party Computation (MPC). Fireblocks has governance controls and custody solutions and is an enterprise-grade solution that allows customers to transfer assets across exchanges, wallets securely, and custodians using MPC & patent-pending chip isolation technology to secure private keys, API credentials eliminate the need for deposit addresses.

Unido, whose parent company, PAC Blockchain & Digital Advisory (over 17 years old), quickly developed and identified the crypto custodial problem back in 2017, from which Unido was born, thus began development on a multisig wallet that is usable on any blockchain.

Since then, Unido has produced a patented custodial-grade, secure digital asset platform built to handle crypto transactions, enable enterprises to manage their on-chain assets easily, a crypto-banking suite with a business banking portal, governance, and security compliance controls, and DeFi vault access, seamlessly.

Both Unido and Fireblocks are making it easy for enterprises and different-sized organizations to enter DeFi today, and both products offer unparalleled security, access to DeFi strategies, Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs like Uniswap and Balancer), and total access to all the exchanges and decentralized applications (dApps) in the crypto ecosystem.

Unido and Fireblocks offer comprehensive security, easy compliance with regulations, and an easy-to-use platform that makes it easy to enter crypto for large to small businesses.

David vs. Goliath

The proliferation of businesses entering the crypto economy has been booming since Michael Saylor began buying Bitcoins en masse for Microstrategy (a U.S.-based publicly-traded company), which now has over 108,997 Bitcoins in their balance sheet (estimated at over $3 Billion).

In 2020 it became apparent that it wasn’t just retail investors jumping into crypto markets but rather large influxes of Venture Capital funding and institutional scale investments making their way into the crypto economy. Unido projects that institutional investment into the crypto space will grow exponentially by region and the number of businesses growing exponentially (see chart below).

(Source of the image is from Unido Whitepaper; page 5)

Fireblocks is undoubtedly a name well-known in the cryptoverse and has many prolific backers and VCs associated with its project. They recently raised $310 Million in a Series D funding co-led by Sequoia Capital, Stripes, Spark Capital, Etc., bringing the company’s enterprise valuation at over $2 Billion to continue developing their digital asset platform.

While Unido remains a lower-cap gem compared to the capital raises of Fireblocks, that’s not to say that we don’t have similar, if not comparable, digital asset platforms built for enterprises and institutions.

Fireblocks uses their MPC-CMP algorithm that enables digital asset transactions to be signed up to 8X faster and supports transaction signing from cold and hot wallets. It gives institutions the ability to configure a key management scheme that fits their organization. MPC-CMP follows a strict set of steps that guarantee there is never a single point of compromise of the private key because it is never concentrated on a single device at any point in time.

Similarly, Unido Core, or its MPC, is deep tech, patented solution that provides cold storage levels of security for all transactions while maintaining an intuitive and app-driven environment that makes it easy for businesses to use the software.

The Unido core proprietary algorithm divides up the keys into portions and stores them securely among all the wallet members. This distribution of keys vastly reduces the probability of them being lost or stolen and gives multiple members of a team variable levels of access and rights. With the keys distributed using its MPC patented technology, Unido can deliver the required governance and security for sophisticated enterprises that want to adopt blockchain and DeFi technology into their business.

Both Fireblocks and Unido offer similar services to institutions, from governance to fast settlement times, from cold-wallet level security through MPC to DeFi APIs that allow developers to build on the platforms with ease. Although Unido diverges from Fireblocks in some areas, it is plain to see that there is much crossover in both product suites.

Fireblocks also features a digital asset transfer network that acts as an institutional settlement layer. At the same time, Unido has Unido X. This new platform leaves total control for institutions to take complete control over their assets, whether for settlement or manual or automated transactions. Unido X provides companies with liquidity from other financial institutions with swaps matched with the best pricing available on any network.

Unido also has the Enterprise Platform (EP) that allows crypto-native companies and asset management firms to manage their crypto assets. The EP platform has a crypto banking suite that acts as a business bank portal that enables enterprises to handle daily operations and capital expenditure, DeFi Vault access that lets businesses store, manage, and invest crypto assets securely, and a robust suite for governance and security, which helps enterprises enter DeFi in a way that meets all their compliance and regulatory needs.

EP provides enterprises and SMEs an integrated custodial function, cross-chain interoperability, and blockchain-level multi party sign-off for private key operation, making it a perfect fit for all investor classes, including the underserved enterprise and asset manager investor segment.

But Wait… There’s More

Other Fireblocks features include an institutional settlement layer with access to various crypto exchanges to trade, offer up liquidity, operate lending desks, and institutional DeFi access with algorithmic trading, top security, and private key management.

In The End

Fireblocks is by far one of the most well-known and used digital asset platforms for enterprises available today. Fireblocks was valued at $2 Billion after their latest $310 Million raise, and have been very successful at attracting enterprises to the platform, with clients like Revolut, BNY Mellon, and many others.

The Unido team views Fireblocks as a significant example of a great digital asset management solution with a similar approach, including MPC technology and regulatory compliance. Although Fireblocks has no native token like $UDO, their market valuation and money raises make it one of the most formidable competitors in the custody and institutional crypto space.

With such a vast growing ecosystem today, Unido, with a much smaller current market capitalization, has similar features to Fireblocks. While Unido might not yet compete with Fireblocks’ clientele, the team, vision and patented deep technology will make Unido a formidable force as they expand and build out Unido shortly.

About Unido

Unido offers a suite of crypto custody solutions for enterprises and institutions based on a state-of-the-art fragmented private key signing engine, allowing distributed transaction signing at the blockchain level and providing a corporate governance framework over crypto ownership.

This level of corporate governance workflow and security technology is needed by sophisticated organizations to confidently leap crypto, augmented with a Defi investing dashboard to make earning a yield on digital assets a point-and-click activity.