Late this month, Shuttle Holdings investment company published Beta version of custody and maintenance product of digital assets developed based on IBM products. This product will not be directly applied to store cryptocurrencies and digital tokens, but it will provide a set of tools for others to store securely. Big company IBM’s cooperation in this project was showcased last month at Think 2019 conference held in San Francisco. This product is called DACS (Digital Asset Custody Services) and will use cloud storage technology and IBM cryptocurrency. According to Rohit Badlaney, director of Z As a Service at IBM company, encryption capability offered in LinuxONR is the distinguishing feature of IBM to cooperate in this project.
Entering IBM to the arena of cryptocurrencies storage is not the first step of this famous international company in the field of Blockchain. Supplying private Blockchain Hyperledger Fabric and cooperating with cryptocurrency Stellar have been among the other measure of IBM to enter Blockchain technology. IBM company has given news of joint cooperation with Stellar to offer a product for financial payments which will let the possibility of paying from wherever in the world. This project will cover 50 countries and 30 international currencies around the globe. Furthermore, IBM will cooperate with more than 40 reputable international banks to merge payment systems. Transfer services will be conducted through Stellar Blockchain infrastructure. One of the reasons for using these cryptocurrencies is the low costs of the transaction via Stellar. Stellar is currently the eighth biggest cryptocurrency in the world. Joint cooperation of Stellar with IBM can challenge other cryptocurrencies and even cause stellar ascend to higher levels.
The storage solution offered in IBM joint project and Shuttle holdings is different from many other existing solutions at the market applying Cold Storage. In cold storage, private keys are kept in a machine not connected to the network. This storage method strongly limits the attacker’s access to valuable information. However, according to Brad Chun, Shuttle’s chief investment officer, uninterrupted access to private keys is one of the requirements of the users of storage products which faces some dilemmas in cold storage method. Moreover, according to Chun, two features of security and availability have been provided through IBM in DACS. DACS has been designed based on Hardware Security Module which protects private keys like a safe.
In cold storage, the human’s intervention to gain access to private keys is a necessity. This intervention can make an interrupt from 1 to 48 hours, while all the processes can be conducted via HSM without any delay.
IBM is the single provider of HSM technology in the market, Crypto Storage AG and Gemalto are two other companies which offer such a product. Currently, these two products are being applied at the national bank of Swiss and Japanese Bank Nomura respectively.
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