So with Fireblocks, we have security at every level from both the automated point of view and also the checks and balances are in place for the human users.
My name is Shane McGovern. I’m the director of Platform Infrastructure at the Algorand Foundation.
Before Fireblocks, we did have other custodial solutions, but they were more traditional in that they were for protecting a treasury more so than day to day operations. But the bigger challenge was to support the governance payers, which will be roughly about 50,000 transactions in a very short burst of time once every quarter. And the limitations from the other custodians was that they weren’t designed for that large short bursts of transaction volume.
Fireblocks met both of those needs for us on the automated point of view from the governance payouts. We were able to successfully pay out all governors within a very short period of time. This was through their automated policies.
So we had the confidence in their security policies throughout the entire setup. What’s really important, it’s not just the throughput, it’s the API cosigner where we can place in our business logic into these payments so that although if a transaction is valid, sometimes there might be a business logic that we don’t want to do this payout and if it helps us because previously with other custodial solutions, once you’ve submitted the transaction to the platform, it’s kind of done – it’s there on the blockchain, it’s immutable. Whereas we get this kind of pre check to make sure everything is absolutely perfect for us before sending it out there on the blockchain.
The other aspect was based on the day to day operations, which you would have a completely different set of security policies in place because it is human interaction and as well, the payments are far higher in quantity of the tokens you would be distributing. So there is added elements of security that you want there and you want the human manual check to be on those payments.
Another unique point about the Fireblocks platform is that it allows both technical and non-technical users to use it seamlessly so you don’t have a situation where traditional finance folks would be overwhelmed by the operations. It’s very intuitive, easy to use, but it also has it has none of the technical limitations. So as someone who is on the technical side, one of the benefits to me about the Fireblocks platform is that I don’t have to think about it. It’s very reliable, it’s robust. It does exactly what I needed to do. They’re continually adding more and more stuff to essentially make my life easier.