We started looking at the whole spectrum of wallet providers or custodians, and we recognized that Fireblocks was one of the only ones that not only was technology friendly but also had a very scalable solution with a very deep network already embedded into the crypto ecosystem.
I’m Fernando Martinez from Nonco and I’m the CEO. Nonco is a digital asset brokerage that provides liquidity to institutional counterparts. We are heavily focused on the Americas region, however, we do have a global footprint. Nonco serves institutional counterparts such as ETFs, asset managers, crypto native firms, and financial institutions.
One of the things that we were looking for when we chose Fireblocks as a technology provider was, first of all, the technology has to be super user-friendly and API-driven. That’s not something that everybody offers. With the API integration that you can create through Fireblocks, it’s endless opportunities for you to really scale your business. The second thing that we really liked about it is all of the compliance and operational toolkit that you can create. For example, the permissions within the user’s maker or checker type of roles, and also, according to several thresholds. And the last thing that really drove us and once we started dealing more with Fireblocks we really liked is their customer service. So we are the type of firm that likes to be there for its counterparts. We’re always there 24 by seven and we saw the same with Fireblocks. So their customer service and their reactiveness to our needs really gave us comfort after we chose them.
We started using Fireblocks. First of all, for our day-to-day operations. Every single counterpart asset that we send or receive comes from Fireblocks workspace. And what we were able to do there is we started creating individual vaults according to counterparts. So this is very good not only from an accounting perspective but also from a compliance perspective. The moment that we send or receive an asset, we can actually check the Chainalysis or the Elliptic score of how clean those assets are, which allows us to operate in a very compliant business.
The second way that we use Fireblocks is to move our inventory around, not only across centralized exchanges, but also to decentralized exchanges. We plugged in Fireblocks to Metamask Institutional and the same thing we plug Fireblocks to all of the centralized exchanges that we use in order to hedge our liquidity.
So we interact a lot with the smart settlement function of Fireblocks. This allows us to create a ticket where we can post what the trade is with what counterpart, and both of us can send the assets to that smart ticket or the smart settlement function.
What this allows us to do is to mitigate the counterparty risk because we’re not sending the assets first to this institution, or the institution is not sending the assets first to us, right. So through this approach, it allowed us to give comfort to a bunch of institutions out there that were mindful of the counterparty risks.
**note: Smart Transfer functionality for reducing counterparty risk is in limited release.