One year on, Elliptic's secure Bitcoin vault is slowly filling up

Home News Security One year on, Elliptic's secure Bitcoin vault is slowly filling up Bitcoin vaults turn out to be eerily like real ones

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London-based secure Bitcoin vault Elliptic is slowly adding new pieces to its startup jigsaw, last week appointing former Bitcoin Foundation director Kevin Beardsley as the firms new head of business development.

Its another fillip for a firm that in January gained ISAE 3402 accreditation from auditors KPMG, a critical piece if financial architecture for a company that wants to make Bitcoins a respectable form of investment secured using its Vault platform.

So a year into operation, where is this unusual business today? According to co-founder and CTO Adam Joyce the firm is finding customers from Londons financial sector among investment funds and trading houses which increasingly view Bitcoins as a respectable, investment-grade asset.

Naturally, they need somewhere secure to keep these as well as automation to minimise the sort of friction that surrounds so many other financial assets. This turns out not to be easy to build.

Elliptic has had to engineer a tie up to have the Bitcoins stored with it insured in a policy underwritten by Lloyd's of London (based on the price on the day a claim is made). Bitcoins have an odd reputation, Bitcoin startups more so, which is why Joyce is keen to emphasise the financial engineering of being able to offer insurance and the sort of financial respectability of being accredited by KPMG and based in London.

Many of our customers require a custodian that complies with certain standards. Our accreditation by KPMG allows certain customers to use us, says Joyce. We always ensure we act in a compliant way.

One of the most extraordinary aspects of this business is that it is reinventing the world of physical security and paper online virtual currencies might be assume to have abolished. No matter how much clever software the small but expanding team builds, the core of the company is a special room full of computers and other storage hardware that are not only not connected to the Internet but have never been connected to the Internet.

These are the among loneliest computers in the world, so isolated Joyce says that the keys made by them emerge sometimes on paper.

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One year on, Elliptic's secure Bitcoin vault is slowly filling up