Prime Trust is a chartered, regulated financial institution that holds cash and non-cash assets such as stocks, bonds, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, tokens, real estate and private ownership business interests.
This Nevada trust company will share to the public next week that they can manage custody for ether and any token issued on the ethereum blockchain under the ERC-20 standard. This process of cold storage commenced mid-July when they discreetly offered to do so for bitcoin.
Prime Trust’s CEO & Chief Trust Officer Scott Purcell claimed his company will be the first to offer custody for any ERC 20 tokens, which he described as no small feat. Doing so is “great in theory, impossible in practice due to various tweaks/nuances in each different token. That’s why nobody does this – nobody until now”.
His team resolved a “massive technical problem” after their partner company Polymath hosted a conference in Barbados. During that time, his engineers were able to spend some quality time with some of the authors of the ERC 20 standard, which paved way for the creation of different tokens representing various kinds of assets on the same blockchain. “We had an engineering breakthrough which now enables us to easily cold-storage any ERC 20 token (along with BTC and ETH, of course)”, said Purcell.
Such services are a big game-changer among institutional investors. Crypto’s returns are powerfully attractive, however, nobody wanted the responsibility of protecting the cryptographic keys to a digital wallet and/or are required by law to employ a qualified custodian. The private keys, which are like a long password, can be used to drain money from a wallet, are kept offline in a cold storage. It is typically like saving it on a hardware device or a piece of paper that’s locked away in a safe.
Several big players in financial services such as Northern Trust, Goldman Sachs and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent of New York Stock Exchange, have started to explore these type of services. Crypto startups like Coinbase, BitGo and Ledger have also been interested to do the same.
As reported by CoinDesk Prime Trust is confident that they can outsmart its competitors. This is in reference to Northern Trust’s testing period and apprehension regarding when Goldman will come up with a custody product.
