Digivault becomes the first FCA registered digital asset custodian to custody Polkadot

September 28, 2021 - Digivault, the industry accredited, highly secure, and insured digital asset custody business of Nasdaq listed EQONEX Group (Nasdaq: EQOS), has become the first custodian, registered by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FSA), to custody the crypto asset Polkadot (DOT).

Founded by Ethereum co-founder Dr. Gavin Wood, the DOT token is the native token of the Polkadot network, which aims to unite an entire network of blockchains, allowing them to communicate seamlessly and perform transactions at scale.

Digivault operates to the highest industry security standards, using FIPS140-2 validated hardware security modules (HSMs). The solution is Cyber Essentials Plus accredited (a Ministry of Defense designed accreditation) and was recently certified under the ISO27001 standard. Both Helios (Warm Solution) and Kelvin (Cold Solution) are penetration tested to CREST standards of certification.

Digivault uses a unique enhanced certificate standard for communicating public keys, multi-factor authentication, and full backup/recovery system.

Polkadot's DOT token has extremely high potential and is already in the top 10 of crypto assets by market capitalisation. Polkadot platform solves issues inherent in first-generation blockchains, such as scalability, governance, and interoperability, allowing the communication between blockchains that are then controlled from a security and governance perspective by the core "Relay Chain". Most other custodians have not been able to support DOT up to now because of the highly complex nature of the substrate architecture.

"While the advanced nature of Polkadot makes the custodial integration more complex than other blockchains, we felt that it was essential to give people the ability to hold such a unique asset within a regulated custodian," said Rob Cooper, CEO of Digivault.

"Polkadot offers the capability to interoperate with a wide variety of blockchains across the Polkadot network, it has great scalability and efficiency which coupled with the built-in governance avoiding hard forks provides a future-proof blockchain."

Today's news highlights the expansion of Digivault's custody offering, which includes custodial services for Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, as well as other assets that are hosted on ERC-20 and ERC-1400 protocols.

Since May when Digivault announced that it had become the first stand-alone digital asset custodian to receive approval from the FCA to register as a custodian wallet provider under the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information of the Payer) Regulations 2017, it has is experienced a steady increase in client inquiries from both institutional investors and corporate treasurers holding crypto assets.

Mr. Cooper added, "We are seeing significant demand for our solutions that offer the regulatory oversight and protection that investors are now demanding as they make the wholesale shift into crypto assets. Today's announcement and the inclusion of DOT into our platform shows how we are responding to client needs as they mature and look at the next generation of blockchains."