BitGo: The $1 Trillion Wallet And Its Big Ambitions

In 2013, one relatively new project safeguarded by blockchain security provider BitGo held about $10 million worth of cryptocurrency. Later on, the cryptocurrency use crept up to around $100 million. In 2017, BitGo reached a $1 billion mark. In today’s cryptocurrency news, BitGo is among the largest crypto wallets and has big ambitions to secure the $1 trillion mark.

The CEO of BitGo, Mike Belshe, is still looking ahead to the next milestone. He will exclusively give a talk at the Stanford University next month titled “Securing the Trillion Dollar Wallet.”

In a world where everything seems tokenized, this is certainly a realistic proposition. According to Belshe:

“Now we are really thinking, what’s it going to take to secure a trillion dollars? It may be a little far away, but we have to start thinking about it now; we have to start designing it now in order to get there.”

Obviously, designing a system that is as complex as BitGo’s wallet requires a lot of hardware and software, regulation procedures and fulfillment of policies. However, the main thing that keeps BitGo away from becoming the most secure vault for a large sum of money, according to one security consultant in Belshe’s team, are two things: kids and fingers.

As he explained:

“Some of the technology guys out there are saying, ‘hey we can get you out of cold storage in 10 minutes.’ I’m sorry, but if you can get a billion dollars out of cold storage in 10 minutes, that means there’s somebody’s finger that you can threaten.”

Belshe also acknowledged the fact that underwriters are there to provide a service and don’t want to be used as marketing. However, he also pointed out to the fact that full transparency has to be made available for customers, concluding:

“If they are not willing to talk to you about it, it’s a red flag. I guarantee you, if it’s in secret, there’s a reason it’s in secret.”