The $1 Trillion Wallet: BitGo's Big Plan to Secure the Biggest Bitcoin Fortunes

The stakes must have seemed high already in 2013, when the largest bitcoin wallets safeguarded by blockchain security provider BitGo held about $10 million-worth of the cryptocurrency.

What had perhaps been unthinkable in the years previous, by 2017 the largest crypto wallets in BitGo's charge reached close to $1 billion.

Looking ahead to the next milestone, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe will give a talk next month at Stanford University entitled "Securing the Trillion Dollar Wallet." In a world of tokenized everything - not to mention hedge funds and other institutions redefining the meaning of a whale crypto investor - this no longer seems far-fetched.

"Now we are really thinking, what's it going to take to secure a trillion dollars?" Belshe told CoinDesk.

As one security consultant told Belshe's team, building a secure vault for such a large sum of money basically comes down to two things: kids and fingers.

Stepping back, becoming a qualified custodian has taken Belshe years and has seen BitGo come close to acquiring qualified custodian Kingdom Trust, before going it alone to establish BitGo Trust.

With the addition of a regulated trust function, BitGo, which currently handles around $15 billion in monthly crypto transactions, is arguably pulling ahead in the race to secure digital assets for the institutional set.

BitGo has now attained SOC I and II certifications, with the auditing of those carried out by Deloitte.

Following BitGo's qualified custodian announcement, the startup's next big step is a crypto insurance product to be released within a couple of months.

BitGo wouldn't write the policies, but rather white-label the product with an established insurer.