Galaxy Digital-Owned Crypto Custody Specialist GK8 Unveils Tokenization Wizard

• GK8, which was acquired by Galaxy Digital just over a year ago, has entered the tokenization sector with a self-custody offering.

• The company offers a patented flavor of cold storage, a process of creating, signing and sending messages to the blockchain without ever being connected to the internet.

• The first client to use the Tokenization Wizard will be a partnership between asset manager DWS, Flow Traders and Galaxy itself to manage a fully collateralized euro-denominated stablecoin.

GK8, the crypto currency custody firm acquired by Galaxy Digital just over a year ago, has introduced Tokenization Wizard, a platform for building blockchain-based versions of real-world assets, as well as securely managing stablecoins and assorted Web3 applications.

Demand for tokenization has risen sharply, with many traditional finance firms getting on board. Among them, asset management giant BlackRock, which recently unveiled its BUIDL platform in association with Securitize and others.

GK8’s tokenization engine follows strict principles of self-custody, the firm’s co-founder and CEO Lior Lamesh said. That contrasts with the managed custody offered by Coinbase and many other major crypto custody providers.

In addition, GK8 offers its own patented flavor of cold storage, a process of creating, signing and sending messages to the blockchain in the form of outputs only, avoiding any connection to the internet. This is paired with multiparty computation (MPC), a popular method of splitting up cryptographic keys.

“Blockchain is an interactive protocol and at some point, according to the transaction structure, there are some mandatory data that you should receive from the internet,” Lamesh said in an interview. “We have seven patents in different stages around cryptographic innovations that enable us to avoid the mandatory step of receiving input from the internet, allowing us to use only outbound unidirectional communication to send and sign transactions. Since there are never any inputs, we are never exposed to any cybersecurity attack vectors.”

The first client to use the Tokenization Wizard will be a partnership between asset manager DWS, Flow Traders and Galaxy to manage a fully collateralized euro-denominated stablecoin, GK8 said.