We’re excited to announce that Fireblocks has acquired BlockFold, a smart contract development and consulting firm specializing in tokenization. This acquisition enriches Fireblocks’ tokenization capabilities, further enabling users to explore this technology with a complete service layer that includes advisory, token customization, orchestration, and distribution through the Fireblocks Network.
The rising demand for tokenization
Today, 75% of Fireblocks’ top banking and financial institution customers are exploring tokenization. BCG projects that the tokenization of financial assets on the blockchain will grow into a $16 trillion market by 2030, representing 10% of all financial assets. Against this backdrop, Fireblocks has seen rapid growth in user demand, with a 350% increase in tokenization projects between 2022 and 2023.
By embedding BlockFold into the Fireblocks tech stack, we significantly expand our ability to support customers with more advanced tokenization use cases and needs.
BlockFold’s expertise fills an important gap in the market, tailoring bespoke solutions for some of our most sophisticated customers and prospects in the banking and financial institutions space. We already speak a common language in understanding these customers’ requirements at an architectural level. Bringing BlockFold’s expertise in-house means that we can better serve tier-1 financial institutions to quickly and seamlessly bring tokenization projects into production and new assets onto the blockchain. In addition, we can continue to innovate and expand our offerings and tailor our approaches as the market continues to mature and evolve.
Since its first bank-issued stablecoin for ANZ in March 2022, Fireblocks has delivered more than 10 stablecoin projects and is in active conversations with more than 25 banks globally who are exploring the creation of bank-issued stablecoins or tokenized deposits. Within the next three years, Fireblocks expects the value of tokenized money on the blockchain to reach $450 billion.
Establishing the first tokenization marketplace
As increasingly sophisticated tokenization use cases are conceptualized, Fireblocks recognizes the benefits of establishing a network of trusted tokenization providers. That’s why, in continued collaboration with our tokenization partners Bitbond, Securitize, Securrency, and Tokeny, we will create an open tokenization marketplace for customers needing support for specific use cases.
Collectively, we aim to reinvigorate the banking and financial market infrastructure’s decades-old processes and foster healthy competition with fellow industry leaders.
New Tokenization Expertise
Founded in 2021 with the mission to rebuild the global financial system on secure, open, and transparent standards, BlockFold has successfully assisted numerous leading financial institutions – i.e., Swiss National Bank, Banque de France, Singapore’s Ministry of Finance, and National Australia Bank, to name a few – with projects that require flexible and customizable solutions, such as:
- Tokenizing money, including tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDC)
- Tokenizing assets such as carbon credits, real estate, and investment funds
- Decentralized market infrastructure
The BlockFold team is integrating into Fireblocks, with the engineering team joining the Web3 engineering staff and the business consulting team joining the Financial Markets group. In addition to co-founder Francois Schonken, co-founder Terence Siganakis has been appointed senior director and head of tokenization products.
While numerous standards for tokenized assets exist, large financial institutions often require a higher degree of customization of smart contracts as well as orchestration and integration into legacy systems. We have always appreciated the way in which the Fireblocks team understands this at a fundamental level when we have worked with them in the past. We cannot be more thrilled to be part of this team and to unlock even more value out of tokenization and decentralized finance to support our customers.
