My name is Thuc Hoang. I'm the founder and CEO of Firi. Firi is the largest Nordic crypto exchange. Our goal is to give access to this incredible infrastructure that's known as blockchain to the whole region by using local infrastructure.
We're now active in Norway and Denmark. But, later this year, we'll be active in Sweden as well.
When we started out building this company, it was really difficult to buy cryptocurrencies in general. It was really hard knowing who you could trust.
We found that we needed to build something that would feel just as safe as the banks. So this is what we did. We started building out our own infrastructure – so we had our own nodes, our own wallet infrastructure.
In the beginning, it was only Bitcoin, so that was easy. That was one node. And then we did Ethereum, then we suddenly did XRP and then we did Cardano. And at that point we had a lot of nodes. We had backup nodes, we had a lot of costs just on the infrastructure side of hosting those nodes,keeping them safe, and making sure that they're synced. Just the time needed to do this took way too much.
We started looking, initially for cold storage, which we got through Fireblocks, and then we jumped on a hot and warm solution as well, because it didn't make any sense to keep on building our own. Just the fact that we can list a new asset by clicking down on the dashboard is a game-changer, because that's saving us weeks of work. Now, we can just go ahead and say, “Oh, we want to support this ERC 20 token,” or “We want to support a new blockchain.” Fireblocks has the integration and it works. Before, we would have had to do a lot of planning, we’d need to do a lot of testing, we’d need to make sure that when we introduced a new element into this system, nothing would break.
Before we went to Fireblocks, we were supporting six tokens. That was Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, DAI, USDC, and Litecoin.
Now, no longer needing to think about adding new nodes – we support 19 tokens. We have plans to double our size in coins going into the future. This is thanks to the infrastructure that we are getting through Fireblocks.
We use Fireblocks basically for everything. Fireblocks not only saves us time, but also gives us answers when we have questions. It's really nice having a customer success team that actually can be available for us 24/7, supporting us on the technical side of doing all these things. Now, I can do other things that actually bring even more value to the company.
It's not only the technical side that's been very nice. It's also been on the financial side, because we also do financial audits. Both IT and financial audits have appreciated having Fireblocks to make sure that they can trust the data that we're giving them, because now they can actually go in and see what's happening. Before, you only had a few people who were deemed secure to be able to access the machines. Now, we can actually allow auditors into our system, having a read account where we can actually see that we're doing things.
We are actually getting a lot of help meeting the new requirements that are coming. It's not only the MiCA (Markets and Crypto Assets) that's coming from the European Union. You also have the Travel Rule that's coming. You also have new audits and new standards that have been set. By using Fireblocks governance rules are built in, such as for the Travel Rule or segregation of funds, making it really easy for us to secure the funds. And with the Fireblocks Policy Engine that's built in, we can actually say who can get access. It's actually helping us a lot in meeting the requirements that are coming.
Being able to meet the regulations [like MiCA and Travel Rule] is also helping us give a clearer picture to our customers that we're actually proactively working on keeping their assets safe.
As the ecosystem matures, we've been doing more staking through Kiln. And by doing it through Fireblocks, we can do raw signing.
We are actually using the web hooks a lot with all the incoming transactions. We integrate all the partners that we have on our side. And by doing so, we can actually monitor all the inflow and outflow of assets coming through our system.
It's been very nice for us to have a partner that can guide us using the technology as we try to guide our customers through their journey of investing in cryptocurrencies.
